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Marketing Secrets

Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: 2016
Jun 10, 2016

If this works, this might be my new favorite way to sell.

On today’s episode Russell talks about Funnel Fridays, a new idea he had and is starting today where he’ll do funnels live for everyone to see. He explains how this will help people learn how to consume his products and make them want to buy them.

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

  • How Russell came up with idea for Funnel Fridays.
  • Why Funnel Fridays will make people want to buy Clickfunnels, Funnel Scripts, and Funnel University.
  • And find out how you can watch Russell build a funnel live.

So listen below to hear more about Funnel Fridays and why you should be a part of it.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everybody, today is a special day, it’s a very special day for a lot of reasons. One, it’s Friday, number two is it’s the last day of the hack-a-thon, and number three the most important, is today is the first day ever of Funnel Fridays or Friday Funnels, I can’t remember what we called it. It’s either Funnel Fridays or Friday Funnels. I think it’s Friday Funnels, no Funnel Friday. Oh crap.

Anyway, I’ll learn it more as we keep doing it. But I think I’ve figured out a cool new way to sell stuff that’s going to be really, really, really, really cool. I hope all you guys knock me off because I’m pretty sure it’s the coolest thing ever. If you look at our typical sales process, we’re driving ads, we’re doing stuff and people were coming into the beginning of a funnel, they go through the process and they either buy it or they don’t. And then there’s upsells and their moving from funnel to funnel to funnel and eventually they kind of drop out the back and then they’re people, they get your emails and their doing stuff, but they’re not actively engaged into any kind of sequence. So I’m like, how do you….what do we do for all those people? Because I’m sure they have money they want to give to us. How do I make them re-inspired to give us money? So that was where this thought came from.

If you listen to my whole perfect webinar concept it’s all about doing these webinars weekly and on and on and keep going forward, and doing the same webinar every single week and filling them up with people and keeping that consistently moving forward. And I still believe in it, I still think it’s the model of the future. But after people go through that, when do you ever sell that thing again? Because the reality is a lot of people want to buy stuff, they just didn’t at that time, but they might 3 months later, 6 months later it might reignite them.

In fact, it’s funny back in the day, and I should probably more with my business now, but we had a webinar called Dotcom Secrets Local and we would do our webinar to our own list every three months, and I was like everyone has seen this, I pounded it like crazy three months ago. And we do it and we make the same amount of money as we did three months prior. And we’d do it four times a year, same webinar to our same list and every single time it worked. I was thinking, last year Mike Filsaime did the Clickfunnels webinar 3 times to the same list in one year and every single time he did over a hundred grand in commissions, so two hundred grand total sales. Jason Fladlien just did our webinar twice in the last 4 months. So it’s like, our list will keep buying a lot more than we think, but I think we get bored of it, or we don’t whatever. So we have these limited beliefs. So there’s one thing and the second thing, maybe that’s the third thing now, I can’t remember. The third thing is that I was listening to Pat Flynn a little while ago, maybe a year ago, maybe two years. He was talking about how every Friday he was doing a webinar and people would get on and he would just talk about podcasting and the whole time call to action. Like home shopping network style, he pushed people back to go buy, and pushing them back to go buy, and pushing them back to go buy.

So I kept having this idea for a while, this is cool, what if I set up something where every Friday I did something cool, that made people want to come hang out with me and talk, and then in that thing I could home shopping network style sell people. Never blatant like, “Hey go buy my crap.” But it could be like, “Here’s me using Clickfunnels.” And they’re like, “I wish I had Clickfunnels.” And then I’m like, “Here’s me using Funnel Scripts.” And they’re like, “Funnel Scripts is awesome.” “Oh here’s me using Funnel University.” And they’re like “Oh!” and they see inside of me using all of our products and see that, “Wow, Russell’s not only”….what do they say on hair club for men? “Not only the president, but I’m also a member.” They see that I drink my own kool-aid, and see us doing stuff, and it becomes this fun, exciting viral thing that grows and then through that process we get people to buy our stuff every single week and share it with their friends and it becomes viral and all those other fun things associated.

So that’s the thought. Today’s day one. And it’s either Funnelfridays.com, or fridayfunnels.com, I can’t remember, but I’ll learn that better and get back to you on it. But basically what I’m doing is there’s a page and at the top of the page is a Google Hangout, I’m doing the Google Hangout live and what we’re going to do, I’m going to build a funnel each week in 30 minutes. I told everybody to ship me their product so a whole bunch of people are over-nighting their products, so this morning I’m hoping there’s going to be a bunch of different boxes in the office when I show up so that I can pick one. So we’re going to pick one and then we’re going to live build out a funnel. I’m going to have a 30 minute countdown clock on the screen, countdown from 30 to 0. And I’ve got to get the funnel done before the clock hits 0. It’s going to be and Jim Edwards is coming on because he’s going to write the scripts in Funnel Scripts. I’m going to be busting out the funnel inside of Clickfunnels. We’re uploading images inside of Funnel University and just…..people are going to see my work floor and how I build funnels, so it’ll be cool.

And then down below it’ll be like, “Hey get your funnel stuff. Number one, here’s Funnel Hacks, you get a discount, you get Clickfunnels for free for 6 months. Number two, buy Funnel Scripts here. Number three, get Funnel University here.” So it’s pushing them to all of our core offers. It’s kind of funny, back, this is rewind time, it’s pre-podcast, maybe it’s right when the podcast started, I don’t remember. But we were launching this company called Rippln and this is how we grew. We did daily hangouts, which was a nightmare, but we did daily hangouts like this and we’d tell everybody, “Hey, we’re coming back tomorrow, bring your teams back.” And every single day people were bringing their teams back, and bringing their teams back and they kept organically growing like that. Now it’s kind of the same thing, we’re going to do this Funnel Fridays each Friday and then we’ll let affiliates promote them. And the coolest thing about doing a hangout is, you do the hangout live but it’s not like if someone misses it live they miss it. Because they can come back to the page anytime after and the things already embedded in there and they can watch it now, all week long the one you just did.

So affiliates can promote it all week long and keep getting, it’ll show the most recent episode and then when the new one comes, it just floats out for the new one, so it’s a really cool process. So that’s what we’re doing. And then the other thing we’re doing, we’re having crazy success right now with Facebook Live or Facebook Mentions, whatever you call it. So I think we’re going to have a Facebook Mentions or Facebook Live for this Friday Funnel from behind the scenes while I’m doing it, which will hopefully get people more excited because we’ll get Facebook Crew all coming over as well. That’s kind of the game plan. So it’s going to be pretty awesome. Anyway, the good thing is its happening soon. The bad news is its happening in 45 minutes, and I’m late. I was supposed to get to the office an hour and a half ago, I slept in. Now I’ve got 45 minutes to promote it, set it up, figure out what funnel I’m going to build, blah blah blah, and all that other fun stuff. So that’s what’s kind of happening now. I’m really nervous, but really, really excited. Worst case scenario, I totally screw up live in front of everybody. Best case, we inspire some people, get them excited about using our products, they get to see how I build stuff which might inspire them to build more stuff and get them consuming our product. It’s all about operation consumption over here.  That’s my goal, is to each Friday consume our product live in front of our audience so they learn how to consume it.  And I think that’ll be a big difference for us. So that’s what I got you guys. I hope that gives you some ideas for your business, for your products. I think it’s something that any of us and all of us should be doing. But I will set the model, I’ll show it to you guys in the next few weeks, and then I hope you guys copy me, knock it off, use it. Because it’s going to work. Alright, that’s what I got for today. Thanks everybody, I’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Jun 8, 2016

This hack-a-thon has been different than all the rest.

On this episode Russell talks about some things that he and his team are working on at the hack-a-thon, including building a foundation with the development team to get things moving forward faster, and the decision to rebuild Backpack.

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

  • How Russell’s tendency to over commit is making this week crazy.
  • Why Russell’s team decided to work on Backpack rather than Actionetics.
  • And why the Inner Circle mastermind group will no longer have to rent hotels to get together.

So listen below to hear how the hack-a-thon is going and to hear about the exciting new things happening.

---Transcript---

Hello, hello, hello everybody. This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. I am heading into day number 3 of the hack-a-thon, well of the official hack-a-thon it’s day 6 or something of when everybody started coming. It’s been a little nuts. It’s been really, really good.

I don’t know if you guys ever do this, but sometimes I have tendency to over commit to a whole bunch of things at once. For example, right now we’ve got Anthony and Brandon at my home filming stuff about a product for Biohacking Secrets. We’ve got a cleaning lady in the house, cleaning. We’ve got people out fixing our pump, because the well broke again. We’ve got people working on the poolhouse. We’ve got my wife and two of her friends working out with a trainer. We’ve got our accountant, who’s related to Collette, my wife, who slept over last night, on top of Dave. Plus we took 30 people to this really amazing restaurant called Barbacoa last night. All the people, all the programmers in marketing are here. It’s been nuts trying to juggle and do everything, but it’s been really good.

It’s been interesting, normally when we do our hack-a-thon, we come in and talk for 15 minutes and everyone locks down, well I don’t code, I wish I did. But we code, and I write copy or do pit funnels or whatever, and we just go, go, go like crazy. And this has been a little different. Not different in a bad way, just different. And it’s funny because the person in me is like, I just want to go, go, go, go and this has been interesting, it’s been a lot about bringing in our developers from around the country, bringing in our marketing team and trying to build better relationships with everybody so that everybody can work faster. It’s one of those thing, take 2 steps back so you can take 3 steps forward type of thing. It’s funny, because me and Dave and a couple guys on the team are very, move things forward every second of every day focused, it kind of is driving us loony toons, and crazy, but I see the value in it as well, in fact, the first two days these guys, the programming team, they spent 2 days together and it wasn’t us coding and solving problems and fixing bugs and adding new features and stuff like I assumed and thought it would be, it was a lot more helping the entire dev team really understand why Clickfunnels matters. Why it’s important. Why our customers want what they want. So it was hours and hours and hours of discussion explaining to them this whole world and what internet marketing is, and affiliate marketing and why we want tracking ideas and why we want subID 1 and subID 2 and why we need our stats right. And why this part of the stats don’t make sense and helping them to understand it, which again isn’t moving things forward, but building a foundation so we can move forward a lot faster.

So It’s just been one of those things that’s been necessary but that drives people like me bonkers, who just want to move forward. But I think it’s been good and will be interesting to see what happens over the next three months. Because we’re spending this week to build this foundation and get a good understanding, set the goals and road marks and the game plan to move forward before they go home, they basically got a 3 month sprint to get these certain things done. And then month 4 we’ll meet again, so once a quarter we’ll get back together and kind of do this same thing. Hopefully the future ones will be less talking and more coding, just because everybody getting on a better foundation.

And then every 4 months everyone flies back in, set new goals, set new foundations, set new ground work, and then everyone goes back and boom kind of doing that in and out thing every quarter, which is kind of the game plan. We’ll know more over the next sprint of 3 or 4 months, what we get done. So one of the major things we’re working on for the Clickfunnels hyper users like me, we’re kind of rebuilding Backpack. Not rebuilding it but a lot of it was we were trying to figure out how to make Backpack the best shopping cart affiliate platform in the world. I think when we built it initially, we knew we needed it, so we built it and it was out there and it works, but it’s not the best. So we had 2 thoughts, one is we kill it or number two we make it the best. So we spent one day just basically going through every shopping cart and affiliate platform out there, we’ve got a lot of accounts and we went through all of them and categorized the pro’s and con’s. And this one’s awesome because it did this and this, and this one sucks because it doesn’t do this, and this one’s great……looking at all this stuff, which was really fun actually, seeing how everyone does different things. And then from there breaking it down to like, what do we want ours to do? How do we want ours to function? How do we want ours structured? So we took, I feel like we took the best pieces from a bunch of different spots.

And then another cool thing, this is new to me and our world, one of the guys in our team is UI, User Interface and User Experience guy and he does the design, the coding part of the user experience, but more so, he tries to really understand. So we went and found 10 or 15 hyper users of Backpack, so he called them on the phone and talked to all of them. Found out what they like and what they don’t like, and what they wish it did, and what they’re……and all these things. Then he did the same thing with me, which was kind of cool because we saw these really weird commonalities among the hyper users. We all want it to do certain things it doesn’t do. And they were all the same things and there’s this really cool crossover blend. That was really cool too.

Anyway, I don’t know if that helps any of you guys, but hopefully it does. Hopefully it makes you think through the process and things that you’re doing and give you some context or some ideas.  So yeah, that’s kind of what’s been happening. So I’m excited for the new Backpack. The plan initially with this hack-a-thon, is we were going to focus on Actionetics, that was going to be the big driving point, but when we had Todd, Dylan, Ryan and me, and Dave and the guys here, and we were looking at what we thought we needed to work on in the next 3 months it shifted from Actionetics to Backpack. So it’s been interesting. So Backpack will be our focus for the next, hopefully the next 3 to 4 months, and then at the end of summer, a little after summer, is when we do our next hack-a-thon, we’ll get back together and we’ll shift focus, hopefully as long as we finished our initiatives, to Actionetics.

One of the other interesting things we’ve done, it’s just funny how all these lessons apply in so many areas of your life. It’s like, right now the way our dev team has worked, everyone is spread across the platform working on different things. It’s like, okay this guy is integrations, this guy is doing bug fixes, this guys is bug fixes in Backpack, and this guy is bug fixes in Actionetics, and this guy is building a feature in the Marketplace. Everyone’s kind of all over the place and because of that it seems like nothing ever gets done, because everything’s incrementally inching forward. And I think that most of us entrepreneurs have the same problem. We’re doing 12 companies at once and because of that none of them are making any money. What our focus is for the next 3 months is for everyone to focus on Backpack, which is going to be a really interesting experiment where basically everyone is focusing on one thing. That way when we do our daily standing meetings and things like that, everyone’s dealing with the same problems and everything is inter-related and we’re hoping there’ll be a lot more value for everyone because of that.

Anyway, just a couple of things we’re learning through this process that hopefully will benefit you guys as well. Anyway, that’s about all I got for today. I have been up early this morning, we did some Wim Hof Method, which doesn’t make any sense to you yet, but when Biohacking Secrets comes out that’ll make more sense. It’s crazy, I actually did the process and held my breath for 3 minutes, which doesn’t make any logical sense to me outside of the fact that we did it. It’s crazy, the first time I did it, I think it was 1:30, the second was 2:45, and the last one I did was 3 minutes, crazy, cool, ninja things that are happening. Anyway, if you guys want to geek out on that, when Biohackingsecrets.com comes out you’ll be able to kind of dig deeper and see all these weird things we’re testing on ourselves and how that actually relates back to performance in anything. It can be sports, could be business as entrepreneurs, as a leader, as a speaker, whatever it is that you do and you want to do better.

Anyway, that’s what I got you guys. I’m almost to the hack-a-thon office. I don’t know if I told you, we rented an office for the hack-a-thon because we had too many people to fit in our other office. Which actually worked out really good, because in our other office the air conditioner broke. And this whole week it’s been like over 100 degrees here in Boise, which is really hot for this time of year. So my main office, it’s horrible. It’s insane right now. So I had to go back yesterday to do a webinar, we had a big webinar with Jason Fladlien. I get back there and it’s like 120 degrees in the office and I’ve got on long pants, so I go and we did the webinar, which I did my webinar, and then Jason goes and he’s one of the best webinar pitchmen in the world, so he gets excited and he want to plug in what he does. So my typical 2 hour long webinar totally ended up going for 3 ½ hours we were on that thing. So we got done and I was light headed and sweating, and my legs were soaked from my pants. It was pretty crazy, but we survived it. So I think the air con guy was supposed to have everything fixed today hopefully. So we’ll be able to be back into a normal office here in the next little bit.

And the other cool thing, so many cool things are happening, way too many things at once. Next week we have Inner Circle, so that made me think about this, our Inner Circle’s next week. One thing about the Inner Circle is that, usually we do them in hotels here in Boise, but we’re tired of renting hotels, so we’re like we should get our own. So basically we just bought a new office that we’re turning it into, it’s about an 8,000 square foot office, so half of it, we’re going to chop off and turn into a mastermind room where we can fit about, well we’re not going to have masterminds this big, but we can fit 80 to 100 people in our office, and the other half will be our new office, which would be amazing. So we’re building our own Inner Circle Mastermind room, which we’ll also use for our Certification event.

Speaking of certification, we are launching a new certification today. I bet you guys think I have the worst ADD ever, for juggling so many things, but they’re all coming out really, really good, which is exciting. So before I tell you anything else you guys think I’m having worse ADD, I’m going to get back to work and get these projects pushed out the door. I’m also going to jump off because I’m completely lost, I can’t find the new office, so I think if I turn off the Marketing In Your Car and start focusing I should be able to find it, in theory. We’ll see. Anyway, I appreciate you all, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon.

Jun 6, 2016

It’s time to focus on your “one thing”.

On this special late night episode Russell talks about how he learned to stop being a jack of all trades and focus everything around one thing. He also reminisces on some of the harder times he’s had before he got this far.

Here are some interesting things you’ll hear on today’s episode:

  • Russell tells how he used to be a “Jack of all Trades” and how that limited his growth.
  • Why at first he thought it was a bad thing to be pigeon holed as “The Funnel Guy” and why he changed his mind.
  • And why everything he does now is focused around Clickfunnels and why that is the key to his success.

So listen below to find out how Russell went from “Jack of all Trades” to “The Funnel Guy”.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to a late night, well not too late, it’s about 8 at night, so a later night Marketing In Your Car. Alright everyone, so I’m heading back to the office, we are day two of our hack-a-thon, which is so much fun. So we had the last, we had about a 4 hour smack-down today deciding the future of Clickfunnels and it got heated, it got a little bit….a little tension, but it was all good because it’s just interesting. I love my partners and love the people in the company, everyone has, we’re all definitely people who are great at what they do, so we have strong opinions, but when all was said and done, a couple of things I think are very true. One is we all respect each other, like insanely, a ton. And number two is that we care about the customers, and that’s really where the conversation keeps going to, is what is best for our customers, which is awesome. Way better than, what does the board of directors want, which is once again why I will never do the whole VC thing, on top of all the other jokes. But it was really good and we have some really cool directional things that we’re doing that, some things make me nervous but they’re going to be huge. Game changing type things. So I’ll share more as we keep going on, but I just wanted to kind of share that.

And then I wanted to talk to you guys about something that I think is really important, that’s on my mind. It’s interesting, I looked at the last 12 years of me being in this business, and first year I was just hustling and tried to make a little bit of money and I did and that was awesome. And then I tried to make a little more and I remember I was just hustling. We’d do a promotion and make $15- $20K and then I wouldn’t do anything for 3 or 4 months. Then we’d try something else and we’d make a little more, here and there. And I remember one day one of my friends who’s in the business was like, “Did you pass six figures yet?” I was like, “ No.” because in my mind six figures a year is insane, that’s not even possible. Then I was like, wait. I started doing the math, I was like “Oh my gosh. I did, I passed six figures this year. That doesn’t make any sense to me. That seems outside of logic.” It wasn’t something I believed was happening. So then I got excited, now I got a goal. I want to make a million dollars in a year.

