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Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: September, 2017
Sep 28, 2017

Listen in on live Q&A from Gary Vaynerchuk (Part 2 of 2)

On this special episode of Marketing Secrets Podcast you will get to hear the second half of the Q&A section of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation at the viral video launch event. Here are some of the questions Gary answers:

  • Why you should still invest in influencers to build your brand even if they are in a different niche than you.
  • How you support and strengthen your belief in your own intuition.
  • And What Gary’s number one business challenge is right now.

So listen to Gary’s insightful answers to these questions and many others as we finish up part 02 of this special set of episodes.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson again. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope that yesterday you had a good time hanging out with Gary Vee. So just to put this into perspective, his speaker fees to come to something like this is about 100 grand. And that’s about what I had to spend to get him to Boise to hang out and get his presentation, and you guys had a chance to hear it here for free.

So what does that mean? Number one it means that this podcast is awesome. Do you agree? If you guys agree and concur then I ask you just one little favor, tell other people about it. If you’ve got an email list, tell them. You post on Facebook, let people know. I spent $100 grand to give you these two podcasts and you’re getting them for free because I love you and I care about you and want you to be successful.

So I hope you get something good out of it. Again, every time I hear Gary speak I get more pumped up and motivated and excited. I don’t know if he ever gives the tangibles, like here’s the steps to do, but that’s my role. That’s what I do for you guys. I will give you the tangible, here’s the process, and Gary will get you pumped up. So I hope that’s okay. With that said, we’re going to jump into to part 02 of his presentation. Once again we have edited out as much profanity as possible to make this PG, maybe PG13 so that my podcast will stay clean for all the kids and the people like me who like to listen to clean things. So I hope that’s alright. Anyway, that’s it you guys. Enjoy part 02 of the Gary Vee Show.

Audience member: Gary I want to talk about influence for marketing. YouTubers, bloggers, instagrammers, a lot of people are talking about Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Snapchat ads, ROI. We can measure ROI with those.

Gary: You can measure with influencers too.

Audience member: You can, but it takes a lot longer.

Gary: No it doesn’t.

Audience member: How so?

Gary: You’ve got to make the creative be a sales creative rather than a brand creative. You can’t measure the ROI of Facebook either when you do it the way I do it, because I’m pumping it for brand. Not trying to sell you [expletive]. I could measure it if I’m trying to sell you a $49 course.

Josh, people are confused between branding and selling. Make [expletive] phenomenal and [expletive] influencers go for the sale in the creative if they chose to. And you can afford them. Logan Paul sold a [expletive]load of Dunkin Donuts [expletive] gift cards. Sales are super [expletive] measureable Josh.

Audience member: So would you focus, like let’s pretend you’re not Gary Vaynerchuk, let’s take you out of the equation. You are a 41 year old nobody, you have say a million dollars of investors behind you…..You’re a 41 year old nobody, you’re getting into the game. Would you focus on growing your personal brand or would you focus on leveraging other people’s personal brands that are already a thing? Would you ride the backs of using the people you’re building, that you’re investing in.

Gary: Sure. Yeah. What are you asking? I’ll give you the answer. Are you trying to build your personal brand?

Audience member: I am trying to build my personal brand. But I want to build my personal brand in a different niche than the influencers that I want to invest in.

Gary: understood. I think that as long, understand this, just because they may be in a different niche, they have so much awareness that the people that watch them may be into other things. Got it? So if it’s a good deal on awareness, you might be able to convert and then your product has to be good. Do you know what I mean? That’s the math you’re looking at. You don’t have to use the targeted nature of the ads if the influencers a better deal, even though you might lose 85% of the audience because that’s not why they’re watching them. But they’re still going to get 15% of opportunity and then the whole [expletive] kit and caboodle is, are you good enough?

Audience member: Alright, one last question. I’m a diehard patriots fan, if Tom Brady makes it to the Superbowl this year, will you go to the Superbowl with me, on me?

Gary: No. And not only that, I’ve been to the last 6 Superbowls, they’ve been there two or three times, I’m now with Vayner Sports and Steve Rostio and the Dolphins are my business partners and I go and the owners dinner is all fun. The last two superbowls, two of the last three Superbowls I left the city Sunday morning. I have not watched the Patriots play a down of a Superbowl game in the last 4 Superbowls that they’ve played in. Because I refuse, everybody’s like, “The greatest comeback in a superbowl.” I’m good, I have no [expletive] idea what you guys are talking about. I didn’t see [expletive].

Audience member: Well, you like winners and I’d like to invite you to the winning team any time you’d like to come.

Gary: Josh, you’re confused my friend. I’m a winner, you route for winners, dick.

Audience member: That’s very true.

Gary: Be careful. By the way you just witnessed my favorite move. Knicks/Heat game, 7 years ago, dude walks by, beer sports muscles. Guys, I get up and say, “You [expletive] suck. Sit the [expletive] down.” I mean it, I get weird. He looks at me and goes, “Yeah we suck. Look at the scoreboard [expletive]hole.” I go, “Not them, you [expletive]hole. You suck.”  By the way, the darkest version of what you just saw, and Josh knows I love him. But the darkest version, I go to Foxborough for every game, we always get [expletive] on, around the 3rd , 4th quarter when I’m really getting [expletive] on, because I bring my Jets jersey, I’m running in there proper. Somewhere around the 4th quarter when I’m getting [expletive] on, I change the conversation. I’m like, “Look Zan, I’m super pumped that your entire self esteem is wrapped into your football team because you work at pizza hut. So [expletive] you. My life’s better than yours. Maybe your football team is better than mine, but I’m better than you, Zan.”

Audience member: Going back a little bit, you talked about intuition, your belief in your intuition. I’m a 2 day idea guy. I get an idea and then after 2 days I’m like, “That was a crappy idea.”

Gary: You’re probably a 7, right Nicole? Like he bothers the [expletive] out of you right? He’s like, “What about a drone ice cream company?” Go ahead.

Audience member: That’s a good idea. So how so you develop that intuition? How do you support and strengthen your belief in your own intuition to move forward?

Gary: By acting on some of them. The biggest problem is, especially when you have people around you, you want to be right. It’s much better than getting made fun of for being wrong consistently. But by [expletive], I try to do stuff every…..everyone’s like, “You’re always in it doing…” Just try and [expletive]. No one talks about the stuff that I’m doing that….guys nobody remembers the part where Michael Jordan couldn’t get to the finals because the Pistons were beating them every single time. You know what I mean?

Guys let me really unleash doing more [expletive]. Nobody remembers the losses, as long as you have a win. You know, listen, some of you know my stuff and I’m started to like figure out my own stuff. It comes down to six people. Your mom, your dad, your siblings, your loved ones. You’re doing so much [expletive] based on their points of view on stuff, you can’t even imagine. You can unwind that, you’re off to the races.

It scares me how much I value my wife and parents opinion and how much I don’t at all. And in that balance I win. On a macro I value them. But on a micro, my decisions, not at all. You just gotta do one or two of them. If you 1 for 7, it’s a lot better than going 0 for 0.

Audience member: Thank you. Last question, would you sign my book?

Gary: Hi, let’s do it while I’m signing. What’s your question, Katie?

Audience member: Hi Gary, I’m Katie Richardson, and I was first introduced into you as I was trying to go to bed at night and my husband’s got his phone on and I’m hearing this guy make a rant in a cab, throwing f-bombs every other word. I’m like, “What the heck is this?” And turns out, you speak tons of truth, so you have won over this mother of 4 who is a business owner and I love it. So that’s part of what my question to you is, you own who you are and I love that. And that’s what people are so attracted to, right? You’re up there being Gary, at what point….you talked about how you worked with your dad and it was a 3 million dollar company and you took it to 10 million after he left, at what point did you give yourself permission to be you and then realize….tell us that story where you were like, “Wow, this is working, people are connecting with me and my way of being.” What was that like when you were like this is working, I’m going to keep doing this.

Gary: You know, it’s funny. Thank you first of all, there’s a lot of things there. Number one it is 100% because of nature/nurture. Being an immigrant and always having a chip on your shoulder, you’re always an outcast to begin with on some level. And I was a Russian immigrant, which was our major enemy when I was a kid, so I had some weird [expletive] going on that I don’t tell a whole lot because it’s not as relevant these days. But there’s a lot of parallels to whoever the bad guys are now, I was the bad guy, it was kind of weird for a little while.

Number two, my mom. My mom, I remember walking sophomore year in high school….no, freshman year in high school. I’m 4’11” my freshman year of high school, I spurted in sophomore year. I have the worst [expletive] mullet you’ve ever seen in your life. I’ve got a backpack that I’m rolling with that’s bigger than me. And I’m walking down the hall, and I go… I remember this vividly, I’m like, wait a minute. I’m not the best looking, awesomest dude in the world? My mom had me so brainwashed…I’m being serious….on straight positivity, that that never went away.

If I open a door for a woman, my mom was super smart. I’m doing the same thing. If I opened the door, this is a true story Katie, I opened the door for a woman when I was 9 at McDonalds. That’s the story. I went to McDonalds, a woman was coming and I held the door open for her. My mom reacted as if I’d won the [expletive] Nobel Peace Prize. And she did that about all the [expletive] that matters, which makes me who I am today.

Fourth grade I got an F on a science test, I needed to get it signed because that’s how they used to, I don’t know if they still do that [expletive]. I flushed it down the toilet because my dad hadn’t gotten to me yet. And then, I was still a kid so my conscious was still around. So I just couldn’t sleep and I told my mom. And basically three weeks later I was sitting in social studies fourth grade and said, “[expletive] this, I’m out.” And from that day on I decided to fail every class, work on my business skills and become whoever I’m going to be.

Audience member:  I love it. Thank you. Sorry, I just had to quick ask, I make amazing baby products and I don’t know if you’re still having babies or not, but if you need the awesomest baby gift for a friend, come to me. My company’s call Pudge, like baby pudge.

Gary: Send me an email to Gary@vaynermedia, in the title write our entire story, “I was the woman with four kids and the husband in the bed and you won me over. And the pudge and this, all of it”. And then we’ll interact.

Audience member: I’ll make you look amazing as a gift giver.

Gary: Thank you.

Audience member: So I was going to say this is my second time seeing you, and it’s funny how different energy with different audiences. The first time I went, you were like, you even told the audience, “I am not excited to be here. I looked at your stuff, it sucks.” And the lady had been talking about coaching the whole time and then you’re like, “Don’t do it, just do stuff.” Anyway, it was awesome. It was in Provo. Just a couple of months ago in Provo. It was funny.