So we went towards that goal, and went towards that goal. It’s funny because I think it took me 3 or 4 years to cross a million dollar mark, and there’s some mental barrier. I missed it by a few ten thousand dollars 2 or 3 years in a row. I just remember I was like, why can I not break the million dollar mark in a year? It just seemed so impossible for some reason and I couldn’t figure it out. And then after I finally did break the million dollar mark, then that mental barrier was gone and I shot to the next level and we got to the point where I think my best year we did 8.9 million in the calendar year, and I think we did 10 if we looked at it from a start day. A 365 start day from the peaks. But in the calendar year, from January 1st to December 31st, on tax is 8.9 million was the biggest year I had. After that is when the company crashed, if you listen back through all my old marketing in your car’s you’ll hear all those stories. That’s not for today.

Then we restarted, and we started growing and we stuck at 3 million dollars a year, for 5 years in a row, stuck, stuck, stuck. We tried focusing, which got us to 3 million, we were like let’s diversify, let’s launch 10 companies. We launched 10 companies and we still made 3 million. Then, it was just thing after thing after thing.  And then we started having a little more success when some of our other offers started going bigger. Neurocell did well and a couple of other offers started doing well. Anyway, it was just……but it still, then I think we were hovering around 6 million or so. I was like, “How do we get back to 10 million without having a hundred employees? How is that possible?” And I remember going to marketing events and people would be like, “Okay, this is the whatever guy. This is the whatever person.” And everyone would have their thing, and be like, “Russell, what’s your thing?” and I was like,, “We’re all things marketing. We do copywriting and we do funnels, and we do traffic.” We just kind of did everything. And I always thought that was a strategic advantage. “You can go to this guy to learn whatever, but we’re going to teach you the whole thing.” And that was always our whole thing. We want to teach everything.

Just by nature, we were good at everything, so we wanted to show everything and teach everything in this market and that’s what we did. And the problem is we just kept getting stuck and stagnant. And I never could figure out why. And then the whole Clickfunnels thing came and it wasn’t something we even invented the conversation. People had been talking about funnels, we’d been talking about funnels for 8 or 9 years. And I remember at the time, Ryan Deiss Traffic and Conversions Summit was all about funnels, seems like it was a hot topic right when we were building this tool. It really was a perfect storm when we launched it and all these things and it took off. And I wrote my book, and my book wasn’t ever really about funnels. Like if I was to re-title it now I probably would change the title, at least the subtitle, to be more about this is a funnel book. But it didn’t it was just me teaching my process, but it all came down to funnels. When you look at the whole process, it was all funnels. And people read that book and because that came so close to Clickfunnels people associated it as this is the guide book or the handbook for funnels and this is the software, and that means Russell, therefore, is the funnel guy.

But at first I didn’t like that because I was like, there’s a lot of people teaching funnels, I’m not the funnel guy, I’m the guy who does everything. And it’s interesting, but that’s kind of like I had this weird pride thing that I wanted to bigger than funnels, or I wanted to be whatever, but people kept kind of pigeon holing it, you’re the funnel guy, you’re the funnel guy. And finally after a while I started embracing it and shifting things and now all of our products are being tied to that. Funnel Scripts, here’s the scripts to your funnels. We had High Ticket Secrets, which is your high ticket funnel, and we had all these  other things that we have rolled out before and since. And then we started tying things to Clickfunnels. We have our Quick Start Program, which is helping people set up. We’ve got our funnel certification program, even my Inner Circle, interesting enough, transitioned to a funnel inner circle. Someone even mentioned it, last meeting. The reason why we’re in this room is because Russell’s the best in the world at funnels. I was like, how interesting is that? And I really think that the big….I mean obviously there’s a lot of things that happened, but one of the biggest thing for us that took us from where we’re at now to this year, I don’t want to share numbers or anything, but it’s going to be, I mean 3 or 4 maybe even 5 times more than my biggest year of all time. It’s just kind of crazy.

And I really feel like it’s because we picked our thing. And that’s what we’re focusing on. Everything we’re doing is around this one concept of funnels and we’re trying to become the best in the world at funnels. Our coaching’s around funnels, our products around funnels. Our front end offers are around webinar funnels and book funnels. Everything is tied to this conversation that we are trying to become the best in the world at, and I think that that’s one of the keys. As much as I hated to go that way and I didn’t want to, and I fought it for so long. Because I’m good at a lot of things, I wanted to be all these things, but I don’t think that’s the key. The key is figuring out what are you the best in the world at? What is your thing? And then everything you create is tied to that one thing. You know, Ryan Deiss just posted, I think Digital Marketers, he’s says it’s been 5 years now and I was reading this post. It was really cool, I really enjoyed it. But he was talking about how every year their business model changes. They were this, they were this, and they were this. You know, one year they were funnels, the next they were consultants, the next year they were whatever, and this year they’re doing certifications and it’s kind of like, their business keeps changing and I know they’re doing well, but my guess is that if they would pick a track and stick with it, and they’re trying to obviously, one of them is going to become the thing for them, but if you were to ask people 3 years ago who does funnels in the industry everyone would have said Ryan Deiss, but they shifted away from that. They shifted their focus to the next thing. It was the machine in email marketing and then it was…..and now it’s certifications. So I’m hoping they find their spot, I think certifications; I think what they’re doing with certifications is unique and cool and nobody else is doing it. We’re definitely not going that direction. I think that there’s this area that they’re going to carve out and just kind of own. I hope that’s the plan. I hope. I love to see what they can do if they execute hard on that for 3 or 4 years and just focus there.

I look at us we’re focusing now on this one thing and I start looking at a whole bunch of things are going through my mind right now. How do I build a community? Surround a topic? Our community, we’re funnel hackers. We funnel hack. We can have live events, hack-a-thons, the funnel hacking live event. It’s funnels and …. And it’s suddenly all these things and if you want to build a cult or a culture, it comes down to becoming the best in the world at one thing and then tying everything you’re doing around that concept.

Kind of a fun idea behind that. One of my close buddies, Chad Woolner, he’s a chiropractor and he’s been kind of trying to figure out his spot in the world outside of his practice. What does he want to do? How does he want to serve people outside of that? A little while ago he decided he wanted to help serve chiropractors and help other one’s get to the point that he’s gotten, really free themselves from the startup of a practice and those kind of things. So he started a podcast, he’s doing all these things, and they’re all good and he’s teaching everything from how to do this to this, all these things which are broad and good. And we were at a camping trip the other day, and I was sitting there and I was like, “Would I go on Paychat to learn how to grow my Chiropractic business?” and I was like, “I don’t know if I would.” Not that he doesn’t know his thing, because he does, but I don’t think he’s the best in the world at all those things that he’s teaching, all those things. What could Chad be the best in the world at. And I was thinking, and this isn’t the answer for everyone, but for him I was like, “Dude, you’re probably the only Chiropractor on Earth that knows anything about funnels. You build funnels, you build your own funnels, online funnels, offline funnels. I would venture to assume that you are the best in the world at Chiropractic funnels right now. That should be your thing man. You should shift all your branding and everything around that one thing and make that your focus. If that was your focus and I was a chiropractor I would come to you in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t come to you to learn how to build a chiropractic business, because you don’t have the biggest Chiropractor business, so I wouldn’t come to you for that. I would go to whoever did. But you’re the best in the world at chiropractic funnels. I would come to you for that. If you were to come to an event, let’s say there’s a big event in your industry you could say ‘hey, I’m the Chiropractic Funnel Dude.’ They would allow you to speak because you are that person.”

And I was looking at the other Chiropractic guru’s and there’s a social media one, there’s different ones and each of them would have their little spot in the ecosystem. I’ve always, again like I said, I always was kind of resistant to that and fought that, but now I really think that’s the key. Anyway, I just wanted to leave that while I’m driving back to the office to kind of think on. What is your thing? I know you’re good at everything, because you’re amazing. So of all those things, where, when someone says, “Oh, so and so, they’re the funnel dude. They’re the social media dude. They’re the eat fat and butter dude. Or put butter in your coffee dude.” Or whatever your market is. What makes you unique? What makes you different?

It’s kind of funny, I was looking at our old products, we had micro-continuity, which was cool, but it was just another random thing where now I can be like, “hey micro-continuity funnels.” And suddenly takes a concept and wraps it in a way that is unique to me and now it gives context and now people care. Anyway, just some thoughts. Hopefully that helps some of you guys and I hope you take some time to kind of carve out where in the world you fit into your ecosystem. And don’t fight it because you feel like you’re better than it. Own it. And I think that’s how you go deep with people and your audience. That’s where you’re going to see the biggest transformation. So there you go you guys. I hope you enjoyed that. That’s all I got. I appreciate you all, thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this crazy community we’re trying to build, and I’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Jun 1, 2016

Something cool I learned from wrestling…

On today’s episodes Russell talks about hiring a new energy coach and how she is similar to having a wrestling coach. He also talks about why having some kind of coach is helpful in giving you an outside perspective on your life.

Here are some fun things you will here in this episode:

  • Why Russell hired a new energy coach, and why he almost always has some kind of coach in his life.
  • Why seeing things from just your own perspective is not enough and you need an outside perspective to help you work through problems.
  • And how Russell is trying to learn to take the time to look back at a coach and is soon going to have forced meditation to do it.

So listen below to hear about how having an outside perspective on your life can help you.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car.  Good morning everybody. I hope you guys are all doing amazing. I am heading into the office now as normal. I probably should just quit saying that because you guys are all riding with me every day and you all know that’s kind of the game plan.

But I wanted to share with you guys a cool insight I had two days ago. I need to preface it, because in my mastermind groups every year we get a group amazing women who join who self identify themselves, so I wouldn’t say this if they didn’t say it, but since they do I can tease and I can play off of it. But, they come in and usually everybody introduces themselves, “Hey I’m so and so and I’m in the woo woo niche.” Woo woo typically means all of the mindset and spiritual healing and all these things that are grouped in, in the woo woo, right. So that’s kind of our joke in the Inner Circle like, “You’re one of the woo woo teachers.” It’s kind of funny. So with that said, I do believe in a lot of those kind of things and I think there’s a lot of value and stuff and a lot of cool things that come from that.

Anyway, one of our members….some of you guys may have heard of them or met them, but if not, they’re amazing. Their names are Justin and Tara Williams and they run a couple of podcasts. One in the real estate market which I……if you want to flip houses, these guys are amazing, they flip like 100 houses a year, but that’s not the kind of business I want to be in, but if you do go check it out. I don’t even know the name of the podcast there is. They also do one called 8 minute millionaire, which is one of my favorite podcasts. It’s really, really fun. And then Tara just launched a new podcast called, I’m going to mess up the name; it’s like the Energy Healing Podcast. She launched it and I kind of saw them launching it, but I didn’t know much about it, and then at the group she got up and kind of presenting and explaining what they’re doing. And we were teasing them, “Oh no, you’re in the woo woo market now. You guys went from hardcore house flipping to becoming a millionaire to woo woo in a year, which is kind of funny.”

But it was awesome and she showed the process and the model that they’re doing. It was really, really cool. In fact, maybe I’ll talk about it another day, but if you want to see a really interesting, simple, clean model, I’m really kind of watching them close, because I think it’s cool, but if you go to tarawilliams.com and make sure you spell it right. I’ll make sure... my sister-in-law transcribes these; I’ll make sure she goes to the right site, so it’s right in the transcript. If you go to tarawilliams.com, it’s a very simple page telling you a story, you opt in, they get you to listen to the podcast. The podcast pushes back to an energy healing calm, and then eventually I’m sure they’ll go to hiring coaching and a bunch of stuff like that. But it’s simple, the podcast is the traffic generator, and then you look at the podcast, she did a really cool job of when you come in and taking you through an indoctrination. First thing she introduces the podcast, second podcast episode tells her story and then after that it goes through a 21 day jump start. 21 days of hope to help you become indoctrinated and understanding energy healing. Why she does it, how she does it, all these things, which increases your desire to want to go get the coaching call, and things like that.

Anyway, needless to say, I’m going through the process. While she’s at the Mastermind, she reads my energy, totally the woo woo realm of things, so if you guys don’t believe in that kind of stuff, I totally understand it, but I was like……it was strangely amazing and interesting and yeah. So we actually, during the mastermind I had them come over and talk to my wife and I more about what they do, and did a session with us then, and then I drank the kool-aid and signed up and paid them a bunch of money to do some of my own sessions. So my very first call was on Monday, which was Memorial Day. So I woke up early in the morning and did that and it was interesting. I would say I’ve done a lot of coaching, a lot of coaching, probably more than most people on earth over the last ten years, but I would say that it was the most specific personal development, life coaching, whatever you want to call it, session that I’ve ever had. I’ve had a lot of good things that are….but the problem is they are more generic; the way she does things is very focused on me. Anyway, I will leave it at that because there’s a bunch of stuff that is outside the scope of this podcast. I wanted to share that first off because I think the model is really, really interesting. Second off, during my session I learned something really interesting about myself, that I think would be good for you guys too.  So therein lies what we’re going to be talking about for the next 5 minutes till I get to the office.

So during my session we were talking about just things and how I work. She was asking me, “There’s some kind of wrestling analogy here that you need to figure out and explain to me.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I’m kind of thinking through it and I don’t remember exactly what she said for this to kind of come up or anything but, I remember the moral of the story and it was talking about wrestling, and any of you guys that have ever been to wrestling match, this is kind of how it works. When you’re in high school they’re 6 minute matches, when you’re in college they’re 7 minute matches, it’s basically 2 minutes for each period, there’s 3 periods. First period both of you start on your feet, then after 2 minutes, or in college the first period is 3 minutes, then there’s a quick break. The break literally is maybe 10 seconds, it’s long enough for the ref to flip a coin, see who gets their choice, whoever wins the choice can say they want to go top, bottom, neutral or defer. Top means that you get to start on top of the guy, bottom means you get to start on the bottom, where you’re on the mat and the other guys on top of you. Neutral means you get on your feet again and defer means you let the other guy choose and you choose the 3rd period. So that’s kind of what is top, bottom, neutral or defer.

So that goes really quick, you pick “I want bottom.” And then right before you walk back to the center of the mat and kneel down you look back at your coach for a second, maybe 2 or 3 seconds, a really short period of time, just long enough for your coach to be like, “Dude, Russell, he’s leading his right leg, look for that. You’re missing it but he’s leading his right leg.” Or “Hey Russell, keep your elbows in. You’re overextending your arms.” Or whatever that little piece is. And my coach is able to see what I’m not. Because I’m right there, my face is in the middle of this thing. We’re beating the crap out of each other, there’s heads and all sorts of things are happening. And I’m aware of as much as my subconscious mind is picking up from all my training and my practice and everything, but there’s things from the outside I’m not able to see just because I’m so close to the thing. So I look back for a second and the coach is like, “Hey, your elbows are flying, keep your elbows in.” I’m like, “Oh crap, I didn’t even realize. I’m getting out of position.” Or “Hey look for the under-hook on this guy, he’s reaching.” Or “Hey, look he’s stepping.” Or whatever it is, they give me a second, maybe 2 seconds of really fast coaching from an outside perspective. You go to the middle, boom you start again. You go for the next 2 minutes,  the period ends, you come back, reset, you’re standing there and look over to the coach and the coach is like, “Boom, here’s this outside nugget that you’re missing.” And then the match is over.

And what’s interesting, if you look at those little things, it’s tiny periods of time. Seconds, maybe 5 seconds max. But you’re getting this perspective from outside, from something that…….I think about this a lot. For me, and I don’t know if I’d say this in all situations, but you got Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods is better than his coach. Typically if you’re in competition, you’re better than your coach, you’re coach may have been better back in the day, but they’re not actively competing. So you’re the best, you’re technically better than your coach in that period of time, but the coach still has a different perspective that you don’t have. He’s able to look from the outside and be like, “Wow, Russell is doing a lot of good things right, but this is where he’s getting in trouble. This is the piece…” or whatever those things are. And it’s that outside perspective you get for a second. And one of the big takeaway’s from my session with Tara was understanding for me in my business, I’m in the heat of it. I’m going a million miles a minute and doing all sorts of stuff just like I’m in a wrestling match, and the thing I was missing was I wasn’t taking that time to look back at a coach, look back at whatever. And it could be a coach, it could be a spiritual thing, through prayer, which I think is probably more of where I need to be focusing at. It could be, you know whatever, but it’s taking a second and looking back to get the outside perspective so when you go back to battle you have that ability to execute better.

So that’s kind of where I wanted to share with you. For each of you guys it’s going to be different. I think for me, and it’s one of my things I’m trying to work on for the next month or so and really figure out, is where are those times for me? I’m not a big fan yet of meditation, but I know people who are obsessed with it and seems like in my world, everyone is getting more and more obsessed with meditation and I just don’t feel like I have the time for that right now. Some of you guys know I just bought a flow tank, so the flow tank is going to be at my house next week, it’s being delivered. When you do a flow tank session, it’s like an hour sitting in this tank floating in salt water, you just kind of sit there for an hour, so it’s going to be my forced meditation time. I don’t even know how to meditate. So I’m probably going to, when I’m locked in there push play on some meditation thing that forces me to meditate. But it’s going to be my time to force me to stop and look back at my coach. So meditation could be a thing, it could be hiring a coach.

I look at one of our Inner Circle members who’s been killing it, just finished a new webinar and sent it to me today and was like, “I’m so excited.” And I felt bad because I’m so excited about the webinar, but there’s 3 final mistakes almost everyone makes in a webinar and she made all three of them and I was like ahhh. And I feel, I almost feel bad being that coach that’s like, “Hey, this is the three places I see that you’re already making the mistakes,” because I know how much time they’ve put into the presentation and all these things, but that’s what they’re looking for. That outside perspective. “I’m in the battle, I’m creating, I’m doing all this stuff and it looks perfect to me and I look back at the coach and the coach is like, “It’s looking good, but you’re overextending, your elbows are out.” Or “You’re stepping too hard with your left leg and that’s why he keeps taking you down.” Or whatever that thing might be.

So hiring a coach or mentor, I’ve been a big believer, and it’s funny because I haven’t for the last year and a half just because  Clickfunnels got a little crazy. But prior to that in my life, I always had a coach, someone I was paying for coaching, and it wasn’t always like a business coach. It was a health coach, or a life coach, relationship coach. And right now I’ve got my new energy coach, so it can be all sorts of different things, but always having some coach that you’re paying so you have someone to look back to and be like, “Hey I need an outside perspective. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong?” So again it could be meditation for you, could be prayer, could be hiring a coach, could be all those things combined. Kind of my big takeaway for this week is that while I am good in the heat of battle, I’m doing well, better than I’ve ever done, I need to take those moments to look back and get the outside perspective from somebody or something else that I might be missing right now. Because no matter how good I think I might be, I’m missing things. So that’s what the outside perspectives for.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to share with you guys today. It’s cool, I’m excited. I’m excited to see where my journey goes with Tara as a coach for a little while. And just see the different things I get from that. So I’ll share the cool stuff with you guys. But that was the big takeaway for me. So think about that you guys. I’m sure that you’re all amazing at what you do, but look back at the coach to get the outside perspective. That’s what I got. I’m almost to the office today you guys. I got calls. Ugh. I hate days when I have calls from noon to 4. It’s killing me. I just want to build funnels.

Anyway, so I’m going to film from 9 until noon. So I’m going to go bust out four things really quick, then get on calls all day and that’ll be my day. And then tomorrow, we’ve got all Dylan, Todd and Ryan, my Clickfunnels co-founders/partners are flying in for 3 or 4 days and next we’ve got the whole team flying in. So tomorrow will be a fun day of getting crap done, planning for world domination. Taking a step back so we can move 50 steps forward and it’s going to be good. I’m sure we’ll be broadcasting live from some of our secret sessions, so hopefully you guys are tuned into Periscope and Facebook Mentions and all the other places we’re posting cool stuff because we’ll be sharing inside, behind the scenes of what’s happening. Alright guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day, and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

May 31, 2016

How to get people to profitably join your podcast, follow you on social media, and so much more.

On today’s episode Russell talks about an idea he has for the Marketing In Your Car podcast and how to get more subscribers.

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

  • Hear about some interesting things Russell has coming up this week.
  • Find out what awesome idea Russell had to get more subscribers to the podcast and why you should funnel hack the idea.
  • And find out how you could possibly get a hold of the first 250 Marketing In Your Car podcasts on one device in the near future.

So listen below to hear the details of Russell’s exciting new idea.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright everybody, I hope that the weekend was amazing for those who are listening live. Those who….I guess it’s never really live, those who are listening in kind of real time, for those who are listening some other time, hope you had an amazing whatever today was for you. And I have got some crazy, cool things happening this week. I’m excited.

We’ve got…..we’re launching the Keto Funnels for the Pruvit company which is going to be cool. It’s not live today but it should be live by the time most of you guys hear this, within a day or two. So if you wanna see a little bit behind the scenes  of what we’re doing go to ketofunnels.com, that should be live, like I said, in a day or two. We’re going to be rolling those out, funnels for a network marketing company, so it’s kind of a big experiment. We’re going to be testing out, if it works good here, we’ll probably do it with other companies. Anyway, it’s kind of a little sample test to see if we can build out funnels for companies and make it so that a company person basically comes in, drops in their Pruvit ID and unlocks all these secret funnels, so it’ll be kind of cool to see how the first test goes. I think it’ll do well, we’ve built 2 pretty amazing funnels for that company and I think that people are going to love them and do a lot of good stuff with them. So that’s kind of plan number one that’s happening this week.

Also Bio-hacking Secrets should be going live. We would be going live this week, but we have to record one more product, so Anthony’s flying back out for that early next week. We’ve got the hack-a-thon starting. So we’ve got, this weekend basically Clickfunnels partners and co-founders are all flying in, and next we’ve got pretty much half the dev team, maybe more, maybe the whole dev team, a whole bunch of the dev team, a whole bunch of the marketing team. So for a week we’ll be doing a whole bunch of crazy, cool stuff, while we’re filming episodes for Funnel Hacker TV. There’s a lot happening, which is fun, also at times, overwhelming, not going to lie. But it’s good.

I got a couple of big projects I’m trying to get out the door and then I can start focusing on some of the fun things that are going on with Funnel Hacker TV. But today I wanted to share with you guys an idea that hopefully will be a big idea for some of you guys. Because I think I cracked the code on something. If you think about how most people grow, I’ve been thinking a lot about it, I know Snapchat is the new cool thing, and podcasts is cool, and blogs are cool and all these things are cool, right? The problem with most content things is that the way you get traction is first off, you’ve got to do it consistently for forever which kind of sucks. For most of us it takes a long time before you have success. I was doing this podcast for probably 3 years before anyone listened to it. But I didn’t care because it was fun and it was an easy format. But it was hard because, luckily I was monetizing my life in other ways, but this is your marketing strategy, it sucks. If your marketing strategy is, let’s go blog, let’s go podcast, let’s go Snapchat, things like that, it’s tough. So I’m always looking, how do we beat the system? How do we make it so that we can get customers and people to subscribe profitably? Where we make money every time somebody joins our podcast or gets on Snapchat or whatever that thing might be.

So I’ve been thinking about that. How do I do that? What’s the best way? I have an idea and I’m going to be executing on it, and I hope a couple of you guys copying me, because if you do that’d be awesome. My guess is that most of you won’t but hopefully one or two of you will because that’ll make it worth sharing the idea. What I’ve been looking out is, I’ve been doing…..We’re getting close to episode 250 in the Marketing In Your Car Podcast, which is crazy. Don’t you guys think? We’ve been hanging out 250 days, we’ve been sharing this message together. So that’s kind of cool. My problem is when we go pay, “Hey go subscribe to Russell’s podcast.” It’s expensive, and it’s hard to track, it’s less effective, it’s not the best thing in the world right? I know it was almost impossible to track as when we were trying to guess , we were spending $100 to get someone to subscribe to your podcast. it was obviously free things in your list of a bunch of other things to do, but for me to buy ads to get people to build my following, crazy expensive, not worth it, not even worth the time and energy. That’s why putting out good content is good, people share.

A lot of you guys have found out about this podcast because people shared it with you or whatever. So those are the good things having good content, but I don’t want to rely on good content to get my message out there. Because no matter how good your content is, at first it’s not spreading. So how do we do it? So I had this idea. Building a funnel specific to getting people to subscribe to my different channels and things like that. What I was thinking about doing, and a couple of ideas and tips kind of came  along with this thought process, but one of them I was looking at all the podcasts I’ve done in the past and there’s 5 or 6 that are focused on webinars that are really, really good. Things that I wish everybody could listen to. So I’m like, what if I take those 5 things and I’m like, “Hey opt-in for the 5 top webinar strategy’s” or whatever, they opt in and boom, I just give them the links to those 5 podcasts. So that’s one way I can start paying to get people to opt-in and have some kind of metric, but it still doesn’t make me really money up front. So I’m like how do we do this?

So my big thought, my big aha, I’m excited for this, is I’m going to be taking 250, well as soon as we get 250 episodes, we’re getting close. I’m going to make……I’ve been sourcing it in China. In China we’re getting these really cool pre-loaded MP3 players, and I’m going to pre-load the first 250 episodes of Marketing In Your car on that thing. So I’m going to go and actually pull out the audio intros and exits, just so you don’t have to hear the same song 250 times, for those of you guys that binge listen. But I want to encourage people to binge listen. So what better way than to do that than to give them devices with all those things pre-loaded on it. It ends up costing me $5 or $10 in China to get one of these MP3 players. It’ll be wrapped in my logos and all that kind of stuff, and I’m going to do a free plus shipping on it.  Free plus shipping you’re going to get 250 of my top podcast episodes. So that’ll be basically the offer, and we’ll have some kind of order form bump and some kind of upsell, right? Whatever that is.

So now, I can go on Facebook and get my email list and other people’s lists, and all the traditional marketing channels to give away this MP3 player, which people who download my MP3 player with 250 free episodes of my podcast, what do we know about those people? They’re probably either interested in my podcast, or they will become because now I’m giving it away to them to binge listen to them really, really easily. So they will come through that funnel and after that funnel, now this is my, in my mind it’s my funnel to connect people to all of my social outlets. So day one would be a thing like, “Hey, thanks so much for listening, the MP3 player is on its way, but I want you to subscribe right now so that you can get all future episodes. Because episode 251 and beyond are not on this MP3 player, so you have to click here to subscribe. So, boom, we’re getting people subscribed to itunes that day.

So now I’m causing consumption and then I’m getting people to subscribe. And then day number two is going to be something like, “Hey guys, this is Russell. You know what Snapchat is? Here’s 5 cool snapschats I sent out in the past, I want you guys on this list, because if you’re not getting my Snapchats you’re missing out on some cool crap that’s coming directly to you through the Snapchatty-thingy.” I actually haven’t started using Snapchat yet, in fact I don’t know how it works, but I know it’s the big next thing, so I’m like, how do you get people to subscribe? Well it’s hard, you have to train them.

So I’m going to get a freaking pay for ads until somebody to go download Snapchat, search for my name, click on my button, that’s the most inefficient way on earth to grow a following, it’s horrible. But for people who have said, “Russell I’m going to pay you for 250 of your episodes.” those people are a little more engaged and now I have a full day focused on, “Hey guys, today’s a Snapchat day. Anyone who has a Snapchat you’re going to get blah blah for free. Go and do it.” And we bribe them and motivate them to get them to subscribe to Snapchat. The next one can be like, “Hey guys, this is how”….I don’t know, LinkedIn or Pinterest, or Instagram, or whatever, I’m going to use that communication funnel after somebody gets this free plus shipping thing to connect them into all of my social channels and that’s going to be the funnel. So that way in theory if we execute it right, usually it costs us about $10 to get a free plus shipping buyer, and if we can make $20 or so from that initial funnel, that’ll cover our shipping costs and basically now we’re breaking even, and now I’ve got people’s attention, to now get them into our other channels for free, and in a really cool way that’s not them clicking on an ad in Facebook, but actually watching a video of me educating you, coaching you how to do it, telling them what to look for, to how it all works. And that’s kind of the thoughts. So that’s my thought you guys. So I’m going to be  building out really cool, I don’t even know what we call it, a funnel with the sole purpose of profitably acquiring subscribers to my blog, podcast, Snapchat, all those other things.

We should probably come up with a cool name for it. What do you guys think? What would be a cool name to use for it? Call it the…..oh what if we call it, have you guys ever read the article called the Thousand True Believers, or A Thousand True Fans, is that what it’s called. Oh and there’s a book called the True Believer which is a book about how to start your own cult, not that I’m studying how to start my own cult, but if I was, I would definitely be reading the True Believer. What if we call this the True Believer Funnel. The True Believer Creator Funnel. That’s too many words. Let’s call it the True Believer Funnel, this will be just between us people. You guys on the Marketing In Your Car and that’s it, nobody else gets this one right now. So this is the True Believer Funnel. That’s what we’re going to start focusing on, where we can profitably acquire people into our cult, sure. That’ll be the game plan.

Anyway, that’s my thought. Hopefully that helps some of you guys, gives you some cool ideas. Again, you don’t have to be as elaborate as me, with 250 episodes on, you can go pick 5 episodes and sell it for $7 or you could do like I’m doing. Burn them on a CD. Initially we burned it on a CD we just never sold that one. But as a MP3 player it’ll be super cool, it’ll grow and grow the way we’re looking for, plus I can put on all my other follow up sequences and a million other things. Anyway, that’s totally the game plan you guys. So feel free to Funnel Hack it, rip it off. But you will see me executing it very quickly. We’re getting MP3 players designed right now. My brother’s cleaning up all the audio from past Marketing in Your Car’s making it easier to listen to, and I got to get to episode 250. When those things are finished, we will have an MP3 player with 250 episodes pre-loaded on it, for your listening enjoyment.

That’s the plan you guys. Alright, I am outta here. I got a busy day and I’ve got field day today with my kids at 1, so I’ve got 3, about 4 hours to bust through all my projects, then I am out. Which I am kind of excited for, the day’s I only have 3 or 4 hours to get stuff done, I typically get more stuff done than the days that I have 10 hours. It’s forcing me to get everything done in a compressed amount of time to get to my kids field day today. Cause this is the last week of school for them, so it’s going to be really, really fun. I am in charge of the tug o war, so I’m going to be….just picture this, me vs 10 little kids in a tug o war. It’s going to be so fun. I’m excited. Alright you guys, have a great day and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

May 26, 2016

The most ninja thing I learned at this week’s mastermind group.

On today’s episode Russell gives a quick history of how his Inner Circle came to be. He also talks about some cool things he’s learned at this week’s Inner Circle groups.

Here are some fun things to look forward to in this episode:

  • Hear how Russell’s first attempt at having a mastermind group worked (and didn’t work).
  • How when his mastermind groups started growing he was able to set a limit, and easily fill it.
  • And how this week’s Inner Circle taught him how to be like Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat.

So listen below to find out more about how Russell’s Inner Circle came to be and how to channel your own Sub-Zero.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, I gotta keep making the intro more and more cheesy every single day because that’s the best way to do it. Anywho, I hope you guys are doing awesome, I’m heading into day number 4 of the mastermind meetings. It has been amazing, to say the least.

Let me kind of give you a background on the Inner Circle. It’s kind of cool actually. I launched the Inner Circle, probably 3 years ago and I had a mastermind group in the past but the first time it was 7 or 8 years ago. I launched a mastermind group; I think I sold 2 people into it. I was like, “Crap, if they show up there’s only going to be 2 people and it’s going be dumb.” So I invited a bunch of my friends and stuff and tried to make a full group. It was always okay, but I don’t know. It just wasn’t’ amazing. So we ran it for 2 or 3 years and finally I was like, let’s stop running it. So we turned it off and didn’t run it for a long time.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago we decided to launch coaching again. It’s funny how your mindset shifts. We had sold coaching at 5 so this time I was like we’re going to sell it at 8. So we sold it at 8.  And then I was like, now we’re going to do it at 10 and we bumped it to 10. Then I was like we’re going to do it at 12 and we bumped it to 12. But it wasn’t really a mastermind group, it was more this other thing.

Then I met this guy who had sold a $25K mastermind group. He said he was signing up 2 people a week. I was like, I don’t know if that’s even possible. It seemed like too far, too foreign to even be a possibility. But I was like, let’s just add that as a thing and maybe we’ll sell one or two. So we did and then right away we sold one. I was like, “Crap, now we gotta fulfill on it and we gotta sell more.” So we started slowly selling it. I think at our first mastermind group we had 8 people at it. And that was kind of cool. I was like, alright. And then by the second one we had about 20 people at it. And I was like, “Dang this is getting big.” I remember Bill Glazier’s mastermind group I grew up in, he only allowed 18 people in the group. So with 20 we had a full group and we were giving everyone an hour in their sessions. And then it kept growing and growing. Soon we got to the point where we had 35 people in the group. I was like, Dang. So we shrunk it down to where everyone had 30 minutes. It actually ended up being better because people spent a lot less time talking about nothing and a lot more time focused. So I was like, “Okay, cool. We’ll keep it at 35, keep it there.”

And then the next meeting we had 45. So we shifted to 3 days and it hit 3 days and it was too much, everyone was fried. I was like, “What do we do.” Finally I was like, “I’m going to break this into 2 groups. We’ll have 2 groups of 20ish.” So we broke into 2 groups, by the time the 2 groups showed up, they both had 30 people in it. We were at 60 people in the group. I’m like, “Oh crap.” So we had 2 groups. 1 one day, and 1 the other day. We had a crossover day, so we had dinner together and it was really fun. We’re like, cool we’ll keep 2 groups and we’ll be fine. Then the next time we had 2 groups and both groups had about 40 in it. And I was like, “We can’t facilitate 40 in a group, it loses the experience.”

Excuse me, my throat is dry from a lot of talking. Anyway, I was looking at it, we’re almost 80 people. I can’t believe we have 80 people at our $25K a year program. It didn’t make any sense to me. And this comes back to one of the big things we had over the last 3 days so far. When is enough, enough? So I said, “You know what,” and actually I had years ago, Dan Kennedy asked me, “What’s your number?” I’m like, “What do you mean?” he’s like, “What’s your number? When are you going to be happy?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, a billion.” And he’s like, “All you entrepreneurs, especially the young ones, you just want money, so you just work and work and work. You don’t have a number so you just keep working til forever. You gotta have a number otherwise you are going to burn yourself out. And you will find out that this business you created because you wanted freedom and a lifestyle will rob you of that.” And I was like, “Crap.”

So a few months ago, I was looking at Inner Circle and I was like, “What’s my number?” At that time I also said, “From now on we shut down our lower end program.” Which was a $10-12K a year. I said “You know what, we’ll just close that down.” Which was crazy because it was almost a $2 million dollar a year business and I just turned it off. It’s not worth the effort anymore. So I turned it off, which was really scary.  Then the only option became $25K which is why so many kept joining it. So a couple of months ago I said, “What’s my number?” We’re at 80, I’m going to have 100. And when there’s 100 we’re going to shut it down.” And so I said that was the number and within two weeks we got to 100, which was crazy.

So that became my number. I said, “Look, that’ll be it. A $2.5 million a year business for me coaching and that’s it. We’re not scaling, we’re not growing. It is what it is.” And I said, “With 100 people, how do we do this?” And I looked at some of the other groups out there. One of my friends groups, they run a similar thing and they grew the same thing, about 100 people. They have 100 people all come to one meeting. So I went to that meeting and I didn’t like it. I felt like I didn’t get anything out of it at all. So I was like, I don’t want to make mine big like that. The format that I get the most value out of is the one with 20 to 25 people in the group and everyone got to share. So I said how about this, we’re going to break it into 4 groups of 25 and that’s what we’re going to do. And we will lock it out. So that’s what we did, we capped it out at 100 people, 4 groups of 25. And that is now the Inner Circle.

So we had 25 people here Monday and Tuesday. 25 people here Wednesday and Thursday. And then next month we got 2 more groups that will come through and that’ll all 100 people. So that’s kind of how we shifted our Inner Circle and it’s really cool. It’s nice because these groups don’t have 30 or 40 people, we’ve got 25, so it gives us where we have more time and less stress. It’s really cool, just perfect right now. The only thing that’s lame is it’s hard because all these people want to join the Inner Circle and they can’t, which is a good problem to have.

So I told these guys, “Look, this is how it works. Your seat is here and you’re locked in forever. The only way someone else can get in is if one of you guys leave.” So we have these guys from Ukraine, and one of them, Vlad was like, “I just thought of a good business opportunity for me.” And I was like, “What’s the business opportunity?” he’s like, “No more seats are available. I will sell my seat for $50K. I will come as the partner and they will come as the person. I will get just as much value at this thing as everybody else.” I was like, “I guess that’s brilliant.” It made me kind of smile. It’s really fun.

We’re having a great time, and that’s what’s been happening. So the first…..I wish I could drive with my notebook out, because there have been so many transformational shifts even for myself and I think for everybody else in the group. It’s just been really, really cool. I’m trying to think how deep should I go? And I’m kind of late too because I’ve been dragging my feet a little bit. Not going to lie, I’m a little bit tired. So a couple of the….let’s see. How much do you guys want to know? I should just do a session where we sit down and I share the top 20 things we got from mastermind. One of the cool ones, I’m curious if any of you are…..it’s hard to explain this without being able to visually show it. How many of your prospects struggle with procrastination when you’re trying to get them to buy from you? So there’s my question for you. I want you to think about it. I’m guessing that most of them do right? It’s the reason why urgency and scarcity are such big driving points.