But anyway, quick side question, do you sense different energy in different audiences? Because it’s like, it’s the same….

Gary: 100% I have my religions and my beliefs and then I have me craft. So I’m doing everything state of the art. So I have my theses and then I have my work. I was in Seattle yesterday, spent 9 hours. Understand the voice space, my craft. So I have my thesis’ Bret, I have my craft and the reason I’m doing well in speaking is I take my thesis’ and I take my craft, which sometimes has some nuances that are valuable, usually always ahead of the market. Then I reverse engineer the actual audience. I reverse engineer the audience. I give a lot of thought and speak to the people that organize. Who are you? Where are you in your funnel of life? And what can I bring to the most general and how quick can I get to Q&A, so that whatever I miss in the general we can get to in the details.

Audience member: I totally agree, because it’s just a different energy, I feel this time versus last time. But my big question is, when you think of Lavar Ball or Kim Kardashian, or even Donald Trump for that matter, what are your thoughts on them and is that the kind of fame you want? You talked about fame being the biggest arbitrage, what are your thoughts on those kinds of people?

Gary: So there’s a really interesting thing that I believe in, which is until you know somebody, you don’t know somebody. So look, I mean getting political never works, but Trump’s got his shtick and he won on my thesis for the last ten years. Kim Kardashian literally is, we are all living in reality TV. People [expletive] on reality tv in Hollywood, then they [expletive] on influencers, they’re all going to pay because if you’re not abiding to what the consumer wants, you will always lose.

It doesn’t matter what you want on your ivory tower, it matters what the world is consuming. But I don’t, to be very, very, very frank, I don’t think about it a whole lot. I know why they’re winning. They were native….DJ Callin is  a unbelievably important case study in the last ten years and the next ten years. His personality was native to a platform at the right time in the right moment and he’s disproportionally changed his career on that back. Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump navigated reality TV when reality TV was what social media has been for the last four years.

Someone here is going to get inspired and make a voice application for their business that will be that, when voice is here in two years, for the next six years. From 2020-2026. It’s literally the same game over and over, Bret. So I want, what I want…..listen, fame and exposure, it doesn’t change you, it exposes who you are. So I don’t know how you personally judge those three and everybody here judges those three differently. I just want to be known for what I am and who I am and how I roll.

Audience member: Appreciate that, thank you.

Gary: You got it.

Audience member: Hi Gary, I’m here with my amazing husband Josh, who is like my backbone and amazing business partner. I’m a little googly talking to you, because I remember meeting Justin Timberlake when I was 14, but you’re like my 32 year old Backstreet Boy.

Gary: He was in NSYNC.

Audience member: yeah, I loved them all, but I love you more. For the past 7 years you’ve given me the ability to be really authentic. I’m in a niche where it’s very club promoting. It’s network marketing. So I basically for the last 7 years have sold my soul to direct selling companies and made a lot of money and have built an incredible following of network marketers and direct sellers and now that I’ve built a great team that’s passive and I served them and I love them, but I really want to branch out into more main stream impact. Primarily female entrepreneurs. And I want to know what’s your recommendation for someone like me who’s had this huge niche and they all expect me to be the prospector, the closer, the lead generator, the team builder. Now to say, alright I’m someone new, transition…

Gary:  If we had coffee, I’m going to give you the 90% answer because there’s 10% that’s too personal and I don’t want to do it here. I have to figure out how main stream you want to be.

Audience member: I’ll buy you coffee.

Gary: I’m sure. I don’t know how main stream you want to be. If you want to be main stream, like the cover of Forbes. Like all the way main stream, you’ll have to give up network marketing completely.

Audience member: and I have no problem with whatever God has for me, I just would know….

Gary: it’s a stunningly binary answer, Rach. If you want to go main stream, you have to give it up.

Audience member: Because of the stigma?

Gary: And the math around how many people make money in it and how many don’t.

Audience member: Correct. And my last question is, is there any trends that you see, or platforms or any advice that you see with women entrepreneurs, primarily my age 30’s, 40’s?

Gary: So the thing, it’s funny, Katie said the most important part. I’ve become unbelievably fascinated and empathetic in the difference between men and women. I’m super fascinated by it, from a business standpoint, that’s my lens to the world. It’s harder to be 100% yourself when you’re a woman. I genuinely believe that because men are dick-faces.

The answer to your question is to be 100% radically transparently you. I’m also massively empathetic how that’s difficult for everybody, especially attractive women.

Audience member: So four years ago I was couch serving and living out of my car and I sat in a room with Gary and 13 other kids and Gary told us that this app was going to change our lives forever.  And it did, and Gary was such a positive change on my life. Now, unfortunately they deleted the app. What do I do?

Actually I just wanted to make that joke. The real question, when you run into your failures and you feel like you’re at your rock bottom, what’s your next move? Because I’m always trying to reinvent myself and I’ll do things that work and I’ll do things that don’t work.

Gary: You and some of your friends there at the table, you guys have a big advantage, and all of you have gone a little bit different with that transition of buying and what happened on Snapchat and Instagram and things of that nature. But you have something very special. You have talent. Second of all, you’ve once tasted what it’s like to buy beach front property in Malibu.

Audience member: No, I live in an apartment. But yeah, that’d be nice.

Gary: You know what I mean. AKA, you knew what it meant to your career by being one of the first 40 people that mattered on a platform that became huge. Instead of trying what you and others …….I wish you could see the goose bumps I have right now. It happened to me. I won twitter. And then I wasn’t at the top of stuff, like I was in the 2006,07, and 08 world. Why do you think the vine thing…and this is where I’m going with this, basically if you chose to, it’s going to happen again. And let me explain why.

The reason I got you guys all together and I flew to LA and met with others of you, the reason I did that is it was black and white. I’m like, I’ve [expletive] seen this show before.

Audience member: You said that, you actually said that. You were saying this is the new YouTube.

Gary: It was so black and white. And obviously it took different tacks and the ones that kind of tripled down on Instagram had what happened. But instead of trying to catch up to what’s now, I give you the recommendation that I took myself, because I tend to only give advice that I’ve actually done, because it just feels better. You’ve got to either hibernate, make due, grind through and spend all your time looking for that next one. You should be downloading a top 100 app in the apple store that is social or consumer facing every day of your life. Creating an account and producing the first piece of content.

Audience member: okay, I’m going to do that. Thanks Gary.

Audience member:  Hello, 4’11” freshman here. Really quick question, maybe a little personal. You know we have this engine, all of us here in this room, we have this engine we have a hard time shutting off. It’s what makes us successful. How do you balance work and family? How do you do it?

Gary: By first and foremost not adhering to the current state of political correctness that everyone here has deployed on me. Most of all. And second, extremism. I almost took the whole entire month of August off. I go all in. When I’m in…Monday through Friday I do not see my kids, pretty much at all. 39 weeks of the 52 weeks in the year, just what it is. And then on weekends and 7 weeks, 8 weeks of vacation a year, I’m all in the other way. That’s how I do it. For me. But that is only uniquely going to work if me and my partner in crime are aligned in that strategy. Audit that strategy every day. By the way, I don’t even want to do it anymore as now they’re 8 and 5 and not 5 and 2. They’re just more interesting to be around, you know.

For example, I guarantee you in 24 more months, this exact trip, they’re here and we go and see the Grand Canyon or something, I’m so sad that so many people do certain things in parenting because that’s what the other parents think they should be doing. I don’t know, I just want to make a very important statement that I implore every parent in this room understands. Everything that is right in parenting right now by the common standards, will not be in 20 years. You’re going to be judged one way or the other.

Audience member: Hey, fellow 42 year old, I think your mom and my mom should hang out bro. Same mom’s. Just want to let you know, validation on the sound, totally true because I totally take a shower with you every morning. Dude I just hit play on the little shower thing, listen to your audio, gets me going. So thank you.

Gary: That visual is [expletive] awesome.

Audience member: I didn’t even think about you seeing the visual, but now that I think about it, it could have gone a different way. So I got a two part question for you. One is on cultures, our company is growing and we’re doing pretty well and you’ve been to 9 figures and that’s where we want to go, right. So my first question is from a culture standpoint, when you grow rapidly, how do you imbed the culture to make sure that it grows with the right people. So we’ve had values, manifestos….

Gary: Ready? How do you get muscles by doing pushups?

Audience member:  You do it consistently, everyday.

Gary: I spend an ungodly amount of my time on HR. Now, I have 800 employees, the biggest thing I’m working on for 2018…. I have an open door policy, which is not working for me. It’s real open door. The big thing for my 2 admins and assistants is when an employee asks, they get booked. Whoever, first day, nine years, done. Not working. They think I’m fancy and Gary V. They’re scared, nobody wants to really talk to their CEO. So next year I am going to mandate that I see every one of my employees every six months for 15 minutes, which is going to eat up big amounts of time. Culture is the only thing you trade on.

Audience member: So you’re going to see all 800 employees 15 minutes?

Gary: Yes, twice a year. The math is daunting.

Audience member: When I do the one on one time, it always works, but I’m just thinking now for scale standpoint. How the heck do I do that?

Gary: Scaling the unscalable is how you build long term wealth.

Audience member: [expletive] dude, that’s a good one.

Gary: Thanks bro. I didn’t get up here for my looks.

Audience member: Now we know why you get paid to stand up there. Second question was, as you grow obviously you have things, you’ve got haters I’m sure. People who don’t like you or whatever. So I always focus on the mission and the vision and the people that we’re helping, but when you get certain people, it’s still effects me when I get that stuff. So how do you overcome that so you can keep growing?

Gary: Empathy.

Audience member: For them?

Gary: Yes.

Audience member: And just their life circumstances?

Gary: Sure. If a human being can generate hate, they’re not in a good place.

Audience member: So what do you do mentally in mindset to just keep going?

Gary: I deploy gratitude that I’m not them. Thanks man.

Audience member: So I started mine as well, doing…..and now I do it on Instagram and I grew a large following on there. And it’s still growing a lot, but I want to be ahead, as you say, and I know I have a lot of meetings about VR and creating content with NVR.

Gary: I’m a very anti-consumer VR guy in the timing that I like. So everything for me is 24-36 months. I just don’t know how many people are consuming at the scale that you would be giving up opportunity costs in other places in 36 months of VR.