If you look, I’ve done a couple of podcasts on this topic. It’s a big thing. Urgency and scarcity is what gets people to buy. In fact, Justin and Tara Williams are in our group, they’re awesome. He was telling me, “We pretty much figured out that the only thing that gets people to buy is urgency and scarcity. So once a month we launch something and then take it away so we can have urgency and scarcity.” It’s pretty awesome.  But I was like, “Why does it take urgency and scarcity?” It’s because of procrastination, they procrastinate.

So Darrin Stevens, who’s a ninja, a real world ninja. He’s not actually a fighting ninja, but marketing, sales, MLP, hypnosis ninja dude. The guy’s amazing. But what he’s amazing at is so interesting. He runs events and they’ll make $2.5 million over a weekend at an event, which sounds amazing. But when you look at it, his events will have 70 people in the room, which makes it freaking amazing. He’ll close 80%, 90% of the room with a $30K offer. And the events are free for people to come to it. It’s not a buyer event. People come, put the 80 people in the room and he pulls out $2.5 million, it’s insane. I don’t know how he does it. But he was talking about it and showing us a lot of things they do, all about rapport building. It takes them 3 days at an event to get enough rapport to be able to close people at $30K. So they talked a lot about how you build report.

His wife Jackie talked about universals and truisms. Universals are things that are universally true like for example, come into the room and trying to get people to say yes subconsciously, over and over. Similar to trial closes I teach, but it’s this subconscious thing. Universals like, “How many of you guys in the room are business owners?” 90% of the room raises their hands. “How many of you guys here, work for business owners.” So now everyone’s said yes, because that got everyone. They’re universal. “How many of you guys in the room are men? How many of you guys are women?” Boom, you just got everyone to say yes, because everyone is a man or woman. Little things that seem dumb, but they’re training the subconscious mind to say yes. That’s universals and truisms are things that are like, “Hey it’s a beautiful sunny day out here in Boise, Idaho.” And people are like, “Yes, it is a beautiful sunny day here in Idaho.” It’s something that’s true in the moment. So it’s like, “Hey, we’re so happy that all of you made it here today.” Did all of them make it there today, yes they did. So that’s a truism.

Anyway, they’re using all these universals and truisms to build rapport. They’re using breathing techniques, they’re using all these things to try to build rapport with these people, which is cool. And then this one was the ninja one for me. He talked about procrastination. He’s like, “People procrastinate. The reason why…” He draws a picture of a pirate ship on the board and said, “Here’s a pirate ship, who runs the pirate ship? It’s the captain, right? Who actually takes care of the ship? It’s the crew. You’ve got the captain and the crew. Who’s in charge? Obviously the captain’s in charge. The captain is like your subconscious mind. It’s moving things but then the crew is your subconscious mind that’s actually doing all the stuff to make it all happen. What happens when the crew does not like what the captain is doing? It causes a mutiny. That’s what happens.  Consciously you’re selling somebody something that subconsciously it’s something out of alignment, so your subconscious has this mutiny which causes procrastination. So how do you get people to not procrastinate?”

He did this technique and I wish I could show it to you, but he did it all with his hand. What he does is he starts speaking to the different parts of the subconscious mind. So you have the right hand, I’ll hold up my hand, “On one hand you guys are really excited and motivated and you really want to be par t of this, but on the other hand,” he holds up the left hand, “On the other hand you’re freaking out. You’re unsure, you’re insecure, you’ve struggled in the past. Blah blah blah.” So he’s holding up both hands like the right brain and the left brain or whatever. Like two different conversations.

Oh crap, I just cut somebody off. Sorry dude. I’m such a bad driver. This is why you shouldn’t be podcasting and driving. It’s as bad or worse than drinking and driving. Good thing we’re in Boise, Idaho which means this guy probably doesn’t have a gun, if we were in California I would be scared for my life, not going to lie.

Anyway, so now he’s got two hands up. He’s got one hand he’s got you really want to do this, the other hands like, you’re confused and nervous, and those are the two parts. Conscious and subconscious, the two things that cause someone to procrastinate. It’s these two internal conflicts. So he does this left hand, right hand, and says, “These two things can come together.” And he brings his hands together. So subconsciously he’s brought the conscious and subconscious mind together and pushes it out. Similar to, have you guys ever played Mortal Kombat? Sub-Zero shoots out the blue fire ball? It’s kind of like that. Right hand, left hand brings them together, clasps his fingers together and then pushes it out like a fireball to the audience. So he’s taking the two parts of the brain, brings them together and then pushes them out to the people. It does that over and over again throughout the event. Every time they’re talking about something, he’s looking like, “What are the two conflicting parts of the mind that are keeping this from saying yes?”

So it’s like, On the one hand, you probably think it’d be awesome to have Clickfunnels. You’re excited, you think this’ll be easy. But on the other hand you’re thinking I don’t have time, I’m not a techie person, but if we can bring these two things together and then he pushes them out, and help you guys to see the value of this. Then it becomes a no-brainer. Boom, he’s just taking this internal conflict that causes procrastination, he’s brought those two pieces together and pushed them back on the audience and now those conflicts are gone. How ninja is that? How freaking amazing and cool is that?

It’s been funny because for the last 3 days now everybody’s been doing fireballs at each other during their presentations and stuff, it’s amazing.  For me, this is ninja. I’m totally using it on my stage presentations from now on when I speak and everything else. But where else can I use this? So I’m trying to figure out how to do it with my slides. I’m going to add in my slides something like, add a picture of me with my right hand out, a picture with my left hand out, a picture of me putting them together, and a picture of me pushing it out. And I’ll push through these slides as I teach the concept. On the one hand you’re probably excited, on the other hand you’re probably stressing out, but if we put these things together it’ll help you! Boom. Then you will be successful, and you will join and life will become good.

Anyway, that was a cool one. I hope it makes sense when I’m explaining it. But watch the marketing I do in the future, you will see me using this in Periscopes, in videos, in hangouts, in webinars. Because it’s the most ninja, amazing, cool thing I’ve learned in a long, long time. So I’m going crazy, I’m excited. That was just one tiny, itsy bitsy, teeny little nugget we got in the Inner Circle, and it’s been 3 days of a waterfall of things like that.

Anyway, I am almost to the hotel now, I’m excited. I’m going to go in there and do some subconscious procrastination killing, Sub-Zero fireballs at people, and I think you guys should too. That’s what I got for today you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day. If you want to get on the waiting list to be in the Inner Circle and one of these guys are crazy enough to not re-up, that’s the only way to get in right now. Just go to Russellbrunson.com, apply there and that’s it. Alright guys, I will talk to you all again very, very soon. Bye everybody.

May 23, 2016

This is the key to selling almost anything to anyone.

On today’s episode Russell talks about epiphany’s and how to use them to sell to your audience. He mentions a book he read that introduced him to the concept of techno-babble and why that’s bad for business.

Here are 3 exciting things you’ll hear on this episode:

  • How you should use your epiphany moment to sell the product or service to your audience.
  • Why using techno-babble totally turns your audience off.
  • And why sharing your epiphany with your audience can lead to them having their own epiphany.

So listen below to see how to use your epiphany about a product or service you are interested in, to sell that product or service to others.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to an Inner Circle version of  Marketing In Your Car. Alright ladies, gentlemen, friends, foes, anyone who’s listening to me right now. Hopefully there’s no foes, but I guarantee there’s people who hate me who are listening though. So those of you guys who are out there hating me and listening to me. Thank you anyway first for subscribing, I appreciate you just as much as the people who love me.

Anyway, we’re heading into another week of Inner Circle meetings, so I’m excited. Those who are in the Inner Circle, we basically capped out the group at 100, so if you didn’t make it in, then that was your fault. I’ve been talking about it for 3 years. So it is capped out and sold out. We basically broke it down into 4 groups of 25. So the first group and the second group happen Monday, Tuesday, and then Wednesday, Thursday. And next month will be the next two groups. So if you’re interested in being in, in the future, the only way to get in is if someone else drops out. So those people who hate money will be the ones to drop out. Those who love money and like to get more money will continue to stay in for forever. So that’s kind of how it works. Just cross your fingers and hope somebody hates money and then you’ll have a chance to actually get in. And the way to get in at that time is go to russellbrunson.com and apply, we’ll put you on the waiting list, for if and when that ever opens up again.

So that is the pitch for something that’s already sold out. So there you go. For those of you guys who just want to hang out and talk to me while I’m driving, I’ve got an idea for you guys today. I’m going to share this in the meeting, but I thought it was really important and it’s kind of been one of the big epiphany’s I’ve had over the last two weeks or so, as I’ve been thinking through things and looking at stuff that works and why it works. I’m a big believer in….a lot of times we do stuff unconsciously, we’re unconsciously competent, we do cool things, but we don’t know why they work. So I like going back looking at why did that work. It worked for some reason, and if I understand why that worked maybe I can use it in other places where I can more effectively craft it and engineer it so it’ll do better. So that’s kind of my thoughts.

The thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot, I’m not going to call it copywriting, because it’s not that, but it’s related to copywriting. It’s the copywriting sister or something. It’s the way better looking sister too. It’s important. I spoke last week or two weeks ago at a network marketing event, and I didn’t have any notes prepared. I didn’t know what I was going to speak about, I just didn’t know I was going to get up in front of about 100 people, I think about 100 people or so, from the Prove It! Community and talk about what I thought was important. And I was thinking about network marketer. I was literally, they were announcing me, I was like, I don’t know what I’m going to talk about, what should I talk about and I was praying for inspiration. And all the sudden what popped in my head was this concept of a bridge.  And we’ve talked about bridge pages before and other things, but I was thinking of this concept of a bridge. I was thinking about how most people, and I’m going to talk about network marketing, but I don’t want that to turn off the non network marketers, because this is true for every business, but network marketing especially.

So most of us, we get into a business, whatever business, whatever we’re selling, or whatever the thing we’re in, we’ve gotten there. We didn’t just immediately jump in. What happened is that something happened in our life and it’s somewhere along the line we had this epiphany like, wow I need this thing, this product, this service. Or the reason why you created whatever product you sell, you have this epiphany, so I want you to kind of…..that word epiphany put that in your pocket, we’re going to come back to that in a minute. But you had this epiphany and then because of that you got into whatever it is that you’re selling today. Whatever business it is, there was some epiphany that happened to you that got you into this thing. And then you got into this thing and you became obsessed with it. You started studying it and learning it, you learn all the jargon and the keywords and all these kind of things that came from that. And you became very educated, so now you know all these things about this topic, and now you go and try to sell to other people and your using all these terms and this rational that stuff that logically you learned about the product or services.

But you forget that typically you didn’t come into whatever it is you’re selling logically, you came into it emotionally. You had this emotional epiphany that got you into that thing. But then you learned all this logic because you get excited about the topic and then you go try to sell people logic later. And therein lies the issue. One of my friends named Kim Clavier, she’s an old time network marketer, 12, 15 years ago I read one of her books called “If My Product’s So Great How Come Nobody’s Buying it?” Which is a great title. And in that she talked about this concept of what marketers do and she was talking about network marketers, but this concept is called techno-babble, where they come in and start spewing these terms and phrases and all these things down someone’s throat that they learned, and it totally turns people off. But that’s what we do because we’re so proud. “Oh, we’re the number one blah blah, we’ve got the industry leading blah blah, it’s ground breaking.” All this crap that we spew out, all the logical stuff that we learned that strengthened our belief in the product is what we start spewing out at people. And the problem is they never had that initial epiphany. Therefore, all this logic you’re spewing on them, just offends them, totally offends them. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating. Dude, don’t try to pitch me on this crap.

So what I was thinking about as I was walking on stage after they introduced me, was this concept of our goal as marketers is we have to give our audience the same epiphany that we had. Because that’s what sells somebody is the epiphany. So if tell someone, “Hey I woke up.” Let’s say for me it was ketosis , I always tell people “Your body needs ketosis, it’ll help you lose weight.” all these things and they’re like, “What are you talking about.” They don’t know what those words mean. So if I come back and I say, “hey what was the epiphany that helped me understand ketosis?” for me I had a friend one time, who was in ketosis and I was totally making fun of him at dinner one time because he was eating chicken and broccoli and not having any dessert. I was like, “Dude, you’re a moron.” And he explained ketosis to me, kind of like a campfire. So those of you who are in a Prove It! Company, if you’ve ever seen the campfire explainer video, that’s how I came up with that video. The concept of that video, that’s what bridged this epiphany gap for me, and that is why I am a believer in the product and the service so much, because I had that epiphany, oh this is why it works.

So I made that explainer video, all I did was I tried to take people from where I was at and give them the same epiphany I  had. That’s the bridge I created to get them over here to my company. So stepping now, is for us as marketers, we have to cut out all the techno-mumbo jumbo crap that we’re so used to saying to try to sell people stuff. Because that’s not what sells them. What sells them is the original epiphany that you had that got you to sell whatever it is that you’re selling. You have to remember what that epiphany was and then the story that gives them the same epiphany you had is the key. So it’s not  you telling them your epiphany, because that doesn’t help. It’s you telling them a story that gives them the same epiphany that you had. Because when they have that epiphany, that’s the key. Then the selling isn’t hard, it’s easy.

So I want you guys thinking about that. Take a step back in time to wherever it is that you were when you had the epiphany that got you into whatever product you’re selling and think about that and figure out what that story was and then figure out how to tell the story. It could be through video, it could be through a sales letter, it could be through a webinar, it could be however, but you’re going to share how you had that epiphany. And when they understand how you had that epiphany, excuse me, when they have that epiphany then they’re in. Then you can support it with all the logic and all the techno-mumbo jumbo that you guys are so proud of, but don’t lead with that, because that will turn them all away. Whereas if you lead with the epiphany and they have that epiphany, they will come seeking the logical explanations, to strengthen that for them. That’s the secret, that’s the key.

Anyway, I’m excited. I hope that helps you guys. If you look at how I crafted that story by the way, I had had an epiphany two weeks ago and I was trying to give you that same epiphany. So did it work? I could have just told you that the key is you need to have an epiphany and then you need to have a bridge story to connect that epiphany. If I would have told you that, some of you guys would have been like, alright epiphany, sweet Russell. But because I told that story and the process, I told you guys how I had the epiphany, hopefully some of you guys had it as well. So I practice what I preach. I used on you what I’m telling you to use on your people as well.

Anyway, I hope that helps. It’s like a dream inside of a dream inside of a dream. Did we just have inception here? Anyway, alright guys, I am in downtown Boise, and the traffic’s crazy. Pretty sure I’m going to wreck, because I’m driving with one hand, shifting with one hand and on the phone with the other hand, so I better go before I die. I appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

May 19, 2016

PLEASE don’t be as stupid as me. This is your lifeline.

In today’s episode Russell talks about when he was a new entrepreneur and thought he didn’t have to pay taxes when you make money online and how his dad helped him not go to jail. You will also find out how his dad can help you with your online businesses.

Here are some interesting things you’ll hear in this episode:

  • Why Russell thought he didn’t have to pay taxes and when he realized that maybe he needed to.
  •  Why you need to have a business structure in place that will protect you from creditors and predators…
  • And how you can get help with taxes, business structure and bookkeeping from Russell’s dad right now, before he triples his prices.

So listen below to see why you might need some of the services in your business that Russell’s dad provides.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Alright everybody, I hope things are going amazing. I’ve had an interesting last couple of days. I’m heading home right now to go work on the pinewood derby, which has been another part of my crazy couple of days. But it’s all been good.

Monday and Tuesday we had Anthony Diclementi came out Boise, Idaho and we were working on episode number one of Funnel Hacker TV, which the first funnel/business we are building and launching is for Biohackingsecrets.com, coming soon to a funnel near you. It’s kind of exciting. It’s been fun, we’re filming the process and story and everything like that. Also, while we were here, working on biohacking me, with some of the stuff I’m looking for.

Trying to get my energy to last longer throughout the day so when I get home at night, all my good energy isn’t wasted on work and I have a ton of energy left over for my kids and wife and everything like that. So that’s been really fun. And then we’re also working on helping me lose a little extra weight, so that I will be a little bit sexier by my…when is it, by summertime. So for those of you reading the transcript, I said that with a lot of sarcasm, that’s not really what I believe, but those listening can hear my voice.

Anyway, it’s been really fun. We did all sorts of crazy things. We were doing these breathing exercises in the mornings where you…anyway, it’s kind of cool. We do this huge hardcore, oxygenation thing where you’re breathing fast and heavy to the point of getting light headed until you’re about to pass out, and then you hold your breath. I held my breath for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Is that insane? It doesn’t make any sense. But if you guys want to do that kind of stuff, it’s in the book and it’s coming out soon. It’s pretty exciting. We held our breath for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. And then when I was done I felt like a million bucks. It was crazy. So I did it yesterday and today, and I’m kind of addicted to that. Not going to lie. So that was cool, and then a whole bunch of ninja, weird things that you will see in episode number one, which is kind of cool. So that’s kind of some of the stuff I’m working on. And I hope you guys are all having fun without me.

What I wanted to talk to you guys about today is something that came to me….My car is like a million degrees. I’m sweating bad. So this is something that happened to me as a young entrepreneur and recently happened to a really close friend. So I want to warn and help all of you guys just in case it happens to you.

As a new online marketer I learned how to sell stuff, and people bought stuff and it was awesome. And then I took that money people bought things with and I took it and spent it on other cool stuff I wanted. And it worked really good, it was this perfect circle that worked for 2 years. Until one day, I was at my family reunion, and I was telling my dad, “Dad, I’m making money.” Because he was asking, “When are you going to get a job.” All those kind of things. “Dad, I’m actually making money online now. “ and I was showing him. And I was kind of showing him some of the stuff I was doing, the money I was making. “This campaign I made ten grand, this one over here I made 22 grand.” These little things, and he was excited. He was like, “Cool. How are you paying taxes?” And I was like, “No dad, the cool thing about this is it’s the internet. There’s no taxes. You don’t have to pay taxes.” Showing how naive I was. He looked to me, “Russell, you have to pay taxes.” And I was like, “No if you sell online you don’t.” I realized later that might be true with sales tax in some states, but it’s not true with income tax. I had lesson number one. Lesson number two was, “Who’s doing your books.” I was like, “I don’t know what that means. I read a lot of books, is that what you’re talking about?” He’s like, “No. Someone’s gotta be making sure that you’re making money, not losing money. All these things.” I was like, “ I don’t even know. This is all foreign to me dad.” And he’s like, “Let me help you because I don’t want you to go to jail.”