Until I see even one person consistently consuming VR, an hour a week. If I can find one human who’s not a [expletive] really weird nerd, who spends one hour…So I think the reason you’re feeling that is you’re in the LA bubble, everybody is pumping a ton of money from venture capital into VR, and it’s literally….the thing you should study is what happened to the web in 99, 2000, you’ve probably seen it. Pets.com, all these companies worth a trillion, that’s how I feel about VR. It’s coming, Amazon’s coming, Ebay’s coming, but I think for you and knowing the arbitrage that you can trade on, I don’t believe….if I was talking to you every week, I’d be like, that’s not a good place to be spending your energy. That’s my intuition.

I do think voice is incredible. And then I think for you specifically, because I know enough from afar…we don’t know each other super well, but I know a lot from afar, you might want to think about what you want to put that energy into, what bucket. That’s why it’s good that you’re here. What I do think these guys do, that sales and….or if it’s a brand or an event, you’re going to be able to push that energy towards something, you need to take a step back and get thoughtful with yourself. What other interests you have, that wouldn’t come natural as the first thing you would think of. Like the 5 or 6 things you think of health and wellness and lifestyle.

It’s interesting, it’s probably something subtle, putting your energy into building in that world if you want to really double down on entrepreneurship is a good idea.

Speaker: Alright guys, we have only time for 3 more questions. We’ll go Miles over there, and then we have two here and that’ll be it.

Gary: Charles get up there, we’ll do four. But you have to stand up. I saw your face.

Audience member: Hey Gary, I’m a big fan of mental models and ways to kind of overcome challenges. And I like understanding other people’s processes. So my question to you is, what is your number one business challenge right now? And what is your process to come up with that solution?

Gary: I’m crippled by opportunity, is my number one business problem and it’s similar to what I gave over there. I’m just attacking it with blind intuition. Every time me and my team try to attack from a quant standpoint, it’s too foreign, it’s moving too fast on us, and so that’s it man. Crippled by opportunity, which is a blessing and a [expletive] half, as you can imagine. But it’s the truth. You know, it’s the truth.

Like do I say yes to a second season of Planet of the Apps? The Knicks are for sale, it’s running through my mind. There’s a lot going on. I have a lot going on.

Audience member: Right, but other than the intuition, I gotta imagine that there’s a bottleneck in terms of leverage.

Gary: Intuition is the salve for the bottleneck which is making decisions and deploying my energies against those decisions, while leaving everything else on the side. I decided a year ago, I was raising a 150 million dollar fund, I gave all t he money back. It was the biggest financial loss of my career because I’d hired the staff and I was going to pay the staff with the 2% if you know venture, of the overall fund that I was going to raise 150 million dollars on. That’s a lot of money, 2%. I had a pretty expensive staff.

I was going through the process and I’d raised about 80 million dollars and one night I’m flying home and I’m like, I don’t believe in this. I don’t want to spend this 150 million dollars in startups. I think there’s too much [expletive] faith in the market. I don’t know where to deploy it. I think I’m going to lose it. And I gave it all back. That’s intuition, thought process, understanding. So I’m just doing that every day.

Audience member: Big fan, but my girlfriend is an even bigger fan and I basically couldn’t live down the shame of not asking you a question. So I’m a social media manager and I would just love to hear about what you think is the best campaign you’ve ever run and why you qualify it that way?

Gary: Sour patch kids candy. We made it a cultural phenomenon because we took all the money from television commercials, which go figure, 12-15 year olds don’t watch and we gave it to all those people that sit at that table. Or the ones that look like them. In four and half years we took sour patch kids marketing budget and put it into Snapchat and Instagram when nobody was thinking that way and if anybody has a 9 to 17 year old in their life, they eat sour patch kids.

And Sabrina, to answer your question, the reason I qualify it that way. There’s been campaign’s that we’ve done that have made more money, made more likes or awareness or more views. He stands up here and he goes, thanks to everybody we have 100,000 views, I already know him enough to know….yeah, and what’s happening with those views. A lot of people on social media, they plan vanity metrics, not sales.

The sour patch kids is the answer because we have had campaigns get more views, this Budweiser Derek Jeter and Harry…the stuff we’re doing for Budweiser is insane. We’ve really crushed sales, we’re changing a tough brand in the US, but sour patch kids became the fastest growing candy in 20 years.

Audience member: I’m a course creator and I also help entrepreneurs teach better. So their students get better results. I’m a little bit at a crossroads. I heard you talking about being in a space that’s a little over crowded. So course creation is a little that, right. I see though, the chance to make better teachers, to make their products better. That’s one thing, and I think I could do really well there. But I’m also around the opportunity of, I’m a past tenure track professor and I left academia. As I was leaving fellow professors were like, “You figured it out. Go.” I also feel a calling to help professors kind of do what I do.

Gary: You should definitely do that.

Audience member: That scares the [expletive] out of me. But this is easier. Helping entrepreneurs is so easy.

Gary: No [expletive] Linds. But this is back to that….you have to decide whether you…by the way, I have a crazy thing to tell you based on something I’ve been looking at.

Audience member: Please tell me.

Gary: The professors are about to become easier. Because they’re all about to go out of business.

Audience member: It’s a sinking ship and the ones who know it…

Gary: This is the thing I wrote about in Crush it. I said, all these newspapers and magazines are in deep [expletive]. It’s that the writers are going to be better, not worse, they think they’re going to…..these professors are about to get the money they deserve. Eat [expletive] for 36 months, leave money on the table that was easy from the entrepreneurs that are never going to make it, and go help the professors.

Audience member: What’s my first move?

Gary: you’re first move is to build the business structure. What’s the business that you want to do? Do you want to be Ted Conferences? Do you want to be a course? Do you want to teach one on one? Do you want to sell a product?  I mean, you need to decide what you are.

Audience member: I want to help them plan an exit strategy and to realize that there’s actually money. That there’s a lot of professors that could probably make courses really good.

Gary: That’s what you should do. So charge them money for your knowledge if that’s what you want to do. And you know you can put that in 7 different buckets. I’m telling you right now, you’re walking right into what is going to be an enormously large space, and the fact that you were one of them, do you know how much I kill with small businesses? Not because it’s funny and ha ha. It’s because I was one of them.

Audience member: Hey Gary, I’m Kaelin. This is crazy to literally be face to face with you right now, so thank you so much for answering my question. One of the reasons that I love you so much and love following you so much is I really resonate with the whole chip on the shoulder thing. That’s what drives everything that I do. I grew up super poor, like standing here with all these people right now is just insanely surreal.

Gary: And you want to kill them, right?

Audience member: I don’t want to kill them. I want to [expletive] work with all of you. Hit me up, please. But the thing that’s happened is I feel like an entrepreneur on accident, honestly. And the thing that I love to do is the business that I do that’s making me money. But lately I’ve started being way more vulnerable about the whole chip on the shoulder thing and telling my story. And that’s resonating with a lot of people, but that is [expletive] hard. I hate doing that. I’m very introverted; I don’t like being out there that much. But that’s what seems to be making the biggest impact.

Gary:  I have great news, it’s binary. Either you do more of it and get used to it and like everything in life, once you get used to it, it just becomes your norm and you didn’t realize. You may never be the most extraverted, but you just….everybody here could be a better singer, dancer, or basketball player. They may not become Lebron, but if you do it every day, you get better. You keep putting yourself out there every day, you’ll get better.

So you can either choose to do that, or you could say, “I don’t like it. I’ll leave the money on the table because I love the privacy and the private life and not having to engage.” And you do that. It’s your choice. You’re in charge.

Audience member: Are you an advocate for doing what’s harder, though? If it’s going to make an impact?

Gary: I’m an advocate on doing what you want to do. Not because I said so, or your friend said so. I’m advocate of you doing what you want to be doing. But I always encourage to taste more, because it works.  Do you know how many people here hate oysters but have never had one? I think about that [expletive] every day.  That’s how I think about business. You’ve made a judgment on something, yet, you’ve never done it. You know what I’m going to say. You’ve consumed it. I already know you’re going to do more of it, because you’ve already done the hardest part, which is you’ve done it. You’re now a foregone conclusion to me KP.  You’re just going to keep doing it.

Audience member: I love that you just called me that. Thank you.

Gary: That’s what you’re going to do. You’re just looking for me to give you a little more juice to do it a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, which is amazing and I’m thrilled to do it. Because it’s [expletive] you. Here you go. Go.

Audience member: just really quickly, is there anything that is hard for you? Your mindset, the way that you think about things, you’re like, “I am confident, I can do this.” But is it hard to get up in the morning sometimes? Is anything hard at all.

Gary: Spelling is [expletive] impossible. I can’t read for [expletive]. If I was reading from a teleprompter right now, I would crumble and be out of here. Can’t read for [expletive]. You know fencing probably is hard. I’m really way below average in swimming. Poor swimmer, always think [expletive] I’ll be super pissed if that’s how….if I die because we get [expletive] up, somebody hits a….and I have to swim further than everybody. Yeah, there’s [expletive]. You know why you asked that question?

Audience member: Validation?

Gary: No why you asked me of that question. Validation the first part, the second part. You’re asking me that, as somebody who knows a lot about me, because I don’t spend any time on it. We all suck at [expletive]. I don’t care how you judge mine. You’ve got [expletive] too. So because I don’t care about that, the only reason people spend time on their weaknesses is because everyone else’s opinion on it that they’re trying to avoid. I don’t care about your opinion about my weakness because I know you’ve got them too. So let’s just move on.

Audience member: thank you so much. Can I get a photo with you when you’re done?

Gary: Yes.

Audience member: Hey Gary, I swim a lot. So if you ever need to get certified, let me know. I’m 37, so I’m not where you are age wise, but I’ve been lucky a few times in life and I’ve done well and done not so well and everything, and I have done well. I guess my question is, it’s always the concept of the encore, you know when my one company, I’ve had 8 digit companies before and now I’m launching another one. And I guess it’s like, how do you get into it, make bets on it, but feel accomplished if you don’t outdo your last time?

Gary: Because I do not even remotely think that the financial part is the way I score it. You know what I mean. That’s really simple. Outdoing the last one is, the way you’re, I’m listening to your words. The way you’re positioning it like, if you’re putting pressure on, I need a 9er, then you’re probably going to….you know what’s funny about positioning a 9er when you’ve had an 8er? It’s hard to get going.

Audience member: That’s probably the challenge.

Gary: I know exactly what’s going on with you Charles. That’s why I’m asking you, are you doing the ambition of a 9 or 10 because you see the white space and you’re going to strike like a [expletive] cobra? Or is it because you really just want to [expletive] do it? So let me give you an example what I’ve been doing for the last 7 years. I don’t love it. Client services. Having a 32 year old brand manager from the University of Chicago telling me what she should do with Captain Crunch when she can’t sell [expletive].