So he came and flew to Boise once a month for probably 3 or 4 months. And he tried to catch up my books, so he’s going through my Paypal account and going through my check register. If he asked me, my check register was horrible. I literally had a whole bunch of checks, and I’d write the check and give it somebody and I would write the date and the dollar amount in my register and that was it. I wouldn’t write who it was to or what it was for, or anything. I don’t even think I wrote the day, I just wrote the dollar amount on the stub thing. So he’s like, “I got a whole bunch of check numbers with dollar amounts but I have no idea what they are for.”  We had a whole Paypal account with thousands of transactions that we didn’t what they were for or anything.

It was 2 or 3 years worth of that stuff, so he came up once a month for two days at a time, trying to catch me up and get me to the point where I wasn’t going to be in big trouble if the government came and asked me what I was doing. We figured out how much money I actually owed the government, and we paid that. Then from that point forward, we were at a clean slate and we could actually move forward. That has been hugely important and successful in any kind of businesses. So that’s something that was really needed for me.

A little while after my dad came to one of my events and kind of told that story to our audience, and he talked about also business structuring. I wasn’t structured at all, so I was paying all these extra taxes, FICA and Medicare and a whole bunch of other things. And I had no protection, so if someone would have sued me because of ZipBrander or one of my initial, my early products. How to make a potato gun. If they would have sued me, I would have been in big trouble, whereas now we have protected ourselves. In fact, we’re working on a webinar right now with him called Creditors and Predators, it’s like how to structure your business to protect yourself from people who want your money. It can be the government, it can be lawyers, it could be a lot of things. And so that’s kind of the thing we’re working on.

But he came and talked about that with our group, and he offered to help set up people’s businesses, as well as do bookkeeping and stuff like that. So he built up a little small team of people to do bookkeeping. And he kind of does it now for internet entrepreneurs like me and like you. It’s not a huge business but he’s got….in fact, he at that one event spoke and signed up 8 or 9 people at that event, and then since then it’s all been word of mouth. A lot of you guys I know are using him just because of word of mouth, but he’s never once promoted or advertised since then. It’s been like probably 7 years. And it’s just been word of mouth among marketers like us.

Anyway, that’s kind of the back story. So what happened, fast forward now a little while later, one of my close friends who does some work for me. I was like, “Hey man, I need help with this thing.” He’s like, “I can’t, I’m stressing out about taxes.”  I’m like, “Why are you stressing about taxes?” he’s like, “I haven’t paid them in two years, trying to figure this out. I’m going to go to jail. I’m freaking out.” I’m like, “Okay man, I’ve been through this I know exactly what you’re going through. Here’s my dad’s email, email him and you’ll be saved.” And then he did, and within two or three weeks my dad’s team caught him up and got him to today. Got him covered for back taxes and now moving forward has been a clean slate. And my buddy is like, “Dude, the stress is at zero. I love your dad, thank you so much for that.” And it made me think, I’m betting a ton of you guys that are using Clickfunnels, that are on my podcast, that are just reading our stuff are probably in that situation.

Either one of two things. One is that you are behind on your books, or you’ve never kept books, or you’ve been selling stuff and hoping it never catches up to you. If that is you and you’re in that spot right now, I’m here to give you a life line. The second type of person is someone who maybe you started on a business you created, an LLC or something and you threw it up and hoping everything is right, but you have no idea if your structured right, you have no idea if your taxes are right, you have no idea with whatever. Which was also me. Or you’re structured but you’re not doing any entity layering, so you don’t have one company that holds your assets, and one that’s working in public, so if someone sued you, they can’t take away your websites and things like that. If you’re in either of those situations where you’d like to make your structuring better, more solid to protect yourself from creditors or predators, or you need to get caught up on taxes, or you’re paying too much for a bookkeeper that sucks. Any of those reasons are good reasons to contact my dad. He is insanely cheap. I keep telling him that he needs to raise his prices. He specializes in rich internet marketers yet he’s charging super discounted booking fees. Cheaper than you can get from a typical bookkeeper, which again I……

Anyway, you can never profit in your home town. I’m like, “Dad, first step one, you need to double your prices, and that should be the entry. Plus you need to charge people 10 grand to set up the entity.” All sorts of stuff. He also, he told me this too and this is insane. So for those of you guys, if he does the bookkeeping for you, a lot of times they do your taxes at the end of the year for free. It’s just insanely cheap and inexpensive, at least for today. It will not be for forever, because I am working on a webinar with him, which I mentioned earlier called Creditors and Predators. And he wants me to do the webinar which I’m excited for except for the fact that, if I’m going to do that two things have to happen. First off is  Zuckerburg has gotta get paid, and second off, I gotta get paid. Therefore I am more than doubling, probably 3x-ing the price so that Zuckerburg can get paid for Facebook ads, and I can get paid for me helping him to pitch his services. So that’s coming in the very near future.

And most of you guys will be on that webinar, and you will be amazed at what you are missing in your business, you will realize that your entity structure is wrong. You realize you’re over paying for bookkeeping. You realize that your back in back taxes, you’re paying too much in taxes, a bunch of things like that. And when you are sold in that webinar it will be too late, because at that point the prices will be normal. But for those of you guys who are Marketing in Your Car listeners, you’ve got a window here. My dad just finished tax season, and his people just finished everybody and he’s like, “We’ve got room for a few more people. Not a lot, maybe 5 or 10 people max to come in and we can get them all caught up and set up between now and when the webinar goes live.” So if that is you guys, and you are looking for any of those things, entity structuring, protections, lowering taxes, someone doing your bookkeeping, somebody to catch you up, somebody to look at your entrepreneurial business when you realize you’re selling stuff and that’s all that you’re doing and you want some help, I highly recommend my dad.

He saved me, he saved tons of other of my friends and colleagues in this business and he’s here to save you as well. So this is my gift to you guys for being Marketing In Your Car listeners. I get zero dollars and zero cents for recommending this, outside of the fact that when I go home for Thanksgiving dinner, my dad feeds me Thanksgiving dinner and that’s pretty sweet. So that’s payback for that and the fact that he pretty much supported me my whole life. So I get nothing out of this, it’s something that’s a service for you and it’s something that I think a lot of you guys are benefiting. I would say if you’re anywhere from the start up phase, to probably two or three million dollars in revenue, maybe up to 5 million, that sweet spot is about where most of the clients they’re working with now are, so that’s a good fit. You get above that, it might be smart to get somebody in house to run everything, that’s what we had to do as well. We had to get a full time CFO to manage everything for us because it’s gotten a little bit crazy over here.

But that is what I wanted to share with you guys today, so if you’re interested in that, just email my dad, his secret email address is ross@bookease.com. Yeah, if you go to the website, the websites not even done, it’s an old website because he was going to get setup, then he started getting referrals like crazy so he never finished it. So if you go to the site you will see an unfinished website. In fact, I need to make that a Clickfunnel page, so I will make that, add that to my to-do list for my dad.

Anyway that’s kind of what happening. So if you need help, you can go to my dad, tell him I sent you. Say, “I heard it on the podcast, I’m in.” and he will get you setup and figured out. That’s about it you guys. Other than that, don’t do what I did and think that you don’t have to pay taxes, because I really honestly thought that, which is kind of funny now. So that’s it you guys, I’m about headed home. Headed to the pinewood derby weigh ins. They weigh them the night before, which is kind of funny and then they lock down all the cars. So then the next night they have the weigh in’s that way nobody can go and through on a whole bunch of weight over night. It’s kind of funny. So that’s what we’re doing right now. It’s going to be really fun. So that’s what I got for you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.

May 16, 2016

Come hang out with me while I’m driving with my hands off the wheel.

On this special episode Russell drives a Tesla while talking to Michael Rutherford about how he became the top earner at Prove It! And how he earned his Tesla. Also find out how you could also earn two free cars!

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

  • Why Russell is sitting in the drivers seat of a Tesla, but not really driving it.
  • How Michael Rutherford became the top earner at Prove It!
  • And how you can earn not one, but two cars by following Russell’s and Michael’s advice.

So listen below to find out how a car that costs 6 figures could end up in your driveway for free.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Tesla sponsored addition of Marketing In Your Car. Alright everyone, I’m in San Diego right now. I’m driving by Sea World. I’m in a Tesla driving, I’m going 70 miles an hour and my hands are not on the wheel, my feet are not on the ground. I’m floating, it’s the craziest thing in the world. So I thought what better time to do Marketing In Your Car than right now. Because I don’t even need to be looking….I’m going 72 right now, I’m looking backwards, no hands on the wheel, I’m looking at the camera’s around me. This is freaking nuts; I don’t know how this is legal. You’d think that when Elon Musk was like, “We’re going to build a car that you don’t have to look at the road..” Oh it’s slowing me down.

Speaker 2: The car in front of you is slowing down, so it slows down automatically.

Russell: Oh weird. So the car in front of me slowed down so it automatically slowed me down. You think that the government would be like, “Elon no, people are going to get in wrecks.” And instead he was like, “We’er going to do it anyway.” And now I’m driving it. I’m not even driving the car, I’m sitting in the passenger seat and this is insane. So that’s what’s happening right now as we speak. We’re actually filming an episode of the reality TV show. We’re at the Prove It event right now. I spoke at it earlier today, we’ve been documenting this whole journey which has been really fun. So when Funnel Hacker TV comes out make sure you watch the episode on Prove It funnels. Do I need to grab the wheel?

Speaker 2: Just touch it so it knows you’re alive. Alright you’re good.

Russell: Cool. Anyway, so today we went and talked to the leadership team and got them all fired up about the new Ketone funnels coming out. We got 2 funnels coming out for them. And then right now we’re driving the Tesla to the Tesla dealership, because I’m getting a Tesla through Prove It, which is  kind of cool. So if you guys haven’t won a Clickfunnels car yet, you can come to Prove It and get a Tesla car. You can get 2 cars, one for every other day of the week, that way you’d never have to drive the same car twice in a row.

Anyway, it’s pretty insane. If you guys haven’t driven in a Tesla yet, this is really weird. I seriously feel like I’m about to die, I’m on the edge of my seat. So I’m sitting here with Michael Rutherford, who is the….are you the number one money earner? I know you don’t want to brag about it, but are you?

Michael: Yeah.

Russell: Number one money earner at Prove It right now and tell them something cool.

Michael: Okay so the….about Prove It or just in general? Or about the car?

Russell: This is marketing guys, they want to know about marketing. How did you become the number one money earner in Prove It, I’m curious?

Michael: Lit myself on fire, utilized the product to its highest capability and I told every living being that would listen to me for even the smallest amount of time, and I did it with a high level of passion, belief and expectation and I didn’t care what they thought and I just kept going. And the really cool thing is results follow passion. If you have passion take action and results will come and it’s like a pinwheel. When you get a little result, you’ll take more action which creates more belief, which you’ll take more action, give you more belief, get more results and it just keeps going and going. And then the next thing you know, a car that costs 6 figures that drives itself shows up in your driveway and you get to drive it for free because you gave people the option to buy a product that would change their life. It doesn’t matter what you do, doesn’t matter what you sell, what you share, or what you teach, what you coach. Doesn’t matter what you do, do it with a high level of passion and don’t stop. Just do it more than anybody else and you’ll be number one, if that’s your goal. Maybe your goal is just to find passion, so take action and passion will find you. That’s one of the things that’s really been fun. So it’s crazy cool to hold the camera with Russell while he’s driving, or while the Tesla’s driving us.

Russell: He’s filming me, I’m recording him.

Michael: We got another camera in the back seat and the car’s driving us.

Russell: I wonder if Brandon’s getting nervous back there. He’s holding the camera watching us not watching the road. It’s just crazy.

Michael: Hey guys, life is crazy if you dare to take big action. And it’ll reward you every time.

Russell: How long you had your Tesla for?

Michael: I’ve had my Tesla for 3 weeks and it’s currently being completely Prove It customized at a place here in San Diego called SD Wraps.

Russell: Is that where we’re going right now?

Michael: We’re going to the Tesla dealership and depending on time, there’s a place called SD Wraps that’s got Lamborghini’s, Bentley’s, Tesla’s. The coolest cars all being wrapped and customized by them. So yeah, it’s pretty wild.

Russell: That’s awesome. So that’s what’s happening today. So there you go you guys. There’s some words of wisdom. Now you can say you guys have all been in a Tesla with me. Because you’ve been sitting in a Tesla with me for the last 4 minutes 29 seconds in Marketing In Your Car time. That’s what I got for you guys today. Tonight I’m speaking at the No Excuses event. We’re going to be presenting the MLM version of the Funnel Hacks presentation that I spent the last week building out. Oh, it’s telling me to hold the steering wheel again. Are we going to the right spot or do I need to ... We’re going the right way.

Anyway, I’m going to be testing out that presentation and the offer tonight. To the network marketing industry and we’re going to be sharing how funnels work in the offline world. I don’t know if you know that, I’m showing them tonight the Home Party Funnel, the Hotel Meeting Funnel, and the…I haven’t thought of a cool name for the third one, but I’m showing this is how hotel meetings happen, this is the online equivalent. This is how home parties happen, this is the equivalent. So it’s going to be awesome. I’m excited. There you go guys. I’m going to check out and make sure I don’t die. But I want you guys winning a car, either through Clickfunnels, Dream Car Contest. You can go to whatsyourdreamcar.com, or come join me in Prove It and win a Tesla through here. Or join both and get two cars. Because 2 is always better than one. Alright that’s what I got for you today, talk to you soon. Bye everybody and see you on the next episode.

May 12, 2016

Some interesting thoughts behind the scenes of my MLM funnels.

On today’s late night episode Russell talks about why he changed his presentation for two events this weekend to be targeted more towards network marketing. He also shares a few fun things that will be coming up soon.

Here are 3 cool things you’ll hear in this episode:

  • Why he needed to customize his presentation for this specific audience.
  • What YouTube video inspired a new t-shirt design he’s working on.
  • And find out if Russell is finally going to be a guest on The Profit.

So listen below to hear about some exciting things that are coming up.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson welcome to a very, very late night Marketing In Your Car. I know, I know. I swore I’d never do these things again, I swore I was gonna wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning, but It’s becoming crunch time. A whole bunch of things are happening and I’m running out of hours in the day to get them all done. I’m speaking this weekend at a network marketing event. Actually 2 network marketing events. One of them is for Prove it, I’m going to be getting these guys all excited for the Prove It funnels we’ve been creating for them, so I’m trying to get those done. There was a big yawn.

Anyway, I’ve got some work to do to get those done still. We’ve got one of them that….two of them we’ll be showing off at the event, hopefully one we’ll be launching on what day is it? The next Tuesday. That’s kind of the game plan there. Then I’m speaking at the No Excuses event, and I was going to just do my Funnel Hacks webinar that we’ve been doing forever, but I really felt like I wanted to do one that’s more focused on how people can use Clickfunnels for network marketing. Because everyone always asks me, “hey, show me a network marketing funnel.” I’m like, “Dude, technically all funnels are network marketing funnels. The power of network marketing funnels are share funnels. That’s the magic behind it.”

I wanted to show them how the whole process works. So yeah, that’s kind of what I’m doing. I’m re-writing the whole webinar. And it took forever the first day. I think I might have messaged you guys about that. It took me quite a few hours to just figure out the headline. That was hard. And then the 3 secrets, I had to re-write a whole bunch….a ton of time, 2 or 3 hours worth and then finally got it. Then I started building the actual framework of the webinar, and trying to make the stories and interesting parts. I realized there were a couple of things that would be really cool if they were sketched out. The dude that does all the sketches in my books, his name is Vlad. So Vlad had to sketch, I do a really ugly sketch, then I send it to him and then he turns it into an awesome sketch. So I was getting all those done tonight, because he doesn’t work for me full time anymore. So usually I give them to him and hopefully by the next morning he’s got them. I messaged him earlier today like, “Please, can you jump on tonight?” So I just finished sketching those out and handed those off to him, and then I just got a message from him 2 minutes ago saying he was on them right now. By the time I wake up I should have all the sketches done.

Then I just gotta start plugging all the webinar together. I have to create a couple of demos because it’s always scary to do demo’s at a hotel event because half the time the internet goes down. So I gotta create demos tomorrow. Also Robert Kiyosaki’s webinar is coming up. I gotta write all the email sequences, prior to actually writing custom ones for them. Because next week’s the webinar for their list.  I think the last webinar they did, I had 10 or 15 thousand people registered. So we’re trying to make sure we capitalize on it right and do it correctly. So we’re kind for writing a bunch of stuff for them and make it a custom funnel. I think they’re going to start promoting it on Monday, and then the webinar is happening on Thursday through the weekend. So anyway, just a lot of pieces happening between now and then. So that’s why….hence the late night, and not an early morning tomorrow, probably.

So anyway, that’s kind of what’s happening over here. I just wanted to jump on and say hi to you guys. Excuse me. I should not be this tired, but I am. What else cool could I share with you guys? How about this? So a couple of cool things, I’m not even sure before, but they’ve been really impactful. You know we always talk about funnels, that’s obviously a big topic of conversation with me and you guys. So you look at, where’s traffic coming from, what’s up-sell one and up-sell two, down-sell, where’s it go, what’s the next funnel? Look at that progress. But now we’re trying to look deeper and deeper in each step of the funnel and how we can make things better. I told you how I had a call a while ago with some VC guys, and the numbers they were looking heavily were a cost to acquired customer, average lifetime value customer and churn. So churn is something we’re looking at a lot. So what we’ve been doing is adding in stick sequences into everything. So if you join Clickfunnels, and everyone should have got it by now, so you should have probably seen this, but we put everyone through a 21 day ignite your funnel on-boarding sequence. So every day for 21 days you get an email talking about the on-boarding process. So that was a big thing that had a huge increase, decrease in churn, increase in stick.

So Funnel University we just rolled out, I think I had a 9 or 10 day email sequence that’s all about stick strategy. How do we get people to stick in Funnel University? For me it’s all about letting them know what they actually get. Because a lot of times people sign up to get the free thing and they don’t know what they are able to consume, so really showing inside the members area and showing them what’s inside the software. Showing people things deeper. So those are a bunch of cool things that we’re doing. So I would recommend for you guys, look at that. Look at post buy sequences. What are you doing to get those people to like you more? And to consume what you have? Consumption is the key. If we can get people to consume its awesome.

And then one last thing that I wanted to share with you guys because I’m really excited. IF you go to Google and search for cross fit college humor. The first video that pops up, click and play that video. It’s my favorite video ever. I think it’s the only Youtube video I watched like ten times. It’s these guys at Cross fit, they keep messing up saying Cross fit’s a cult, I mean it’s a way of life. And it’s so funny. Anyway, there’s two or three episodes of these guys doing the Cross-fit/Cult thing. I always joke when we were building Clickfunnels, we wanted to build our own community. So I always joke, I think I’ve said a couple of times on the thing, “We’re trying to build our own cult, I mean community.” And that comes from that episode, it’s always the standing joke. Anyway, we just started a design on this new t-shirt. It’s so awesome. It says, “Funnel hacking, it’s a cult” and then “Cult” is crossed out and it says, “Way of life” so “Funnel hacking, it’s a way of life.” But cult is crossed out. And then on the back it says #itsacult. Anyway, congratulations, you’re part of the funnel hacking cult. No, but it all comes from that video. So now you guys know the inside joke. When those shirts come out you’ll be like, “I know where Russell came up with that and why he thinks it’s so hilarious.” Hopefully it doesn’t offend anyone; I just think it’s funny.

There you go. Alright I’m home. I’m going to bed. Oh crap, except for the garage door opener is not in my car. I’ve got two cars and one garage door opener so I always shift them back and forth, and I’m in the wrong car. That means I get to get out of my car and actually go in and unlock it, actually I’m going to go, because the wrestling room lights are on, so I’m going to walk back here. Hopefully you guys don’t mind hanging out with me. I don’t know what else to talk to about right now. Everyone else in the whole world is asleep. So the other cool thing that’s happening is next week, Monday and Tuesday Anthony DiClementi, we’re launching a company together called Bio-hacking Secrets, and he’s actually flying out here and we’re going to be filming him. He’s part of one of the first episodes of the Funnel Hacker TV. So that’s going to be really cool. We’re going to be filming him and me; we’re going to work out here in the wrestling room. I’m going to take him through a wrestling work out and show him it doesn’t matter how good a shape he’s in, but when a wrestler takes the oxygen away from your brain, you can’t survive. Cause there’s always him beating the crap out of me for the next two days, so I got a shot for a little bit, and that’s kind of what we’re going to be doing. Oh man, its dark back here.

And then……yeah anyway. Just a lot of fun things happening over the next two weeks. So he’ll be here Monday, Tuesday filming. And then Wednesday is the Robert Kiyosaki webinar. And after that’s done, I’M going to take a nap, because it’s been an insane 10 days. It’ll be cool.

Oh and then another thing that happened today. Sorry, you guys are getting all the stuff because I have no one else to tell all these things, so you’re getting it all. Marcus Lemonis text me today and said, “Hey, What’s your email address? I need to get you to come out and record a show with me.” So we just emailed his producers and they’re trying to figure out a date in the next 3 weeks for me to fly out and go film or be in one of the episodes of the Profit. How crazy is that? It’s crazy. I’m excited. Alright guys I’m going to bed. I’m really tired and I’m totally rambling, but hopefully some of those ramblings are fun for you guys, because they’re fun for me. Have a great night and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

May 10, 2016

You have to get your customers to vote with their credit card.

On this episode Russell talks about why your opinion doesn’t matter when it comes to marketing. He recalls an article written about Rippln that didn’t go well, and why the authors opinion wasn’t important.

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

  • Russell recalls reading an opinion article about a sales video he had done for Rippln and why in the end, it didn’t matter.
  • He explains why the only opinion that matters is the customers who vote with their credit card.
  • And he also go over why he wont’ give his opinion to his Inner Circle members, when it comes to their businesses.

So listen below to hear why your opinion does NOT matter.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and this is Marketing in Your Car. Alright everybody, I hope you are all doing amazing. I had two days in a row of 5am wake ups. So this is good, I’m getting into the cycle, into the late night, or early night going to bed, late night, or early morning…..yeah early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise. Is that true? Well, I hope so. I’m testing it out right now. It’s been going good so far. This morning I was working on the Funnel University stick sequence and one of the emails talks about this article I wrote one time called Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter, or it might have been Guess What? Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter. I think I said it more like that.

Anyway, I pulled up the article and I reread it and it made me laugh and smile and I wanted to share it with you guys because it’s important. And the fact is your opinion really does not matter when it comes to marketing. In that article I talked about how one morning, this is back when we were in the middle of the Rippln Launch and I had done this video and one of my buddies texted me at 5 in the morning, he was like, “Hey man, you’re on Tech Crunch.” I was like, “What? I’m on Tech Crunch? This is awesome.” And then his next text was, “It’s not good.” I was like, “Oh crap.” So I went to Tech Crunch and there was an article. And the title of the article was titled: What Not To Do In Your Startup Launch Video or something like that. And I start reading this thing and he goes line by line through the copy for the sales video I created, and he just ripped it apart. He hated it, venomously. Is that the right word? He was so mean about every single thing and just ripped it line after line. And at first I was like, my heart sunk, I was sick to my stomach.

And then I stopped for a minute and started thinking, well all these things were his opinions about why he hated this video and why it was not a good video for a tech startup and all these things, but then I started looking at the numbers and what we had achieved with that little cheesy video that he hated so much. And I can’t remember, at the time I think it generated 300 or 400 thousand opt-in members. And we were average 30 thousand opt-ins a day from this one video. And I was like, it may be that he didn’t like it, but it didn’t mean it didn’t work. It was working perfectly. And I started thinking back, about all the split testing stuff that we used to do. The way Todd and I used to do our split testing, I would go and create the best version I possibly could and he would make up these tests, and half the tests I was so embarrassed by. I was like, “Don’t do that, it looks bad.” Things I didn’t like. And I was like, “No there’s no way that’s going to beat my control. The thing I created is perfect. This is my opinion.” And 9 times out of 10 Todd would beat my control. Almost every time.

I realized really quickly, my opinion doesn’t matter. I have my opinion but it doesn’t matter. What matters Is how people vote. And it’s funny because a lot of times we think, I’ve seen….drives me crazy, businesses that run survey groups, have people fill out surveys, all these kinds of things to try to get feedback on their product. What they’re going to buy or not buy and all these things. And there’s a time and a place for those things. But the reality is that none of that matters either. The only thing that actually matters is will customers vote with their credit card. That’s it. If they will not pull their credit card out of their wallet and vote with their credit card it doesn’t matter.

They can say, “Oh yeah, I would definitely buy that product.” Or “I’m definitely more like this.” Or whatever. They’ll tell you whatever. Whatever it is you’re looking at, but the only thing that matters is not your opinion, it’s not even your customer’s opinion. The only thing that actually matters is them voting with their credit card. That’s how they vote. They can’t vote by saying, “Yes I would do that. Oh yeah, I’d buy that.” Only way that they can vote is by actually pulling their credit card out, that’s the only vote that matters, that is if you look at….that’s how it should be with the presidency. You should vote, but you should vote with your credit card. And the more money you’re willing to spend voting on a candidate, the more votes you get. Because then it actually matters. The only thing that actually matters is how they vote with their credit card. That’s the only truth, everything else is opinion and opinions don’t matter.

It’s funny, as a marketing educator, it drives me crazy watching other marketing educators, and a lot of them say blanket statements that they feel are true, that I know aren’t true. And I’m not going to tell all the specifics, because the person’s really cool. But I’m in a Mastermind Group, and they wanted me to give a talk, a short talk. So I was giving this short talk, ahead of time they had this public speaking coach, who wanted to get on the phone with me and walk through my talk with me. So I got on and was kind of interested in what he had to say, and what was interesting was that he kept sharing all these opinions about the stuff I was doing wrong and how I should have done it instead and all these things. And while I have a lot of respect for the guy and his opinions, I know that his opinions were wrong. Not because I’m arrogant or I’m boastful or anything like that, I might be but that’s not the reason I knew they were wrong.

I knew they were wrong because I had split tested these messages. I had split tested the verbiage and how I used it. I knew which one out converted. He used to tell me, “No you have to go this way.” And I was like ugh. I was respectful and I was like, okay. And I did it that way for him and for the group, but I knew it was wrong. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his opinion was wrong because we had split tested. And I wanted to step back and be like, “But you know, I have run hundreds of thousands, if not millions of visitors through a path, that uses the message, you’re trying to get me to use, vs the one I’m using here and I know that this one wins. Every single time. I don’t even have to guess any more. It’s not worth testing anymore because I know based on millions of people voting or not voting with their credit card, that I’m right. And it’s just killing me because……but I respected him and the situation so I followed that even though I knew it was wrong.

And I just want all you guys to understand, our opinions really don’t matter. I get people in the Inner Circle all the time, “Russell, can you look at this page and give me your opinion?” I’m like, “No, I don’t want to give you my opinion. My opinion could dramatically screw things up. As we’re building I will give you my opinion because this is the direction I would go, based on everything I know, this is the best chance of success, so create that first and then I’m not going to give you a review because my opinion doesn’t matter. The only opinion that matters, is the opinion of the buyers in your specific market. So create it the best you can, and then you go and you buy ads, and you get people to come, and then they vote with their credit card, and that’s how we know if we got a winner. If people vote with their credit card. If they don’t, I don’t care how pretty it is, how many awards it wins, or how nice it sounds. The only thing that matters, when all is said and done, is will people vote with their credit card. And that’s the key.”

So the sooner you are okay humbling yourselves, I’m the same way, I have to continue to humble myself and I do every time Todd destroys me in a split test, every time something I create doesn’t work, or every time we test things and we figure out things that do work, I get humbled every single time. I realize that man, I’m not as great as I think I am. My opinion does not matter. The only opinion that matters is that of my customers who are pulling their credit cards out and voting.

So watch that closely. Watch what is causing them to vote with their credit card and watch what’s not. And that’s how you’re going to learn and that’s what you should base your judgment and opinions on. Not on what you like or don’t like, because what you like doesn’t matter. The guy at Tech Crunch did not like my copy, yet it was probably the highest converting message I had ever written. And because he thought it was wrong, does not make it wrong. People were voting, and that’s the only thing that really matters. So there’s your marketing lesson for today. I’m at the office. I’m going to go get some work done and try to get some customers to vote with their credit cards. So that’s the plan. Anyway, I appreciate you all. Have a great day and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye.

May 6, 2016

Why it’s hard to be a Mom (as a Dad), and my interesting call with the VC’s today.

On this episode Russell talks about a meeting he had with some VC’s during which he confused them by already being profitable. He also picks up his son Aiden who tells an interesting and confusing story of his own.

Here are 4 fun things you’ll hear in today’s episode:

  • Why Clickfunnels doesn’t need money from VC’s and why the VC’s were confused about it.
  • Find out how you can confuse VC’s too.
  • Hear Aiden tell a story about Norah.
  • And find out why he wears Harry Potter glasses.

So listen below to find out how to confuse VC’s, and to hear a cute 5 year old tell a story.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in the Mommy Mobile. Hey everyone, yes I’m taking mom duty on today. I’ve got Norah in the back seat, we’re going to pick up Aiden from school. I happen to be one minute late already. It’s hard to be a mom, no one ever told me this, but it’s hard.

Anyway, so that’s what’s happening today. The reason why I’m a little bit late, is we just got off a call with some VC people, which is kind of cool. First off, they’re super cool people, I really enjoy them and everything. But it was interesting conversation. You guys want to hear behind the scenes of some of the funny stuff? In fact, I’m going to title this podcast, how to confuse the VC’s. Because it’s interesting, they have been trying to talk to us for a while and we basically said, “We’re not looking for money, sorry.” And they’re like, “We know you’re not, but we still wanna talk.” And we’re like, “No, we’re not interested.” And they’re like, “Please? We’ll fly out to Boise.” And we’re like, “No.” Anyway, so finally got the call set up. But it’s just funny. I feel like we’re in a good position….Can you guys hear Norah back there, guys?

Anyway, I feel like we’re in a good position. I told my team, “I feel like we’re the hot girl that doesn’t really want it, so everybody wants her so much more.” Anyway, we’re not interested in taking it, but we thought it might be fun to talk to them. Maybe, who knows? Whatever. But we had a conversation, and it was cool. Like I said, super cool guys, enjoyed that whole thing. But it was interesting, if you look at what they’re looking for, there’s 3 core metrics that the VC’s want. They want what’s the cost to acquire a customer? What’s the lifetime value of that customer? And what’s your churn? Those are the 3 core metrics that they asked about that we kind of knew going into it.  And what’s cool is that because of all the funnel stuff that we do, and hopefully you guys are doing, it totally confuses the VC’s.

They have one way of doing things. What’s your cost to acquire a customer? And we’re like, “All of our customer’s are free.” And they’re like, “No, that doesn’t make sense. How much does it cost?” And I’m like, “Well, if we buy ads from Facebook straight leads to a trial, it’s like $150 a member.” And they’re like, “Wow, that’s really good.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s really good but we don’t do it.” And they’re like, “Why don’t you do it? You should be spending that money all day long.” “Because we’re a start up boot strap. The money we’re spending is out of my own pocket, and we’re good enough at funnels, that if I’m not profitable at breakeven point of sale, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go in the whole too much. If I had a hundred million dollars in VC’s, sure we’ll go waste money on dumb marketing, but we are smart enough to be profitable up front. This is how it works, we’ve got front-end offers, or my free book offers, or The Perfect Webinar script or things like that. What happens, is we buy ads on Facebook, cost us $10-$15 to acquire a customer there, but we make $30-$45 in the funnel, therefore we make $25-$30 from every single customer that comes into our world. And we have a huge follow-up sequence in place that we promote that then gives us all of customers for free. In fact, we make money ahead of time, before they ever become a customer, and then our email sequence gets them into our program for free.”

They’re like, “That doesn’t make sense.” I don’t think they believed us. I was like, “No, this is how it works. We do have a customer acquisition cost on different channels, like affiliates we pay out 40% up to 45%, we give away cars and stuff.” And they’re like, “What? You give away cars? Why would you do that?” I’m like, “Because that’s awesome. That’s how it works. It’s all about recruiting sales teams. Then people come in now we’re selling on-board, we’re selling certifications, things like that. So we’re crazy profitable.” They don’t understand it because they come from worlds that aren’t profitable typically. So we’re showing them our numbers and then we show them the numbers and he’s like, “Wow. I don’t think you guys understand what you guys have right here.” I was like, “Yes, we do. This is why we’re not looking to take money. Everything’s fine. We’re really good at funnels.” Then the next question was, lifetime value of a customer, right. That one was an easier metric, but we’ve only been in business for a year and a half so it’s hard because our customers have to start using us, if they don’t leave us very high. So we showed what the lifetime value of a customer was, but it’s not accurate because the numbers are growing so fast. Alright I’m at the school, I gotta pick up Aiden, I’ll finish up this podcast when I get back.

Alright, I got Aiden and he’s talking about some movie called Norah.com?

Aiden: No it was called Coconutcron.com

Russell: Coconutcron.com. Anyway, to finish off my thought….oh wait, what?

Aiden: Also, do you want me to tell you a story?

Russell: Yes, tell us a story.

Aiden: Okay, so at first starts with Norah.com and its….wait, I actually kind of forgot it Dad.

Russell: Alright, so that’s Norah.com. Alright, let me talk…

Aiden: That’s only half of it.

Russell: I’m going to talk for a minute and if you wanna tell them the rest of the story tell me okay.

Alright so the last have of the story is Churn. They’re like, “What’s your churn?” we’re like, “If you look at the last 3 or 4 months, it’s decreased dramatically.” And they’re like, “how much?” and we’re like, “well I think it before it was at 16% and we added in this one step in the funnel and it dropped it to 12% and then we added in this 21 day ignite your funnel, communication funnel, our on-boarding funnel after they come on, and we dropped down to 9%.” And they’re like, “You dropped it that much in a short period of time?” and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s what we do. We test things, we test all the steps and process and try to decrease churn and we’re always looking to get it better and better and better.”

Anyway, it was just so funny because I don’t think they’re used to these kinds of things. They’re used to having a bunch of money and spending tons to acquire a customer. I was listening to a thing the other day and it talked about Hubspot. They said that Hubspot cost them $10,000 to acquire a customer. Excuse me, maybe it was $1,000 to acquire a customer. Something crazy like that. I’m like, “Are you serious?” It’s so much easier when you understand what you guys understand, what we understand with all these front end funnels. That’s the magic. And then the webinar funnels are profitable, dramatically profitable up front. It doesn’t make sense to them.

Aiden: Dad?

Russell: What bud?

Aiden: I remember it.

Russell: Alright Aiden remembers it, hold on, he’s back.

Aiden: Okay, then the person says, That’s Norah. That’s Zap.  So that’s Norah, and that’s Zap? No! That’s Norah, and that’s Zap. So that’s the rooms zap. And then the baby’s Norah? No! This is Norah, this is Zap.

Russell: You guys all getting that? So, this is Norah and this is Zap.

Aiden: This is Norah, and this is Zap? Yes!

Russell: Nice. So there….I don’t know what he’s talking about, it’s something……Is it a movie you saw?

Aiden: The end. Yeah.

Russell: Oh the end. So that’s a movie…Did you watch that today or is that something you made up?

Aiden: …..but I still like make it .I didn’t watch it today, but I just have to do it on the movie. Like on a camera, then everybody will watch it and they’ll like it.

Russell: That makes more sense. So Aiden right now is wearing some cool Harry Potter glasses.

Aiden: Because I’m a big fan and my eyes are really hurty.

Russell: Because he’s a big fan and his eyes are really hurty. So we went and took him to an eye appointment and his eyes were amazing. So we ordered some…but he wanted Harry Potter glasses really, really bad, huh bud? So we went on Amazon and ordered some, but the wrong ones came. What were they? Did you like the first one’s that came?

Aiden: No.

Russell: No, he did not like the first ones. So we ordered some new ones, and they came and looked awesome. They are about half the size of his head, but he wears them everywhere. Wore them to school today huh?

Aiden: They also like them. They’re really ……..

Russell: And his friend said, “You look weird with them.” But he still loves them.

Anyway, so that’s what I got for you today. I gotta bounce and play with my kids. Just wanted to share that, I thought it was interesting. So that’s how you confuse a VC, have really profitable up front funnels, lower your churn through on-boarding funnels. Increase your lifetime value by having an amazing product and they’re going to be like, “What>? That doesn’t make sense. Why is it so good?” And hopefully you’ll get people coming to you as well. Anyway, I hope that helps you guys. That’s all I got. I’m out of here. Appreciate you all. Talk to you guys again soon. Oh what? One more thing. Say it again.

Aiden: Bye.

Russell: Aiden says bye. Bye everybody.

May 4, 2016

Step one in our planning for the new FunnelHacker.tv.

On today’s episode Russell talks about an idea he has for a new show about Russell and his team doing funnels for businesses. He explains what kinds of things you’d see on the show.

Here are 3 cool things on this episode:

  • What the name of this new TV show would be.
  • What companies Russell already has in mind to be on the show.
  • And what kind of behind the scenes stuff you would be able to see on the show.

So listen below to hear all about Funnel Hacker TV.