Audience member: I’m actually from the U of C, so…

Gary: Not fun for me, I know why I’m doing it. I decided at 35, 36 that I was going to spend 10 years of my prime as a business person building a death star of communication by eating [expletive] and building a very big business. And then I was going to point that death star, the Vayner X machine against the Crohns and Colitis foundation, because my brother has it and I want to cure it. Some business that somebody comes along but didn’t know how to run it, so I bought it for a million and I can get it to a hundred.

But I realized 6, 7 years ago, [expletive] I now know who I am, let me build the biggest infrastructure in the world around it and then whether it’s to help hurricane victims, or sell sneakers, I’m going to be able to point this [expletive] thing. So for me, I don’t look at me ebada, I don’t care how much we’re growing. I’ve made a 20 year decision that I’m in the process of and I’m going execute against that. And the numbers and dollars are just not the way I score.

If you’ve been lucky enough to have the success you’ve had and you’re this young, I would take a big step back and try to figure out, what is the most fun or the most macro thesis you can come up with.

Audience member: Great, thanks.

Gary: Guys, thank you for having me, this was fun. Thank you.

Sep 27, 2017

Listen in on live Q&A from Gary Vaynerchuk (Part 1 of 2)

On this special episode of Marketing Secrets Podcast you will get to hear the first half of the Q&A section of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation at the viral video launch event. Here are some of the questions Gary answers:

  • What he sees happening with artificial intelligence and robots in the next 5 years.
  • What Gary’s latest strategies are for shows on both YouTube and Facebook.
  • And What Gary recommends for taking your preferred platform and skyrocketing your numbers.

So listen to this first half of Gary’s Q&A and tune in for the second half tomorrow.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. For the next two episodes I’ve got some exciting things for you. As you know we just got done with our viral video launch event, which turned out amazing. And our keynote speaker was Gary Vaynerchuk, and in his contract he said we are not allowed to stream nor share his presentation, but then he did the presentation and messaged me after and said, “That was probably one of the best presentations I’ve ever given.” I was like, “Sweet man, can I promote it on the podcast?” and he was like, “You know what, go for it.”

So that is what’s happening, so we actually have his presentation. The first 15-20 minutes of his presentation he kind of just rambled for a bit, but didn’t really have…. I think he was just trying to figure out what he wanted to talk about. And then he switched to Q&A for the next hour and a half. And Gary’s the kind of Q&A and it was really, really good.

So what I’m going to is, we pulled out the Q&A, so I’m going to do 45 minute episodes here for you. But for all of you, my fans and followers and people who listen to me, you know I keep my podcast nice and clean, I don’t swear or curse or anything, Gary does a lot. So I had my brother go through and bleep out all the bad words, so hopefully it will still be PG rated for all the kids at home. And that’s kind of the game plan.

So hopefully you enjoy this episode of the podcast, appreciate you all and have fun listening to Gary.

Audience member: My question is, I know you say it’s going to end all with robots killing everybody. Until then, what role do you think artificial intelligence and robots have and are going to have in the next 5 years in the marketing and digital marketing space?
Gary: Huge. Even in the 15 minutes that I’ve gotten a better taste of what these characters are up to, they’re going to love it. The math people are going to love it because machine learning and AI just do [expletive] that we shouldn’t be doing. It’s just efficiency. It’s going to have an enormous thing.

But the good news is there’s so much that we still can do. So basically how I think about ML and AI, at the pad, get me to [expletive] third and half base. And I’ll take care of the rest. And whatever AI can do for that, cool. And whatever low priced employees can do, cool. But everybody is spending way too much money to get to third and a half base and then the magic is the last part.

So that’s what AI’s going to mean for everybody here. There’s a lot of dumb [expletive] that people have assistants for or managers for, that’s nonsense. Zero value that the biggest AI companies in the world are going to get their nut off on.

Audience member: It’s really exciting to be here in this room with you and everyone here. This is awesome. I’m really…experiences that help people save time are awesome, I’m really interested in experiences that are time bending, help people lose time. The world’s most connective music festival where festival goers are connecting with each other like never before and with the artist and the artist with their fans. So in 2021, music festivals, connection, the best time of people’s lives, what do you see happening in the context of music festivals that you’re excited about and that you’re excited about creating?

Gary: If I dissect that right, a couple of things. One thing I’m super fascinated by that I would have never seen, by the way, I never spend any time predicting like voice….not predicting [expletive] that’s happening. What I think I’m good at is recognizing when it’s practically and then going pot committed right. Which means you’ll lose money for a couple of years and then get it. You don’t lose for 7 years and never get there.

The thing that’s been super fascinating to me, which I never would have thought, just [expletive] social media is making people do more [expletive] in real life. Like literally some dude is hiking right now just for the [expletive] Instagram photo. So what’s been amazing about music festivals is because everybody here now is not only themselves, but they’re the PR agent of themselves for what they’re putting out, people are going to more concerts than ever because of that whole dynamic.

I think what you’re alluding to is kind of like, what’s going to happen in society? Like in general, like mixed reality and things of that nature, you know it’s going to be funny. Technology is making music, going to music grow, and then it’s going to take it away, but I don’t think it’s as soon as 2021. But I think that right now a lot of music festivals are failing because they all have the same [expletive] acts and it’s just supply and demand.

So when you were first, 4, 5, and 6 years ago, you went and now there’s 87 micro festivals and big companies sign the same 13 artists and they’re [expletive]. So I think there’s a huge white space for the next generation of that. Like the people that the streets [expletive] with, and then I think ultimately it’s going to be interesting in general what happens when we live in a mixed reality world.

I think the big albatross, the only thing that’s going to break the internet is VR. But VR is quite a ways a way. Nobody here spends an hour on VR in a month, in real life. So we’re a long, it takes time. Behavior takes time. But eventually when we’re switching between completely virtual, like I don’t even see you guys right now, my contact lenses have me in Afghanistan. Switch it off, I’m right here. Switch it off and it’s AR and Santa Claus is sitting right there, you know, Santa. You know, that world I think is super interesting and is going to change all our businesses. Thanks man.

Audience member: Gary, you just came back from August and you said, I’m bringing YouTube Fire, new shows are coming out and you took the Ask Gary V. show to Facebook only. So what are your latest strategies and why for both YouTube and Facebook?

Gary: I think you have to make content that is native to the platform you put it out on. I’ve always thought about that, I [expletive] wrote a book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook five years ago on this. I wasn’t doing that. So now that the Ask Gary V. Show is on Facebook watch, and the Daily V is on YouTube when DRock, whenever the [expletive]… DRock? Now I can say, “what’s up YouTube?” Where I couldn’t do that before. And those little nuances [expletive] matter.

All the action is in those little edges, so I broke them up mainly because of Facebook video. Now that there’s watch I’m fascinated. Any of you watch a show yet on Facebook Watch? Just raise your hands, just curious. Higher. So this intrigues me. Everybody here has to watch one. Not because, I don’t watch [expletive]. I’ve watched one, the Ball Family, because I just want to see what the [expletive] they’re doing. To me this is the most interesting thing that I’m doing that the good market isn’t. You’ve gotta taste everything. If you want to win and [expletive] there’s no way you’re [expletive] in Boise Idaho if you don’t want to win right now. I mean that.

When I think about who’s here, [expletive] these people are hungry. So to me, 19 hands, which means maybe 31 because people get shy, two weeks into Facebook Watch, haven’t watched. That’s it. That’s where I play. That’s my margin. That’s why I did it. Because I wanted to make it native, I have two active shows. I needed to do something on Facebook. And because I watched Facebook……actually [expletive] I’ll tell you, it’s not fully announced yet, but we’ll see how thing goes, but because I watched Watch, and I watched it for kind of four days in a row, looked and understood what the [expletive] they were doing, so I sent them an email, pitched them a show and they bought it.

So now I’ll have, kind of anybody can put a show on Facebook, a page, a Watch page, which everybody should be doing here. I’ll have my YouTube show and now I’m going to have a produced by Facebook show that’s going to get big even more, listen man. I talk and doing and hustling and all this, I just do so much more than I talk, which is [expletive] crazy because my mouth is always running, but I’m just doing. I’m doing, doing, doing because I’m tasting, I’m tasting. I never think I’m fancy.

So many people in here, I know you, so many people here make it a little bit and get fancy and stop doing the [expletive] that go them there. That’s the minute you’re [expletive] dead.

Audience member: I have a question, there’s a guy I follow online, you might have heard of him. His name’s Gary Vaynerchuk, and he told me to push all in on whatever it is that you’re good at. So I’m making this big push as Marshall Live, I’m going to everything live. Like straight to ask me questions, I love that aspect of your brand. So the question is, if everything’s moving to voice, is Live streaming podcast going to end up being bigger than iTunes, or a recording you can come back to?

Gary: so first of all, you said something interesting that we all do. If everything is moving to voice, nothing is everything. We will always have the written word. Do you know how much virility there is through long form written Facebook and instagram posts? If you’re sitting here and you can write, write long [expletive] posts on Facebook and Istagram and watch what the [expletive] happens. We’re humans, we’ve been around a long [expletive] time bro. Marshall, written word, audio, video [expletive] locked in. Got it?

It’s not like you’re going to lose it. [expletive] If you’re great at smoke signals, get the [expletive] up there. Communication doesn’t change, the pillars of communication are set. Where we communicate changes. And then you have to be contextual, right. Some people are incredible at making a 6 second video, I keep looking at him because it’s fun to see him and I haven’t seen him in a while. Others aren’t.

I can’t put two [expletive] sentences together in my life. I have 5 New York Times bestselling books because I have a ghost writer. Because I didn’t try to become a great writer when the blogging thing happened, because I bet on my strengths. I do believe everybody here should bet on their strengths and surround themselves with their weaknesses. I think, back to an earlier question, I think AI and machine learning is going to help a lot of us in here who are creative, close the gap on a lot of our weaknesses, which is going to be really awesome.

Audience member: I think a lot of people in here, using Clickfunnels or not, have kind of come into a lot more money than they have ever been used to making. In one of your previous sentences you said, “Yeah, you only care about money and all the sudden you’re 47…” But then you didn’t finish your sentence. I was hoping to hear you elaborate on that.

Gary: Sure. I’m sure a lot of people here who have come into money. It’s not as great as advertized for a lot of people. Some people love it. They like watches and lambo’s and houses and that [expletive] rad, mazel tov. Other people don’t, and you start questioning what the [expletive], right. Because when you’ve got nothing and you’re on the come up and you’ve got numbers in your head, whether it’s a million or 5 or 3, whatever the [expletive] it is, it’s [expletive] empty when you get there for a lot of people.