---Transcript---

Hey, hey, hey, I hope you guys are doing amazing, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright, so I did one this morning, a podcast, which was 3 minutes long because I was preparing for our meeting, and I was talking really fast, but hopefully some of you guys got some cool value out of that. But I have something I wanna talk to you guys about, but I’ve been all bottled up because I’ve had 9o’clock meetings, when usually I’m in the car right before 9. Anyway, I’ve just had less time to talk and hang out. So I’m going right now to the store to grab some stuff for my wife, so this gives me a cool opportunity to share some cool stuff for you guys. Hope you don’t mind.

So I am crazy excited right now about something that we’re doing that I think is going to be amazing. I don’t know. I’m kind of nervous to tell you guys, not even everyone on my team, not even my partners know this yet. Todd will probably find out about this from this podcast. And maybe Dylan, I don’t know if he listens or not. Kind of what we’re thinking. How has marketing been done up to this point? It’s all about creating cool funnels, driving traffic and that conceptual thing. Or doing Periscopes or hang outs, or cool things. All I’m trying to figure out….I’m trying to be the next level, the bleeding edge, the next cool thing. I was trying to really figure out how do we….I feel like we built a really cool brand and a community and all this kind of stuff. How do we expand that? How do we take that to the next level and make it bigger and better?

So that was the question. Last week my wife and I were out visiting our nanny, who just had a baby so we went and saw her and saw the baby and everything. So we were driving around and talking before we went to Jack in the Box. Was it Jack in the Box? Anyway, some horrible fast food restaurant, that tastes way too good, and definitely not on any of the diets on earth, but nevertheless we went there with the kids. And as we’re driving we’re talking about HGTV’s Flip That House, and we’re talking about just some things like that and as we’re driving all the sudden this inspiration I feel it just hit me from above thinking…saying, the cool thing about those shows is that they pick a house, rehab a house, you watch the whole process and in that process they’re telling the back story and all these things. They have this sub-story of things happening. Each week there’s a house that they’re finding, they’re rehabbing it, flipping it or whatever and making it awesome. That was our favorite one, with Chip and Joanne Gains, but all the house shows are similar.

I was thinking about it, we’re working on a lot of side projects. Things I’m kind of doing on the side. Funnels I’m building for companies that we’ve traded equity for, stuff like that. And I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if we made our own reality tv show and showed behind the scenes, so people could actually see  what happens? And I started thinking of different funnels I’m working on and one of them is Bio-hacking Secrets with my friend Anthony Diclementi. We’ve already recorded so much cool footage of him with his Cryosauna with laser lights, and all these crazy….the visuals are already amazing, because we’ve been filming the whole process and we’re about to launch it. I’m like, you’re building all this stuff behind the scenes and no one gets to see it and it doesn’t really help the Clickfunnels community other than some of them hear about it later. But I’m like, what if that became a thing and each week we pick a funnel that we’re building anyway and we build it out live and everyone gets to see the story? And it’s not just like a boring thing us in the office like, “Blah blah blah.” Make it fun and exciting and have story lines and a whole bunch of things like that. So that’s kind of the idea.

So we’ve mapped out the first 12 episodes, 12 funnels and some of them are projects like Bio-hacking secrets, the prove it funnels we’re working on, a couple things like that and some of them….For example, tomorrow I’m actually being interviewed, or he’s interviewing me or something I guess, I don’t even know. Robert Kiyosaki are getting on appear.in meeting and we’re recording it, gonna pre-record this intro for the webinar. Because me and him are doing a big webinar next month. And he can’t show up on them live because he’s going to be out of the country, so we’re filming the intro together and then we’ll show the intro and I’ll do the webinar live to his whole list. And his list is crazy huge, so we could in theory, I don’t know do half a million or million dollar webinar, and wouldn’t that be a cool episode to film that whole thing? Film me tomorrow as I’m driving to the office, freaking out excited and there film behind the scenes of me interviewing Kiyosaki and us being on this thing together. And film the webinar actually happening and showing all the nervousness before and showing people registering and showing up and stats and numbers, and doing the webinar and showing the pitch, the close, the percentages. Just showing the whole thing. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Or with Bio-hacking Secrets, we’re about to launch. It’s a free book funnel, plus a tele-seminar funnel, plus a webinar high ticket funnel. All of that Is 90% done. So we’re going to fly Anthony out and film the story of us launching this thing, and how we buy the ads and how we get the right things and testing the campaign and seeing what’s converting and what’s not converting. Doing all the stuff we do anyway, but showing you guys behind the scenes of it, in a really cool, fun exciting thing. Wouldn’t that be fun? So that’s kind of the first half. Again, I’m trying to think, how do we make this fun and engaging and exciting. Recently one of our fellow funnel hackers started working for me, and he’s in the office, sits right behind my desk. His name is Steven Larsen, some of you guys may know him, so he’s been actually…I’ve been focusing a little more on strategy since he’s been here and he’s been focusing on building out and we’ve been kind of going back and forth until something looks really good. So I thought on the show, instead of me talking about it and building it and being really annoying person who thinks he’s really important, instead wouldn’t it be cool if its like, I’m coaching, which I’m doing anyway, but I’m coaching Steven through building these funnels and doing the whole process. And he gets to ask questions and be in on the strategy meetings and all these kinds of things. And that way you guys get a unique view where it’s not just what in my head what’s happening, it’s me explaining it to him what’s happening. So he’s kind of in proxy for the rest of the audience, learning along as this thing is happening, as we’re building it out and seeing behind the scenes as we do the pages and the funnels.

Anyway, I’m so exciting. So we started filming some of them today. We’ve been working on the Prove It funnels. We filmed behind the scenes of us doing the whole strategy session, pre-launch stuff. Next week I’m flying out to actually speak at a network marketing event and a Prove It event. So we’re going to film me in the air flying there, telling the story and those kind of things. And then my next book’s coming out, so we’re going to film that story. And we’re going to show behind the scenes of that book funnel. I’ll show you behind the scenes of the Tony Robbins book funnel. Dave Ashworth book funnel and all the other ones we’ve done and just kind of episode by episode build out different things and show you behind the scenes of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it. And the actual numbers, and the actual stats and having complete transparency.

And the other cool thing we thought, if we have an episode that goes live, on the site we’ll have the episode there, you could see each month by month, we could do income reports similar to what John Lee Dumas on Entrepreneur on Fire. Show each month, Bio-hacking Secrets launch. Month one we did this, month two, month three. Show the running stats of what each of these little business, each of these funnels is actually generating for us. And just try to be complete transparency. You guys can look at what we’re doing and then funnel hack it for your own businesses.

So that’s the idea. I’m excited, I hope you’re excited. We’ve been so crazy. We have some crazy ones. One of them we’re flying down to Columbia to go drop ship roses. One of them…..anyway, we’ve got some crazy, crazy stuff that you guys are going to love, and you’re going to have the chance to see behind the scenes of everything. So that’s the first part. The second part, I’m not sure if I should even talk about this yet, but we’re trying to figure out how to make, and this idea came to me, I actually did a Periscope tonight, asking our Periscope followers, “What do you guys think about this?” Trying to get them engaged with the idea and get some other feedback, what they’d want to hear and see in the episodes.

One thing I kind of talked about was, I don’t know if you guys watch the show the Bachelor or the Bachelorette. You shouldn’t, but if you do you know what I’m talking about where they every night that it’s on, people all around America have these big bachelor parties where they get their friends and family, everyone gets together and they watch the episode together live and they talk about it for the next week waiting for the next one. I was like, what if we build these really cool things like mini hack-a-thons or something where each week when the episode is live; people could run a hack-a-thon in their local area and invite their friends and family members have everyone come over and watch this thing, and watch it streaming, and see the actual ups-ell unfold and see how cool it is. Wouldn’t that be awesome. We were thinking about even having it kind of like a pre level certification. Our certified partners could run bigger versions of these, but having this as like a pre thing where you pay a little bit to get in, and you get in we send you a box, and the box has got like 10 Funnel Hacker t-shirts and it’s got a special gift that’s only for people who are hosting funnel hacking parties. And it’s got…..we’re talking about, Steven had an idea of making a lead pages dart board and having that there. A whole bunch of awesome stuff.

But that would be the thing and that would get people all around the country each week as we release these episodes, we release them at the same time, getting everyone on board, getting everyone to watch together, and commenting and sharing and talking. Make it a really cool, interactive community type building thing where we’re all experiencing this together at the same time. That’s my thoughts. So with that said, I would love to hear your guys’ feedback. Hit me up on Facebook or whatever and say “Yay” or “Nay” or “This is stupid” or “this is awesome” or “I would love to watch that and share it with everybody I know”. Because we’re trying to make this a cool thing. It’s gonna be called Funnel Hacker TV. Some of you guys have seen we had two episodes of Funnel Hacker TV in the past, but we’re going to try and make this into a real thing. I think it’s gonna be amazing. So I’m crazy excited.

We’ve got, we started filming the first ones today. We’ve got a couple more tomorrow. The fun thing I’m learning is, and I’ve always been pretty good at project management, because that’s what I’ve normally been doing. But now we’re project managing 13 funnels at once because we’re filming different parts and different things with each one. And trying to make sure we have each of the sections for each of the things. It’s gonna be amazing. I just wanted to share it with you guys. Please keep it a secret. Don’t tell anybody else. Hopefully it gets you guys excited and gets you thinking about cool things you can do in your own community to get people more engaged and more excited and I think this is going to be it for us. It’s going to take the marketing to the next level. And just the community and this whole brand we’re trying to build and take it more mainstream and make it more fun and just make it not a software program. We don’t want this to be that. We want this to be a cult, I mean a community. So that’s the game plan. I appreciate you guys. I’m walking in the store to grab my wife’s stuff. I’ll talk to you guys soon. Have a great night, appreciate you all, and that’s about it. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.

May 3, 2016

These five minutes will change your business forever.

On today’s episode Russell talks about why his company has started doing stand up meetings everyday and how it has helped hold employees accountable for what they do every day.

Here are a couple of cool things to listen for in this episode:

  • How these standing meetings hold people accountable for what they did the day before and for what they plan to do each day.
  • And how they can also help direct your team toward the correct priorities.

So listen below to find out why you should be doing standing meetings in your company.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Alright everyone, so some of my new friends in the Inner Circle were teasing me about our introduction man, what he says, “and now your host Russell Brunson”, so now that I hear that it makes me laugh, so I hope you guys are laughing too.

Some of you might be wondering, why haven’t you done a podcast for a while, and then the second question would be Russell, why are you talking so fast right now? And the reasons are the same. Both of those reason’s are the same. It’s because we started this new thing in our company that’s really cool. It happens every day at 9am, which is in three minutes from right now. So I’ve got three minutes before I am officially late. So as the CEO, I can’t even call myself the CEO without laughing, it seems like such a real business term. Anyway, as the CEO of my corporation, I gotta be there, or else that’s just not cool to not be there. So I’ve got three minutes to explain this concept to you guys and jump on the call.

So this is what it is. What we’ve been doing in our company, the dev team started doing it a month or two ago and then recently we’ve kind of pulled in me and some of the other guys, because I think it’s really effective. So we do these really quick stand up meetings and we do it every single morning at 9am. And it typically takes less than 15 minutes and we’ve got 15 or 20 people that attend that meeting. So it goes pretty quick for how many people are involved. The way it works we use gotomeeting, and when we log into gotomeeting there’s a list of all attendees in alphabetical order, so it starts with the first person on the list at exactly 9 o’clock, which 2 minutes from right now. So the first person gets on and says, “Hey, this is Russell. Yesterday I did blah blah. Today I’m focusing on blah blah. And these are the roadblocks I have.” The next person goes, “Hey, this is Russell. Yesterday I focused on this, it went awesome. We crushed it. Today I’m focusing on this. I have a two potential roadblocks, I can’t figure out this or this. Can I get so and so to talk to me afterwards?” Boom, next person, next person, next person. And we go through and what it does is a couple of cool things. First off, it holds everyone accountable for what they did yesterday, to make sure people actually showed up and did your jobs, so that’s a cool thing.

If you’re having issues in your company wondering, “What do these people do all day?” And I know that’s a real thing because I have thought that in the past with other companies we have built. I remember firing 60 people in one day and coming in the next day waiting for a million balls to drop, and nothing dropped and I was like, “What did all these people do?” Anyway, that lets you know what they’re doing each day. And what’s cool about it is you can be like, “Why are you wasting time on that, that’s the stupidest thing in the world. You should be focusing on this.” And you can quickly redirect people to the correct behaviors, so that’s number one. Number two you find out what they are focusing on today, which once again half the time our dev team or other people on the team are focusing on something that you don’t really care about as the CEO. You could be focusing on something, for example: We’re launching Funnel University and everyone’s only focusing on something that means nothing to anybody and it’s like, “No, that’s cool but that’s our number one priority, you should be shifting to this.” And third thing is all of us get stuck. We have blockers in our business that hold us back from the thing we’re trying to accomplish and a lot of times other people on our team don’t know what those blockers are and that’s what’s actually keeping you from the success you want and need. And so we find out what the blockers are while you got everyone on the team there, so now you know, “Hey I gotta help Todd with these two things because he can’t progress with his job until those two things are done.” It’s pretty cool.

So I’d recommend….because I hate meetings. We haven’t done meetings in years because meetings are so boring and so long and everyone wants to talk about stuff that doesn’t actually matter. We do a meeting and I count…I remember sitting in a meeting and counting how much I paid each person per hour and doing the math and being like, “ That meeting cost me $2300.” Or whatever it was. And being so angry because not only does it cost $2300 but the opportunity cost of us getting our crap done was even bigger. So this is awesome because it’s like 15 and if you a small team you could get done in 5 minutes.

So I highly, highly, highly recommend it. And that’s about it, I’m late for the meeting so I gotta bounce. I hope that was helpful for you guys. Start doing standing meetings, that’s the process, there’s the format. So far it has become magic for us, I hope it works for you as well. And that’s what I got for you today. Talk to you soon, bye.

Apr 28, 2016

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:

  • What part of Russell’s new morning routine has been hard, and it’s not what you think.
  • Why direct response marketing works to improve your business.
  • And how you can use direct response marketing to help optimize and improve EVERY aspect of your life, not just business.

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.

Apr 26, 2016

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:

  • Why Marcus Lemonis called Russell 3 times in a row in less than a minute.
  • What book convinced Russell to change his schedule and devote two hours a day to funnel building.
  • How Russell’s new funnel building schedule is working for him since he started it two days ago.

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.

Apr 21, 2016

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:

  • What it was like being at Robert Kiyosaki’s office and how they use Clickfunnels
  • How Russell got Dean Graziosi to agree to help him with an infomercial.
  • And why Russell’s whole day was just the best day ever.

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.

Apr 19, 2016

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:

  • How a twin baby birth makes a single baby birth look easy.
  • Why you shouldn’t complain, but if you do, be careful about who you are complaining to.
  • And find out which one of Russell’s kids is amazing at soccer.

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.

Apr 14, 2016

“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:

  • The interesting, and kind of backwards way they are thinking of launching Funnel University.
  • Why affiliates will benefit from the use of sticky cookies rather than first cookie wins when it comes to promoting Funnel University.
  • Why Russell is currently selling toilet paper with Clickfunnels.

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!

Apr 13, 2016

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:

  • How Russell learned about affiliates and how to use them to grow his business.
  • Why having a good affiliate program is important.
  • Some cool launches that are happening today.
  • And what kind of surgery Russell is having today.

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.

Apr 11, 2016

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:

  • How TV went from 3 channels to hundreds of channels and changed advertising.
  • The ways social media and TV have gone in similar directions.
  • How you can use different social media platforms to market to your niche.
  • and why Russell’s son Aiden is a genius.

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.

Apr 11, 2016

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:

  • Why Russell isn’t currently donating time or money to the Boise State Wrestling Program.
  • How good marketing has the potential to save the Boise State Wrestling Program.
  • And  how applying good marketing into every aspect of your life (yes marriage, relationships, finances, business, etc…) will make it better.

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.

Apr 5, 2016

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.

  • Why if you didn’t enjoy Batman vs Superman, you might be high maintenance.
  • Highlights of presentations given by Sean Stephenson, Ryan Stewman, Marcus Lemonis and others.
  • Why the money you spend on entertainment, whether that be by going to the movies or attending Funnel Hacking Live, is well worth the investment.

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.

Mar 29, 2016

What happens the second the pressure is lifted.

On this episode,Russell talks about getting the finishing touches done for his presentations for Funnel Hacking Live. He also shares some new ideas he has and some cool new stuff that is coming up in Clickfunnels and Funnel University.

Here are 3 cool things to listen for in this episode

  • How Russell practices what he preaches by promising to sell to you at the event.
  • Some interesting new ideas that may or may not be happening in the near future.
  • Find out what reason Russell thinks is a part of why Clickfunnels has had so much success.

So listen below to hear some of Russell’s ideas and to get excited for the upcoming Funnel Hacking Live event.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, good morning. This is Russell and welcome to another edition of Marketing In Your Car. Hey everybody, hope that things are amazing today, I’m just backing out. Today I’m driving the Corvette because last night I was driving home and I got a flat tire in my brand new tires, which is kind of frustrating. I don’t even know how to get it from my garage now to go get new tires but I’ll figure it out another day. Today we’re going to the office to go finalize everything for the event. Tomorrow morning we all fly out. Some of our team’s already down there and I’m going to be heading out in the morning, I was there last night until about 2 am working on presentations and I’m feeling good. I finally got the main presentation done and designed and figured out.

Why do I call it the main presentation? Well, some of you guys may know that one of the reasons why everybody does events is to hopefully make some money at them. We make some money out of ticket sales but most goes back to speakers and advertising and promotions and all those things. So our event is really kind of twofold. One is to bring the community together to get everyone talking, funneling and getting more excited about Clickfunnels and having a great party. Number two is we want to make some money from it. I think everyone would be disappointed if I didn’t. I would not be practicing what I preach, I would not be congruent there for, I promise those who are at funnel Hacking Live, I will try to sell you something, and that’s what I was working on last night. Now our sales pitch is the same this year as it was last year. We try to have the event a million percent content and just one percent pitch, so we are offering our certification program again. So that’s what I was working on last night, the presentation for the certification program.

Now, I’ve had a lot of fear wrapped in this because we’ve dramatically increased the price of certification. So because of that I’ve been nervous on how to present it and how to pitch it. Got some good advice from one of my friends and one of the inner circle members, Darin Stevens, and based on that, did something new so I’m excited. I’ve never sold this way before, but hopefully it will work out good for me and for you and for everyone that’s there.  I’m excited, so that’s what I’ve been working on late til last night, which was fun.

It’s funny because I’ve been stressed trying to get all these presentations done. I think I have 7, I believe. And now they’re all done, and I’m going in today just to clean up all the slides and make sure when I click slide to slide the right thing pops up at the right time. Make sure that logically, it all makes sense. So today will be kind of an easier day. So the hard work got done last night at 2 am, because that’s the hard part for me. Getting all these ideas and concepts out on slides and then now it’s just cleaning them up.

It’s funny because, this is the whole burnout thing we talked about last week, but now that the bigger barrier is out of the way. In fact, this is the first time I’ve gone to an event that my slides are done before I get there, ever, in the history of Russell Brunson.  So I’m kind of excited about that. It’s funny because now that that pressure of this big task that I’ve been avoiding is done, all day today all I can think about is new cool stuff I want to do. It’s the A.D.D. entrepreneur right. I should be thinking let’s take a break, but no, instead I’m thinking, okay so I’ve got some cool ideas. First off, during this whole researching phase, I’ve been going through and getting a bunch of stuff, I looked at a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk stuff just because he’s been really intriguing to me a lot lately. Watching the Gary V. Show, watching how he presents himself, watching these other little videos he does. And I got a cool idea for a type of video I want to start creating. You know how, I’ll turn on a couple clips at the event, but Gary’s got this short 30 second to 1 minute videos that he talks about one topic. They’re really powerful and awesome and they’re the kind of thing that you share because you get this one nugget and it feels awesome. So I kind of want to do that, but obviously I don’t want to copy Gary, I want to figure out my own model and method to make it cool.

And I was thinking, we’ve got all these cool hand doodle sketches. Tons are in the DotcomSecrets book and tons that are in the new Expert Secrets, and tons that have been in presentations that will never see it in print. I thought won’t it be fun to do a show where each show we focus on one of those little printouts and I talk about it? Anyway, I thought that’d be fun. So I was like, that’d be really cool.

And the other thing I was thinking about, some of you guys may have seen our tv show we launched back in the day called funnelhacker.tv, I only did two episodes then I never did any more. And it was probably because the whole setup to create one of those, there was a lot of stuff that went into that. So it wasn’t just bust out a video each week, or bust out a podcast while driving type of thing.

Oh man I hate cops when I’m on my phone. I’ll drive by and hopefully he doesn’t flip around. Okay, I think we’re safe you guys. Otherwise, I’ll introduce you to one of the nice Boise policeman here in a minute.

Anyway, where was I? Sorry I got A.D.D. you guys, I’m off track. Anyway, funnelhacker.tv I did two episodes and we just never did any more. I was thinking, it was a cool concept, people liked it, but it wasn’t done right. It wasn’t done in a way that’s easy to follow through. So what if I changed that and made that show where it’s like, all of you guys go funnel hack people and then record it and send it to me and I can make a video, you have guest episodes on, it’d be kind of cool. And the other thing I was thinking, and maybe this is, I don’t know, I got to talk myself out of this but it gets me excited. One of the big things that I like doing, obviously, is building funnels. You know, back a few years ago we launched a whole bunch of businesses and I was trying to make a bunch of money and those kinds of things and it was okay. Some of the businesses took off, like Neuracel and a couple other ones, but other one’s just flopped because we stretched ourselves too thin. So part of me doesn’t want to do this, part of me thinks it will be really cool to have this be part of funnelhacker.tv or maybe Funnel University or something. But wouldn’t it be fun to go and create some sales funnels in different markets? Allow you guys to see what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, behind the scenes.  How we write the script, how we produce the video, how we get the formula up, where we get the traffic and just show the whole thing and do a funnel maybe, in the weight loss base. And a network marketing funnel and then maybe, I don’t know, pick 3 or 4 different funnels and just show the process behind the scenes. And show dates on funnelhacker.tv so you can kind of see it, but then…I don’t know, it’s just a thought.

There’s some dude that’s riding my butt. Should I tell you guys his license number in case something bad happens? He’s riding me really tight, I’m not sure why.

So that was just an idea. Would it be cool to pick 3 or 4 markets and start slowly, not aggressive, but slowly building out funnels and building out the pieces and just letting you guys, let everybody see behind the scenes of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I feel like I’ve never been a real C.E.O. before so I’m like, what’s the role of the CEO. So CEO of Clickfunnels, what’s my job? It’s supposed to be to inspire people and to internally run the organization and things like that, but I feel like almost, the way I view it is my goal as CEO of this software company, whose just trying to teach people to use Clickfunnels, is to create amazing funnels that you guys can look at and you can model and you can funnel hack.

I think a big part of the reason why we’ve had success up to this point is that we’ve showed off, here’s our sales funnels, look at the Dotcom Secrets Labs book, the Split Testing book, look at the Dotcom Secrets book, you look at coming out, we’ve got the Funnel Stacking book, we’ve got the Expert Secrets book. We’ve got a lot of videos and training, the funnel hacking webinar, all these things, what I’ve been doing is basically showing behind the scenes of what we’ve done.

Obviously as we’ve launched Clickfunnels, I’ve done less of other businesses funnels. You know a lot of those things, no one gets to see. I feel like doing a little bit more of those kinds of things, you guys get to see them and reverse engineer them and do some of those things is a good idea. That’s a big reason why we’re launching Funnel University because I think more people should be doing continuity programs. There was a time that all we talked about online was membership sites and continuity programs. I remember in one year we came, or Ryan Deiss came out with Continuity Blueprint, we came out with Micro-continuity, Ryan Lee had a continuity program, or his membership site program. We weren’t the only ones, there was probably ten other people. It was the year of continuity, everyone talked about it, it was amazing. And then it went away, nobody really talks about it anymore. So we want to launch Funnel University, give people a model for how to do their continuity program.

People always come to our Facebook group and they’re like, “Hey, I’m looking for a real estate funnel I can hack.:” Or whatever it is. Looking for continuity funnel, looking for a webinar…so I feel like one of my roles, or jobs, responsibilities should be to create really cool funnels that work, that people can see that they can funnel hack and they can model. So obviously, we’re doing that inside the Clickfunnels world. You guys will see some really cool funnels coming out after the event. I was thinking it would be fun to do it outside, so you guys can see it as well. I’m not sure, I’m thinking about it. It’s just a whole other project, so it’s not going to happen soon, but if it did happen I gotta figure out a way to work that’s simple easy thing that’s easy to be consistent with.

Anyway, just some thoughts. It’s mostly me, because I’ve got some pressure taken off my mind. All the sudden I have a thousand new ideas and cool ways to serve flooding back in. This is probably not the best thing a lot of times. Anyway, I just wanted to share with you mostly to get it out of my head. Hopefully it gives you guys a couple ideas of cool stuff you could do and kind of look at what you’re role and responsibilities to your organization, to your community. IT may or may not happen, so don’t see me in 3 months like, “Russell, you promised me this thing.” Because it may never happen. It might’ve been a bad idea, that I thought would be fun to talk about. My goal really with Clickfunnels company, if you look at the event and post event, we’re rolling out really cool front end marketing systems that’ll take some of the pressure off of me doing all this stuff, and then give more affiliates ability to do a lot of cool things and that way I can start creating more cool things like that for affiliates and for front end funnels to get people in.

Anywho, I don’t know if that made sense, it makes sense in my head. Sorry Because I just don’t have the whole picture. I apologize. Anyway, you’ll see a bunch of cool stuff coming out over the next few months and maybe we’ll start showing off some more niche funnels if it makes sense.

Anywho, that’s the plan you guys. I am in the office. I’m at the office now, I’m going to go in and clean up my slides. I’m going to be cleaning up the affiliate center and then we are out of here, we are jumping on a plane. Taking my whole family, all my kids, I want them to meet Sean Stephenson and kind of see a thousand people in the room with their dad on stage. I think it’ll be kind of fun for them to see. That’s what’s happening then they’re going to go to the zoo or something, I don’t know. That’s the game plan. So that’s what’s happening, I will try to podcast you guys from on the road. I don’t know if that’ll happen though, so if not, I’ll talk to you guys next week when we get back. I’ll  report back on the event, what happened, all that kind of stuff. So that’s the game plan everyone. Appreciate you all for listening, if you got any value from this or any of my podcasts, please share them on Facebook and other social media outlets, that’d be awesome. With that said, have a great day, talk to you soon.

Mar 29, 2016

Apply these two little things and I guarantee you’ll make at least three times as much money, with the exact same amount of effort.

On this episode, Russell talks about applying urgency and scarcity to your products can make them sell better. He also gives examples of how urgency and scarcity have helped his business that you could apply to your own business.

Here are 3 interesting things you will learn in today’s episode.

  • How applying urgency and scarcity to selling tickets for the upcoming Funnel Hacking Live event caused it to sell out.
  • How to treat an opt-in like a mini launch and create urgency and scarcity.
  • How adding urgency and scarcity could make you 3x more money.

So listen below to learn how to add urgency and scarcity to your own business so that you can make a lot more money.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everybody, it’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining, it’s awesome outside, I’m heading in, I’ve got two days to work my last presentation before we jump on a plane and fly out to Funnel Hacking Live to hang out with most of you guys, which is going to be awesome. I’m feeling really good. Last week there was some stress, some burnout, some ups and downs and all sorts of craziness, but I wanted you to know that I feel great today and I’m excited.

I came in on Saturday, and I think we talked about that, but I put in some hours getting the printouts done, so we can print out and hand out some stuff that turned out amazing. It ended up being 300 slides, so we fit 3 slides per page, so 100 page printouts for every single one of you guys who are coming, full of all of the amazing, cool stuff we’ll be talking about and it’s going to be good. I am really looking forward to the next few days of getting stuff done and then coming down and hanging out with a bunch of you guys.

So what I wanted to talk about today, and this is something I talked about a little while ago, but it’s been on my mind and I just did 3 voxes with people in our inner circle all about this same concept, so I wanted to share with you guys as well because I think it’s important. So if you look back, there was a podcast that I did a little while ago called Urgency and Scarcity, it was probably 2 or 3 months ago. If you go to marketinginyourcar.com, you can scroll the titles, you can see the once that says Urgency and Scarcity, but I just want to talk about, reiterate what I said there, because in case you guys missed it, that was a huge deal.  So I figured out something, only thing that gets people to buy, it’s not the only thing, but the main thing, is there urgency and scarcity? It is completely ridiculous.

One big thing is this event. So we’ve been promoting this event for 8 months, something crazy like that. And we could not get people for the life of me to buy at first. I was like, “Great lets cancel the event, no one’s buying, it’s totally stressing me out.” And we’re trying to get people to sign up and trying all sorts of stuff. We were calling them on the phone, 4 months from the event. They’re like, “4 months away, I haven’t event thought about this week, let alone 4 months away.” It was like pulling teeth to get people to sign up. So toward the end we get to like, 6 weeks out, and I’m like, “We got like 500 more seats we got to fill or else I’ll look like an idiot when no one shows up at the event.” Then I thought you know what we should do. We got urgency and scarcity, that’s what we got, those are our secret weapons. How do you cause urgency and scarcity without selling out? I don’t want to be like, tickets are sold out when we only sold 50. I didn’t want to be like, we’re selling tickets out this week, and then not sell them out. It’s this whole chicken and the egg thing.

So I was thinking if we did urgency and scarcity and say tickets are selling out this week, we could probably sell a bunch, but what if we don’t sell out, how are we going to sell the other 399 tickets or whatever it is. So we thought, let’s add urgency and scarcity to pieces of the offer. So we did a big push, some of you guys probably saw this, where we were giving away the recordings from last year’s event. So that was the first thing of urgency and scarcity. “Hey this week Sunday at midnight we’re pulling away the recordings of last year’s event. You can still get tickets in the future, but you lose the recordings.” So that was the first big push and we started talking about that. Guess what happened when we added a little bit of urgency and scarcity to pieces of the offer? People went nuts. That week we signed up 150 or maybe even more, I don’t know. More than 150, less than 200 somewhere in that range people signed up because we had this urgency and scarcity tied to one feature of the offer. So Sunday at midnight we pulled that off the sales page. I was too lazy and it would have been a huge pain in my butt to actually go and pull it away from people who were buying, so if you bought it afterwards, you still got the recordings from last year’s event, don’t tell anybody. But it was off the sales letter, so no longer was it part of the offer, so you lost that part of the offer. But man, pulling that thing away gave us 150 ticket sales, which at $600 a piece, that’s almost 100 grand, my math’s probably way off, but somewhere like that. So then that ended, so ticket sales stopped again.

I’m like, “You guys keep buying, we gotta sale this event now.” So I was like, “That worked last time, so how do apply urgency and scarcity to another piece of this.” So we applied urgency and scarcity to a price point. So we said, “We have 2 for 1 tickets. This is going to disappear.” So we pushed urgency and scarcity the next week on that, and guess what happened? We sold a whole bunch more tickets. And then when that ended tickets sales dropped to nothing again. I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”

Urgency and scarcity kept bringing it back, bringing it back until we actually sold out. And then the coolest thing about selling out an event, is after you sell out, that’s when people start buying tickets, because they’re like, “Wait, you sold out. Why didn’t you tell me?” I’m like, “I’ve been telling you every day for 8 months. Seriously? I’m going to strangle you.” So anyway, ticket sales were flying in like crazy when we were sold out. People are freaking out and paying more and trying to get in, and it’s been awesome. So selling out an event is almost the best way. We sold out our event when we passed 1,000 tickets sold, which is how many currently fit in the room, but if we shift seats around, we can actually get more than that, so we got some extra seats, so we’ve been selling on the back. People call, we charge more because they freaking waited forever and stressed me out, so they must pay for stressing me out.

So there’s lesson one of urgency and scarcity. Here’s another example. We were doing the Funnel Scripts Webinar, did the webinar, sold a ton on the webinar. I think we had a 40, I can’t remember the numbers, something crazy like 45% close rate on the webinar, so did well over 6 figures live on the webinar. Then the next day replays and stuff continued to sell well. It was 60 grand day two. Then 40 grand and then you know sales kept coming really consistently, really well. And so part of me is like, let’s just leave it on. And then I’m like, you know what we can’t just leave it up because then it’ll just trickle out. We need to do some urgency and scarcity. So we decided to have a cutoff date. So Sunday at midnight we cut it off. I like Sunday at midnight cut off things. Probably because I queue up the emails on Saturday before I go to bed and Monday morning I come in and look at the sales, and I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” Sunday, it’s crazy.

We add urgency and scarcity and we did as much sales on the last day as we did the first day.

It’s crazy right? So I started thinking, if urgency and scarcity is the secret to buying stuff, I’m going to start applying this everywhere. If you look at what I’m currently doing, this is my big secret for you guys, I hope you take advantage of it. So I used to have people opt-in, they’d opt-in to a list, then I would promote an offer, then I’d transition into a secondary offer and I’d be leaving content in and out and that’s how I looked at things. So instead I thought, okay if somebody opts-in to a squeeze page, there’s one core offer, one core thing that I’m trying to sell. So when they enter that squeeze page, they entered that gateway and came into my world, I now have a window where I’m doing little mini product launch. And the goal of this product launch is 2 or 3 fold; I’m trying to build the relationship with attractive characters, I’m still doing a soap opera sequence to build the relationship, but I’m doing that and pushing them towards buying a product and in that sequence, I’m applying urgency and scarcity. so basically what I’m doing is I’m sending out ten emails for 7 days when someone joins my list. You guys are thinking, Russell that’s crazy. But it’s not. Trust me.

So the first set of emails are all building relationships, pushing people to the offer, making a really good offer, and if I’m making good offers, I’m not saying, “Hey, here’s my product go buy it.” For example, somebody buys any of my offers now, let’s say you buy the Perfect Webinar Script, there’s this little mini product launch sequence that’s happening over seven days, ten emails, that is getting you to sign up for the Clickfunnels trial, and I’m not saying, “Go get the Clickfunnels trial. Hey, go get the Clickfunnels trial. Hey you should go get a free trial.” everyday, right. I’m making this mini product launch. I’m saying, “Look, you just bought Perfect Webinar Secrets so you know webinars are important, Clickfunnels is the tool we use, so for any of you guys who go and get the free Clickfunnels trial today, I have a  really special offer. I’m going to give you this bonus, where you’re going to get this…” and I give them this crazy bonus worth, I don’t know $500 or $600 if they go and get the free trial from Clickfunnels. You guys see what I’m saying?

So imagine you’re doing an affiliate launch and I’m trying to get you to buy someone else product and competing against a thousand other affiliates I’m going to create a really good special offer for you to go buy this thing. This same thing I’m doing now and this autoresponder sequence, here’s the product over here, for me it’s Clickfunnels. I’m not just saying, “Go buy Clickfunnels.” I’m saying, “When you buy Clickfunnels today this is the bonus you’re going to get. I’m going to give you this two hour training I did here, you’re going to get this script right here, you’re going to get this shared funnel here, you’re going to get boom, boom, boom. Here’s 5 or 6 things you’re going to get that are amazing and can’t get anywhere else, you get today.”

Now the cool thing, by making that special bonus offer, what I am able to do is now I can have urgency and scarcity, so that you opt-in.

Build a relationship email one. Email two, I’m talking about this offer, here’s a special offer I make, here’s bonuses, bonuses, bonuses. Now because I’m not saying here’s a site to go buy a thing, now I’ve got these bonuses and now I can apply my two magic gifts. Urgency and Scarcity.

So check this out, the last two days it says, “Hey guys, you got 48 hours left to get the Clickfunnels free trial and then this free offer with special bonuses disappears.” Boom, urgency and scarcity. Next day, “Twenty four hours left before you lose out on this bonus, you’re going to lose out on this, this, and this.” Boom “Twelve hours left, you’re going to miss out on this, this, and this.” “Three hours left, you can still get Clickfunnels tomorrow, that’s cool and you should, but if you don’t get it in the next 3 hours you lose out on all these bonuses.” Now I can apply urgency and scarcity to the product I’m trying to pitch. And the thing about actually shutting it down or those annoying things we have to do as marketers, and guess what happens? People take action, people buy, people ascend. A whole bunch of amazingness happens.

So the moral of today’s story, is start thinking about that. When somebody opts-in to your list, don’t just promote the next product in your queue. Use this as a mini launch sequence. Pretending like you’re a super affiliate, making an amazing bonus offer they have to buy. Buy or die. And apply urgency and scarcity. This can work for anything by the way, you guys. Think about your affiliate, maybe you don’t have a product yet, go to Clickbank, go somewhere, find an amazing affiliate offer, create a squeeze page from that affiliate offer and have a seven day, ten email sequence. It pushes really hard urgency and scarcity, where you’re delivering some bonuses and things like that, and test it out. I guarantee you’ll make at least 3 times, and probably a heck of a lot more than that, but at least 3 times as much money than you do right now, however you’re promoting your affiliate offers.

If your own products you’re selling. I bet you’ll make 3x of how much you make in every single campaign. Because urgency and scarcity my friends, is the secret. That is the big aha I’ve had over the last few days. So hopefully this little nugget will benefit you guys. It’s amazing, try it and test it out. Let me know how it goes. And I promise you, you will make a crap ton of money. That’s what I got you guys. I’m out, have an amazing day and I will see you guys at Funnel Hacking Live. Bye everybody.

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