So you know, I’m just trying to make sure people are being thoughtful. Much like what I just said to Marshall, life is pretty simple. People play on legacy, family, money, there’s just a couple pillars, I just think in our space right now. I know a lot of you have heard me rant on this. I do think entrepreneurship has taken a turn towards club promotion. And that’s just dangerous. It’s just dangerous for the people that are going….I don’t give a [expletive], it’s dangerous because people need to realize they need to build a business, not a perception that they’re good at business.

When the market crashes, nobody’s going to Vegas with you when you work at Bank of [expletive] America. You know, I’m just trying to get people to be more thoughtful.

Audience member: Russell and you are two……Last year I was selling websites, I was getting really frustrated that I wasn’t helping people. It felt like they weren’t growing their sales, but they had a really nice site. So you guys inspired me to start a podcast, didn’t know exactly what for, but s

Gary: You’re like, “[expletive] it, those guys are doing it. I will too.”

Audience member: More along the lines of, I was listening to a podcast in the gym, host asks the other guy, “what would you tell your 20 year old self?” and the guy answered, “I would divorce my wife earlier.” I was super pissed off, I’m married with two young kids and wanted to have a podcast from a different perspective. So a year later, thank God, two weeks ago I got to publish my interview with Russell. I’ve had Dean Graziosi …..and  so my question is, number one is how do you grow even further? And number two is not just for me, but anybody starting or in progress, what should your priorities be?

Gary: So let’s see here. You know, both of those things I can’t answer because you need to decide. First of all you have to define growing for me. Is growing being a top 50 podcaster? We all get into our micro gains, and by the way I think micro gains are good. Little short goals, micro. It’s kind of good. You scratch it, it’s fun for a little bit. I think you gotta have your macro point of view. If you’re telling me the truth, like you felt the conversations were going in the wrong directions and you wanted to go a different place, well the answer to your question is just do it every day until you’re dead. That’s my plan.

My plan is hopefully it gets me to this one little funny weird thing that I want to buy a football team. But other than that, my plan is to put out [expletive] for free that is historically correct, so I can continue to live the life I’m living which is, I made the money I wanted to make a long time ago, but getting 50, 60, 70 emails, 80 emails a day of people like, “[expletive] you helped me.” That’s just intoxicating. That’s what gets me off.

And by the way, I’m not sure that, I understand why that wouldn’t be meaningful to someone else. So you just have to do what you have to do for yourself. That’s how you grow, by consistency. You’re a year in, you grow when you’re 19 years into your podcast.

Audience member: More specifically, in terms of actual numbers and taking what you’ve done and now specifically on the number aspect of it, what do you recommend in terms of taking your platform and kind of skyrocketing numbers?

Gary: Buy underpriced attention. Whether that’s buying ads on Facebook and Snapchat right now because they’re underpriced. If that’s working with influencers, because many are still underpriced. Whether that’s taking the high risk of trying to make a ten to fifty thousand version of what you just saw, they’re incredible video. Because that one video can be your Dollar Shave Club of your brand.

Saying yes to everything. If you want it, if you’re hungry you do what I did which is 4 years ago, I didn’t jump into podcasting right away. The first two years I just went on everyone’s. I could have went to sleep at 11 pm or I could have went on Lewis Howes podcast at 11pm. That was a decision. It’s just about awareness. Where are the eyeballs? Just putting your time and effort into that. Some of it’s free, some of it costs money.

Audience member: Hey Gary. My first time seeing you, you’re honesty is so beautiful and it’s so wonderful listening to you. If someone was trying to build their brand and get a podcast and get more into Facebook and all these sort of things. What kind of tips do you have for building a powerhouse team around you to help you accomplish all these things?

Gary: First there has to be, stay here, first it has to be practical. So some people in here can afford people, other people can’t. So they either have to learn how to do it themselves by spending hours looking at YouTube videos on how to or read. Or finding people, we’re an incredible era right now. There’s so many kids 14-21 that want to be creators and think it’s cool to do it for free. You just need to test and learn.

Everybody’s over thinking. Just do. I don’t know, post right now. Literally right now, as soon as you sit down. Go on [expletive] whatever platform has the most, go on all of them and be like, I’m looking for a video and audio intern and see what the [expletive] happens. Again, I always tell people, watch what I do, not what I say. I know a lot of, there’s a good amount of people here that follow me, randomly out of nowhere…. I [expletive] tweeted today, “Does anybody make customizable retail floor mats?” I needed a retail floor mat. You do? Good. Do you do them for free in exchange for some awareness?

I would ask and then try somebody. The amount of people I’ve hired when it was early in something and I didn’t know if they were good or bad, I just thought it was much smarter to just do it and then figure out if it was working. And then I’m like, oh [expletive] they sucked. I’m just not scared to waste money or time and everybody’s petrified because you worry about what other people think about you. That’s why, if you’re curious. That’s the [expletive] answer. That’s [expletive]. That’s the [expletive] answer.

Your answer is so easy. How do you build a team? Hire some [expletive] people, bro. But it’s like, you’re like, I don’t understand. People are scared to get “had” because they don’t get it. Okay, put in a [expletive] load of time to learn the craft or bring someone in and watch what they’re doing carefully instead of outsourcing it and falling asleep because you’re all [expletive] income and I got a team doing (bleep, bleep, bleep) stupid. Got it?

Audience member: Hey Gary, my name is Jay and I run the Inner Changemaker podcast and I want to ask a question that goes a little deeper in what you’re saying in terms of sound and watching what you do. We’ve noticed that you’ve launched a couple other podcasts outside of Ask Gary V.

Gary: Within my experience? Like the brown paper bags and all that [expletive]?

Audience member: The brown paper bags, kind of like the 365 daily.

Gary: the 365 is on the Lexus skill, briefing excuse me. I’ve been doing sub-branding in my podcast because I’m testing to see if there’s traction and I’ll spin the amount and create new pillars.

Audience member: Okay, so I guess my real question is, where content creators started on one platform, for example I started an interview based show, you have a Q&A show…If you kind of have that urge to branch out……

Gary: Do it within the interview show because you have an audience there. Don’t worry that you may lose a couple of people. Like right now, as I’m sure everybody has seen, for two strategic reasons, out of nowhere I’m talking a lot more than I should be about wine. I’m doing it for a reason. There is no question that there are people unfollowing me because, “Yo bro, I [expletive] came here to [expletive] get pumped up because I have no [expletive] juice. What the [expletive] are you trying to sell me actual juice?”

But I don’t give a [expletive] because I’m playing a macro game, I don’t want to lose people from it. I’m sad, I don’t want to disrespect your attention and know what you came for. But I need to test something and this is what I have. So I think it’s better off for you to try it, because one, you may hit pay dirt. One thing a lot of people don’t realize is your numbers look good, but they’re disguising the fact that you’ve plateau’d and you’re tired.

So I think you try it within it, you take the risk of a little decline for enormous upside. Because you can always go back. Instead of starting a whole new thing that’s going to take energy. Got it?

Audience member: My name is Prince, I own a company called Art of Visuals, we have over a million content creators in 122 countries. You said something earlier about everyone from 14-22 wants to be a content creator, I absolutely agree with that and have tons of those people in my community. The problem is with there being so many content creators now, how do these content creators, how do they create a business? How do they make money when they have thousands of people doing it for free etc.

Gary: By being better. Guys, it’s supply and demand. And then once there’s too much supply, you have to be the best. Just move onto the next thing. I bought every Google Adwords of every wine term for 5 cents a click the day it started. That was good. Then everybody jumped on and they started becoming $2, $3, and $4 words and it became different. I had to be better, I had to be more crafty.

Then what I started doing, was the day the wine spectator would come out with good scores, we would buy that exact wine, that exact vintage, that became our new albatross for a year or two before everybody caught up. When a market is mature you’ve got to better.

Audience member: Do you think it’s good enough just to be a content creator, or do you think these content creators need to also have products and other things that they’re pushing as well?

Gary: If you’re [expletive] Steven Spielberg, you probably could end up just being a content creator. But if you’re like Sal, you’ve got to consider other revenue streams. It’s just very basic business. Supply and demand, Prince. 4 years ago there were people that landgrabbed, they were good and they were first. It’s just real estate. If you were the people that bought Malibu beachfront property first, you won. You won, you made money. But there was a reason you were the first. It wasn’t [expletive] Malibu yet, Prince. Now people who buy Malibu beachfront properties, they’re just better.

So all those kids, that they’re going to aspire to be the next this, they’ve got a rude awakening. To be the next this, you’ve got to be 5 times better. It’s evolution. When people debate these athletes versus other, these athletes would destroy every athlete from every other generations. Because they work out 24/7 now. They have data now. It hurts my feelings too that my childhood…..they would get [expletive] destroyed. Lebron would step on people’s heads in the 80’s. People don’t get it. It’s [expletive] evolution.

Audience member: I don’t really have an ask for you. I’ve watched your stuff a ton, I just want to say thank you for giving me the permission to pursue my passion and now do what I love everyday and spend time with my family and make things. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say thank you, because I don’t know if I’ll ever see you. If you ever want to play bubble hockey, I’ll destroy you. I know that say that you…..

Gary: Are you filming this? Where do you live….First of all

Audience member: I live here. There’s a spot right down the street I can take you to play. I’m a winner in Boise, Idaho Gary.

Gary: That’s going to happen now. It’s so crazy. You’re funny, you’re smart, you know me. You know that now I’m getting….now I’m blacked out and want to destroy your face. But the only, what’s more interesting though, your [expletive] whalers  hat is [expletive] me up because I’m like, man he’s got a Hartford Whalers hat, this team hasn’t been in the league for 20 [expletive] years, he probably is awesome at bubble hockey.

I’m going to do something for real, based on what you just said. I want you to come to Vayner media for a day, I’ll pay for your flight and hotel and during that day we’ll play bubble hockey and we’ll see what’s up.

Audience member: Hello Gary, I first want to say thank you to both you and Russell. You two are kind of like the Jesus of marketing and branding.  I come from a poor country, Dominican Republic, and if it wasn’t for you two, I wouldn’t be here. So I just wanted to say thank you.

So my question is what are you doing in other languages? Because right now, my main language is in Spanish and I see a blue ocean. Russell’s always talking about a blue ocean, and other language is ridiculous, the blue ocean that there is. Marketing, fitness, whatever it is, you name it, the ocean is blue. So I want to know what you’re doing because I’m going balls deep into Spanish.

Gary: What I’ve been doing over the last 6 months, I’ve poured an ungodly amount of money into infrastructure to transcribe all my content into a ton of languages and pay distribution in them. I’m spending an enormous…I’m going to Singapore, which is my second trip to Asia in the last 3 months. I’m going to mainland China in January, I’m going to India in February. I’m spending an enormous amount of time, and I’ll spend millions of dollars next year just on the transcription and distribution of the content that I’m natively making in America in the English language. So a solid amount.

Audience member: Okay, there is also influence marketers in other language. It’s cheap in English, in Spanish is pennies on the buck.

Gary: Again, because I just can’t. I miss him, I haven’t seen him. I remember when Jerome and I, I was like, “Jerome you need to go and [expletive] figure out who these [expletive] influencers are in Mexico because even in music right now, there’s so many.” I’m spending a lot, maybe you guys are paying attention because I love hip hop, I’m spending more time with these artists, I keep telling them that, “you need to go down to south America. There are so many artists there that are really popping, you have the leverage because the brand of America. They’re much bigger artists than you, but you’re America. So you’re automatically bigger than them.” I mean it’s very…..I totally agree.

Audience member: Gary, Caleb Maddix’s dad, I want to thank you personally for your impact in his life. Between you and Russell Brunson, seriously. I mean, coming from a dad, there’s no way I can repay you. The character that you’ve taught him, I thank you for that.  I have a two part question. One, you gave him some advice last time you were with him about patience, and I hear you talk about that a lot. And I want to know as a dad, can you expound a little bit more on that. And I’ll wait til you answer that, and I have one more part about that.

Gary: you know it’s super fun for some of us in this space. We’re literally watching your son grow up. I literally just saw him like, [expletive] dude, you don’t look 14 anymore. Now he’s hanging around with all these [expletive] faces. So he’s going to get into trouble. Like patience is important because he’s got more swag now. He’s sneaker game is stronger. He’s going into that time of his life where dumb [expletive] decisions are going to be made because he’s making decisions to make short term cash because he’s trying to arbitrage it for other things in his life.

Why do I preach patience? Because it’s the only thing that keeps people away from being straight (bleep, bleep)holes.

Audience member: That’s good. I like it. So what did your dad do? You talked about….

Gary: I didn’t have my dad in my life. I luckily still have my dad in my life, but I didn’t know my dad until I started working at the liquor store. My dad left before I woke up and came home after I slept. As a matter of fact, it’s probably funny how I feel about you guys, it’s fun to watch because I didn’t have that. But what my dad did do for me, ironically, is because I have that kind of salesmanship and charisma, I was completely full of [expletive].

I would be, everything I make fun of subtly, I would be if it wasn’t for my dad. Because at 14-15 I went into that liquor store, and you walk into…it was called shoppers discount liquors back there. I was 14 years old, I looked 9. You’d walk in and be like, “Do you have this product?” and I’d be like, “Yeah we have…” Because I was already full sales kid, I’m like, “We have that product.” But I knew we made more money on this one, I was like, “But this one’s better. I have it.” It was phenomenal, I’m 14.

People are like, “you have it.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s my dad’s store. I taste it.” I don’t think I…..talk about making [expletive] up, I don’t think I said a real thing once.  So my dad took me and taught me that. My dad thinks embellishing is straight lying and he suffocated me over a three year period. That really changed the course of my life. And I think a lot of my success comes from, I have all the skill sets of that character, but between being old country and really my dad not allowing me to be that guy. So that’s what he did for me.

And I think that’s what you, as a dad, you need to just keep watching him evolve and when he goes into territories that you think are historically incorrect, not new ideas and doing new [expletive]. No, tried and true [expletive] human dynamics that win and lose. That’s how you try to guide it.

Audience member:  One more if you don’t mind. I’m sure a lot of these people probably have kids as well. So your dad was a powerful business man, and you had a lot of ideas and passion at a young age. What did he do to not…how did you guys balance that? Was that decision of him making you stop selling baseball cards to come work in the liquor store, was that the right decision? Would you do that for your kids? I’m only asking out of curiosity because when I hear that I’m just very curious about it.

Gary: I get it, it’s a tricky one man. First of all, we’re an insular family. We’re an immigrant family. We didn’t know [expletive]. There was no internet.  We didn’t know anything. We literally just thought when you turn 14 you go work at the store. We were merchants. You know people like that, you know that cliché story. It’s just what it was. It was my 14th birthday, it was [expletive] time.

My D’s and F’s in school weren’t helping me with any compelling reason that I could get out of it. As far as how we did it, we [expletive] fought. I fought for every inch I had and then I got lucky. What happened was, when I came from college, my dad had saved up a lot of money through these years and started building a dream house for him and my mom. And he took that year off, and he was just not around. And that year I took the business from 3 to 10 million in sales. And that was the end of the debate.

Audience member: My name is Sarah, I’m really enjoying your speech so thank you. I was wondering, in retrospect, you’ve built a brand around yourself and your name, is that what you would recommend looking forward? Or rather more of a brand around a brand?

Gary: I think you have to do both if you’re going to build it around yourself. Because what you’re alluding to is you can get pigeon holed and you can live or die by the person. I think a lot of people forget with me, I built my library first, Gary V. came later.  So it’s not like I went the Caleb route per se, I didn’t come up with the game. I know how to build….I’m serious, it’s a little [expletive] up now, I don’t think I could pull it off, but I kind of want to….

Actually, you just inspired me Sarah. I’m going to build a 25 million dollar business in the next three years, that nobody knows is mine, just to remind everybody for myself, because I’m weird like that and I need it, that I build businesses. Now, let me promise everybody in this room one thing. Fame is the number one arbitrage in our society. Fame, it’s not Snapchat ads, not being the first result on Google. Fame, full brand awareness is the number one arbitrage. So I built my brand as a bus-dev machine.

Audience member: Sure. Well, I’m glad I can inspire you. Let me know if you need a goalie in your bubble hockey.

Gary: I might, he’s wearing a Whalers hat, I’m scared.

Audience member: Hi Gary, I’m Rachel, that was cool for a second and then it wasn’t. So I’m the mom of two young daughters, I’ve got a third on the way and it’s awesome. Being a parent is obviously quite challenging as an entrepreneur. You talk a lot about what you were taught through entrepreneurship through your dad’s mistakes and successes and you’ve had a lot of success as an entrepreneur.

So for your…you have two kids right? What are the three main things that you hope that they get out of life and how are you going to instill those three principles into them?

Gary: The biggest reason I’m obsessed with entrepreneurship is it’s the clearest and most obvious thing that allows you to do the following. Which is do what you want to do today. Waking up and being able to do whatever the [expletive] you want to do is incredible. So the only thing that I want for my kids through that standpoint is the ability to do what they want to do everyday.

Now what scares me about that, they’re probably going to have that no matter what because they’re going to inherit extreme wealth. So much so that I’ve been having feelings……I used to make fun of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in my head of like, “you’re going to donate 99% of your money?” It’s funny, you talk [expletive] until you live [expletive].

Now I’m like, [expletive] I don’t want to give these kids (bleep, bleep) that. Because rich kids have a huge disadvantage because when I wanted Sega Genesis in 1989, my mom’s like, “cool, go get it.” You know, when I wanted to go to a Knicks game I had to sell baseball cards [expletive] in [expletive] sit in the [expletive], you know [expletive] top row [expletive] Carmello’s coming over my Hampton’s house to play with Zander. It’s [expletive] up.

So I don’t know what. Here are the things I give a [expletive]. Number one, more than anything, and I will kill them, murder, go to jail. They have to be kind. Kindness is the most important. Number two if I ever see them, even an inkling, even an innuendo, even a subtle little joke of imposing my or my wife’s wealth on somebody else because they think they’re part of that, I will break their [expletive] neck.

And then number three, I will not raise them in the politically correct environment we live in now. They know there is no such thing as fourth place trophies or participation prizes. Now if they want to be non profit. They’re going to look at daddy’s mountain and they’re like, “[expletive] that.” Or they’re may be, do what I do. “My dad’s seems big, mine’s going to be a hell of a lot bigger.” Other people have made it bigger than me and kids have done this, they’re going to look at that and they’re going to say, “[expletive] that. I’m going the other way. I’m building schools in Afghanistan.” Or they’re going to be like, “[expletive] it, I’m going to climb that mountain. I’m going to stick it to big mouth.”

I don’t care. I don’t need my kids to be entrepreneurs. I just need them to be as lucky as…..my mom, I got D’s and F’s. Every immigrant got good grades in the 80’s. There’s a couple of people a little older here, there was no entrepreneurship, school. Good school. That was it. My mom spit in the face of all those parents that made fun of my D’s and F’s and gave me ear cover to be me and it really [expletive] worked out. Not only for me, but the world became it.

If my kids want to paint in tomato sauce, I will back them to the earth’s end, as long as that’s really why they’re doing it. Not because they’re doing something to run away from something. Just blind support as long as they’re kind.

Audience member: And the last thing I wanted to say is I’m going to buy the Minnesota Vikings, so I’ll see you in the owner’s club.

Gary: No, no, no. Superbowl. Jets, Vikings 2047, I’ll see you there.

Audience member: My question is about time. You’re an angel investor in 100 companies, you have books and an 800 person agency and a family. It’s unreal to watch how much content you’re putting out. How do you choose between the thousands of startup pitches you’re getting and which interview to do or which speaking events to do? There’s just so much.

Gary: It’s 100% blind belief in my intuition. You know this. Everyone’s hustling. Eventually you lose, eventually you don’t have enough time to do the opportunity, so you’re crippled by opportunity. You just have to go that route; otherwise you’re going to spend all your time thinking about the process to make the best decision. And you’re going to waste being able to do four things that would have included the two things you’ve been debating for the last [expletive] day.

So just the belief in my intuition. And then lots of making fun of yourself. This one’s a perfect example. I have to, talk about time, my son has a birthday now, he’s an august birthday, I didn’t realize it was this Saturday, and I think it actually came after we booked this, but all the money from this talk is going into the [expletive]. I was originally going to go to Seattle, now I have to take a private plane out to…. I just [expletive] it up. And the whole day I’m just complaining, I’m like “I’m a [expletive] idiot.”

So you’re not always going to make it right. You’re always going to play micro/macro, but I think everybody’s saying no. Everybody’s saying no to [expletive] because they think they’re being thoughtful or they’re smart. You know how many people are saying no that aren’t even fancy enough to say yes yet? So I just say yes, man. A lot.

Audience member: Great to meet you. I have a two part name, Frank Jay. I want to appreciate you and your dedication, your consistency and your communication. We own a company called International Tribe design where we bring a style of communication, which is very simple but yet rare in this society, which is honesty and authenticity. I feel like you embody this. And I feel like a lot of us entrepreneurs, well at least for me, it was like shall I present myself strategically or authentically? What I want to ask you, the first part of the question. What do you think sells more influences more people, authentic honesty, or strategic marketing, neurolinguistic program and communication?

Gary:  I think in the short term it’s a real battle. I think either could win. I think in the 30 year macro, the radical candor authentic way always wins. And the thing that [expletive] with people is a lot of people can win on strategic, you’re being very politically correct. A lot of people can win on bull[expletive]. Play it out for four years, get out of the game with their chips and win. Not a lot of people can though. But then once you know of one of those examples, it sounds exciting, because it’s a [expletive]load easier.

Audience member: and what do you think the future is for collaboration versus competition? So what we’re all about is collaboration, let’s bring us all together. I think we can all do great things as a team.

Gary:  I think both will work. Competition matters, I want to destroy [expletive] Whaler hat, I wanna kill [expletive]. I want to kill Viking’s girl. Competition matters. Zenning this all out, but I’ll tell you in real life, Terroga five. David Terroga, phenomenal business man, has an incredible angency, he’s going to get his. Let me tell you one thing that a lot of you are making mistakes because you’re saying [expletive] behind people’s backs. You can’t stop winners from winning. Winners win.

I don’t remember when it became obvious to me, but it’s unbelievable. If I see a winner, I’m like, she’s a winner. It’s binary, even if she’s taking David Terroga. Winning in my world alongside Vayner Media, I’m pumped. I’m happy for him. Because if you’re also a winner, you’re going to always eat. Winners win. A lot of people see somebody who’s a winner and they’re not there yet, or they feel like they’re taking away from them and they’re talking [expletive] and really all that’s doing is exposing where you’re at. It’s unbelievable.

I hang out with a lot of people, people start yapping a little. I’m like, winners win. So unless you’re doing something really not noble or something of that nature, winners win. So I think that I collaborate with other winners that take from me. Complex and vice and they’re going to win. You’re not going to stop a winner. So keep that in mind. I think that’s something that does hold back this competitive, driven, hungry demo more than you might realize. Envy is stupid. It’s just not practical. I just don’t spend any time on it. Why? I don’t know.

Audience member: Gary, great to be here with you man. Seriously, it’s been about three years since you came across my Facebook feed, you were talking to some millennial kid and you just owned him, and you just had me hooked from that moment. But a couple of things, you talked about….

Gary: I apologize. I’m really anti the downplay of millennial kids, and I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, but I just figured I’d put it on film. I’m 42, there were plenty of lazy losers, entitled [expletive] when I was 22 too. This notion that millennial’s, millennial’s are first and foremost dramatically better human beings that the other generation, it’s actually not even close and you can’t be mad at them. The market, this has nothing to do with millennials, and over parenting. This has to do with economics, the last nine years have been phenomenal. We haven’t had a crash…..

How many people here are under 29? Raise your hand. You’ve never tasted the game when it was hard. You’ve never been punched directly in the [expletive] mouth yet. You don’t wake up like I did in April of 2000 and the market collapse and every invoice and every order is over. You don’t know what it feels like when the corporations that want to give you $10,000 for a selfie, don’t spend money anymore. It gets a little harder to be an influencer when there’s no cash in the system.

So I’m not mad at millennials, I’m mad a people’s not understanding of why. They’re awesome human beings because they’re far more rounded and they just had it good. That’s not their fault. We could have had that. I got into the world in New Jersey 2000 [expletive] got [expletive] on. 9/11 got [expletive] on. 2007 got [expletive] on. So I’ve tasted that. Just keep that in mind. And by the way, the reason I told that story, please keep in mind that the economy has been phenomenal for the last 9 years.  A lot of the good is coming for you because of what’s happening at a macro level. You’re just average. I’m being serious. I’m not saying that to razz. I’m saying that to make you reflect so you can step up your game so that when the [expletive] ravage comes, you don’t die. So good, you got a little zing that you’re average, but now you can actually stay alive and not go [expletive] work, or go back to business school. Sorry, bro.

Audience member: I didn’t know that was going to take it on that course. So you talk about how companies are kind of behind the 8 ball on the whole social media, Facebook marketing, it’s how it’s a good value right now. Are you starting to see that trend diminish and when do you see that being not a value, Facebook?

Gary: As soon as math and art combine to not be valuable. Like on television. Meanwhile the Superbowl is the best…anyone who’s got 20 million throwing around, run a Superbowl ad this year. The problem is they’re 7, it’s only 7 for the ad, which is phenomenal, but the network makes you buy some other [expletive]. That’s where it get’s [expletive] up. But Superbowl is an incredible value.

I don’t know, I’m stunned that these big companies that I work with, still question it’s ROI and want to run commercials and billboards. It’s so fun to watch them all go out of business over the next 20 years, they deserve it. I can’t wait. Seriously.

Audience member: Last thing is you mentioned political correctness and your kids, which is awesome and I think that’s what everyone loves about you, you just say what’s on your mind. I think we could all take a page out of that book of just being pure honest. With this crazy climate, with the whole Google guy that got fired from there, the whole ESPN thing. How do you see this political correctness and what do you do to mitigate that in your company?

Gary: It’s a really good question Rob, and it’s a really tough one. A couple of things. Number one, I said to something the other day that finally articulated how I feel about all of it. I said to a friend, “[expletive] people, there’s only one place in my life where I’m not logical or practical, American Football. Against all data, I think that the Patriots are cheaters and Bill Belichik is a terrible guy and even though Tom Brady is clearly, and I’ve spent money on investigative journalism, he’s the nicest human being ever, I still say things like, he left his pregnant wife for Giselle. He’s a piece of [expletive].” I will do anything blindly.

Even talking right now, the chemicals in my body are different. I feel it. I hate them so much. I really want Bill Belichik to die. You know it’s funny. I wonder if people think I’m going for… I want it. So cool. We’ve established that.

I’m clearly irrational, over emotional, not logical and just the worst version of myself in that one narrow place. There are people who are fans of me who have DM’d me or have tweeted that I’m a bad guy. I’ll yell at children at games. I’m not joking. You know how people get beer muscles? You know that term? You drink and then you want to fight. I have sports muscles. I go to a game and even though everybody would probably be able to beat me up, I want to fight you because I want to fight you because it feels better than feeling the pain of your team beating mine.

Like a week ago I realized, holy [expletive], that’s how blindly everyone is about politics. You’re either red or blue and you deploy no logic, no rational, you are blindly emotional, you have no idea what the [expletive] you’re talking about and that’s it. We’re about to turn every issue into a political….how the [expletive] is climate a political….what are we doing here?

So I have a huge office in New York and LA. 84% of my employees are liberals. 84, right. So I have liberal points of view all day long. The thought of hating anybody or disliking another human being for any reason, other than maybe being a patriot, is insane to me. Insane to me, insane to me. But I have clearly republican….an 8th place trophy is why China is going to [expletive] on us with such a big [expletive] dump that we’ll never be able to breathe again.

How I handle is one by one. It’s very hard. You cannot handle this at a macro right now, because our society is on tilt. That’s how I do it.

Sep 22, 2017

The secret behind making the important become urgent.

On this episode of Marketing Secrets, Russell gives a recap of some of the events for the Viral video launch from last week. He goes into some rough numbers and stats and explains why they did it. Here are some of the highlights of this episode:

  • Russell gives some rough numbers of how the viral video went and some of the stats for the first 7 days since.
  • He explains what good things have come from the video launch and why they did the things they did.-
  • And he explains why he needed to make the important things become urgent in order for them to get done, and why he recommends others do the same thing.

So listen to this episode and find out how many views the viral video got, and what good things have come from it so far.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I want to welcome you guys to Marketing Secrets. I’m finally giving you a chance to hear behind the scenes of what happened with the viral video launch, the bubble soccer party, and everything that’s happening on today’s episode of Marketing Secrets.

Alright everybody, welcome back. I hope you guys have been doing amazing. This whole week I’ve been in inner circle meetings, so I’ve been dropping some cool stuff on the podcast, hopefully you’ve been enjoying it. If you’ve been listening to the audio version, I gave you guys a really cool call from Frank Kern, which was awesome. Sent you my presentation of how we went from zero to a hundred million dollars without taking on any outside capital, which was cool. Hopefully you liked that. And Now I’m finally having a chance to tell you guys behind the scenes.

So it’s been a fun week afterwards. Whenever something like this happens, we have no idea what to expect. What happens if we launch this video and it gets 500 million views, what if we launch it and it gets ten views? You have no idea what’s going to happen. So for me it’s always like, I think sometimes people get so invested in the outcome, they miss the fun and joy of what you’re doing.

I know that I’ve had times in my life where I do that as well. So consciously with this, as well as any launch, I set big goals and big dreams and stuff like that, but as they get closer and closer and closer, I start, I don’t know if that’s the right word, I delete the outcome goal in my head. I just, I don’t know what it’s going to be, and if I set one and I don’t hit it, I’m going to be sad. If I set one and I surpass it, I’ll be happy. But I don’t want that, because I did the work no matter what and I want to be able to celebrate it and enjoy it.

So I try to just get rid of the outcome in my head. So going into it, I didn’t have an outcome. Again, I was looking at things like, what’s the worst case scenario. So for us, Clickfunnels worst case scenario, a lot of you guys know we spent a lot of money. Harmon brothers charge about a half a million dollars for a video, plus we threw a big party, we hired influencers to come, when all was said and done, I haven’t looked at the numbers yet. It’s been a whirlwind week. I would say probably, all in, in this party promotion we’re probably in close to a million dollars, which is kind of crazy.

I think I told you guys before, it’s the first time I just put everything on black, or everything on red. However you say that, I don’t know the terminology, the gambling thing, just kind of rolling it. Typically with any kind of marketing, we’re very direct response driven. Where we test small, put a dollar in, get two dollars back out, and if that works we scale. That’s how we’ve grown our company. That’s how everything I believe is based on that.

So this was the biggest thing. We’re like, we’re putting  a lot in without knowing ahead of time, but it’s okay because we’re looking at what’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario, average Clickfunnels member, lifetime average I estimate is 1200 bucks or something like that, maybe higher. In fact, I’m sure it is higher. We’ve only been in business, in fact tomorrow is our three year birthday, a lot of people have been with us three years. So that number keeps growing over time, but as far as we know now, it’s over $1200 a person.

So we’re like, worst case scenario, if this video brings us an extra thousand customers, it broke even, which is awesome. So that’s really good. But the bigger win on my side, there’s a couple of big wins. One of them is, when this video went live we needed to simplify our process. The signup process, the onboarding, all sorts of stuff like that. Because of that, I don’t know if you guys logged into Clickfunnels recently, there’s a bunch of new stuff.

There’s a Clickfunnels game, there’s new onboarding, there’s these things we call “Show me how” little walk-through’s that have video and written out explanation that show you how to do every single thing. We set up a way to get custom domains, where you click a button and get a custom domain. In fact, we gave everybody the first custom domain for free. We figured out all these things to simplify the onboarding process, so when this new onslaught of people came, we’d be prepared for it.

So one of the biggest things, that’s something we’ve known we needed to do for probably two years, we just haven’t had the time or energy to do it. This  forced us to spend that time and energy. A lot of times we focus on stuff that’s urgent but not important. This one was super important, but it was never urgent so we never got it done. So by doing this, calling our shot and making this big video, it forced us to focus on the important that’s not urgent. It became urgent for us. So we, as a team, killed ourselves. You probably saw the week prior, we were here all night last week.

Our whole tech team and dev team, design team, everyone was here just killing ourselves to get prepared for it. A lot of evaluations, if we ever wanted to sell Clickfunnels in the future, one of the big things to look at is churn rate, so we knew what our churn numbers were at. For us it was like, if we could lower our churn by 2% that alone would be worth, tens if not in the future, hundreds of millions of dollars. But tens within the next 12 months.

So that was our goal was to reduce churn by 2 points. So it was a week ago today that the viral video went live. So we’re about a week. Obviously stats aren’t perfect, we don’t know the numbers, but based on the first, it’s been live a week, what’s it trending towards?  I don’t know if it’s going to hold, so I don’t want to tie down to it yet, but based on the first 7 days our churn in the window and everything has dropped by more than 2%, which is amazing. More than 2%.

I’m hoping over the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days that sticks. If it does, that alone is worth more money than I could ever have dreamt of. In fact, the thing is right now, I could talk about this for a long time and explain it all. But basically where we’re at right now, as we’ve grown, we just passed 50,000 members last week, a week ago yesterday, 50,000 members. But as soon as we get to about 60,000 members, the new members we bring in and people we lose each day become about the same, so it gets really hard to scale past 60,000 members.

If we drop our churn by 2 percentage points, our next peak is at 100. So almost instantly we get to 100,000 members. So that alone is a big reason. Another big reason why we did the viral video is unification, if that’s the right word, connection, tribe building, bringing people within the culture, closer together and building that bond. We had hundreds of people throwing viral video launch parties in their homes. We had Julia Stoilin throw a launch party and invited the whole internet and she had people driving four or five hours to her house to come watch it with her.

It just brought our tribe as a whole together. We streamed live presentations from me, from the Harmon Brothers, and Gary Vaynerchuk last minute was like, “You should stream my stuff too.” So we streamed his. And we had 20,000 people live between YouTube and Facebook that watched this whole event go down. Think what that does for community, tribe, culture building within our audience, which was amazing. So that was another big thing. How does this become a bigger win for us as a community?

Second is how does this make Clickfunnels even more fun? We’re a software product. We’re competing with all these boring software products that are faceless, nameless and boring. Now we’re interesting to talk about. This video is something that people can talk about, they can share, show their friends and family. People come there and they’re like, “oh that’s what Clickfunnels does.” It gave us the ability and the timeliness to rebuild our sales funnel.

Typically I don’t like, here’s a brand new funnel, but we kind of had to. So it gave us a chance to sit back and re-tweak things and build things really differently. You’ve probably seen some of it. Again, it’s on the weekend, so I don’t know super good conversion numbers, but as a whole the conversions and EPC’s and dollars in are up, dramatically.

So doing this thing wasn’t just, “How many times has the video been shared, how much viral? Is it actually working?” But it’s all these other pieces that are more important to us, that it forced us to do. So I just want to put it out there.

It was funny, I was watching people’s Facebook the next day, I think we had like 300,000 views the first day and people were like, “Oh this didn’t go viral, Clickfunnels burned their money.” And all these things, and I’m just on my side laughing because you guys don’t get it. People see what they understand, but they’re missing the rest of it. That was my goal with this podcast always, to let you see the magicians hands. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Why is that important? Why was I willing to gamble and risk that much money on something that was that big of a risk?

Because it forced us to take the important and make it urgent. Which most business don’t ever do that, which is why they die. Kind of like my wife’s business, you should see the video. I buried it next to my first wife’s business, and my first wife. If you haven’t watched the video yet, go to Clickfunnels.com and watch the video. That way that joke will make more sense, along with the nude squirrels and everything else.

Other good things it did for us internally. We’ve always struggled to be recruited talent. People know Clickfunnels, which is the majority of our team come in. But developers and things like that, it’s hard. Where now, they see the video and they’re like, “Oh cool, that’s the company, that’s the culture, that’s what I want to be part of.” So it’s helping us already recruit talent. And on the other side it’s bringing in customers at an incredible rate.

So prior to this launch, depending on the ad sent and the landing page and stuff like that. For us to get a new Clickfunnels member on the low end, was probably $60, on the high end $120-130, to get a free trial. And that’s kind of the window we played with. It goes up and down and bounces all around, but that’s kind of been the window. Right now, the video is getting new customers at under $40 a piece on the pay side, but don’t forget there’s also the free side that’s bringing tons of free people.

So if you take the free and the paid and mix them together, our cost to acquire a customer right now from the video is probably, I don’t know, this is off the top of my head, I’d say probably $15-20, which is insane. Insane. Most SAASes in our world are $120-150. So there’s kind of cool things.

Also, as of today, should I check it? We were almost at a million views. A million people have seen our sales video and now are aware of Clickfunnels, which is crazy. I’m pulling up the actual thing to see. We were thinking today we may pass a million views, but it’s going to be a tight one. I don’t think by now, but by tonight hopefully we will have done that. We are at 927,000 views. So we’re getting close to a million and this thing will continue to drive leads, traffic and sales today, tomorrow and forever.

We knew with launching this it wasn’t going to be like Poopourri or Squatty Potty viral. To explain what Clickfunnels is takes more. In fact, they were stressed out at first, “This is the longest video we’ve done.” I think it 4 minutes, almost 5 minutes long. I was like, “Yeah, but it’s okay because I would rather have less people, but the people who watch it understand what we are and then they come in and actually become customers and they stick.”

Anyway, it’s funny, the people that….it’s just funny. I see all the trolls that are in, all be like, “The video’s too long, that’s why it’s not going viral.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t need it to go viral. That was the campaign we did to unite the community and get people excited so that people cared when this came out.” All the other things is why we did and why it’s already….it paid for itself in the first 30 hours. That part is done, now it’s this tool, asset that’s becoming huge for us.

So that’s what I want people to understand, in case they don’t. Because I know a lot of people don’t quite get all the pieces. So hopefully this kind of helps. Sorry I’m watching the video again, it’s so fun.

Alright so, what else what else was I going to share with you? So that’s some of the core things. A lot of people have been asking me about it. The last thing I want to talk about, it gave us the ability to throw a party. Why do I like throwing parties? Because we’re marketers and we should make an event out of everything. We had inner circle last week and we had James Malinchak, who if you know who James is, if you Google “Secret Millionaire” he was on secret millionaire 7 or 8 years ago. And I remember when he was on Secret Millionaire, most people would be like you’re on TV and it’s like, “Hey I’m on TV.” And that’s it.

But James is really strategic about it and he actually threw a big party at his house. He invited me and a bunch of other people out to his house and then did a whole launch around it. He had what’s his name, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? Robin Leach come to it. And he threw a big event around it and it made it fun for people like me to come to it and talk and share it. And it made me become friends with James and connect with him and care about him and his mission. Because he threw this big event around it. That’ why we did this as well.

It gave us the ability to throw an event that people, whether they could come to Boise or not, could watch it streaming live and see me and Gary and all these people. So many cool tribe building, culture building things that came from it.

Anyway, throw an event. I tell people if you’re going to launch a Facebook ad, throw an event around it. If it’s going to be good, invite ten other influencers to come to your house, launch the event together, launch the ad together. Whatever it is, make a party out of it and they have a vested interest in your success. They’re going to walk, talk, all those amazing things come from it. Everyone in my office is out clapping. We got some weird people over there. Sorry, if you’re wondering what’s happening over there.

I hope that helps you guys because everyone keeps asking me what happened? Has it been good, bad? And I just wanted to give you a recap, it’s been freaking amazing for us. Again, it forced the important to become urgent, it’s reduced our churn, it’s increased our….dropped our cost to acquire a customer, increased our conversions, our average cart sales, so many good things have come from it. We’ve built some amazing relationships, people who never would have known what Clickfunnels were, sat in a room for 5 hours with us and then played bubble soccer with us. We went in the Guinness book of world record playing bubble soccer.

We build connection, community, relationships, so many good things came from this thing. It’s been amazing. So yes it was good, financially as well as all the other things, and it keeps continuing to grow. I don’t know how many software companies have a sales video that has been seen a million times in the first 7 days. That’s rare. And it was the sales video that pitched the product really, really hard. You know what I mean? Sometimes they have these ones that are fancy. I don’t know if you remember Grasshopper, they had a really cool viral video about being an entrepreneur, it’s a big entrepreneur thing and everyone’s like, “Grasshopper.” And that was it. Yeah, it did that. But it didn’t sell the product. What’s Grasshopper. I go to Grasshopper.com, oh it’s phone systems for entrepreneurs. I didn’t know that.

This one is like a million people watched it and it’s pitching our product, you know what I mean. We got 5,397 shares, 19,000 emojis, a ton of comments, 1870 comments. It’s all good from a lot of different angles. So I hope that helps. I hope that gives you guys some visibility on what we did and why we did it. One of the big reasons why we do launched, as much as I hate them and the stress that goes into them, again is it forces important to become urgent.

So I recommend for you guys to look at, what are the important things that you have that you need to do? That you’re like, “I know I need to do that.” And how do you make it urgent? How do you tie in a launch or something, or an event or something that forces the important, that you know you need to do to become urgent.

For us the urgent was always launch a new funnel, launch a new thing, drive more sales, those things were urgent so we were always doing them. But it was like, if I can reduce churn by 3 percentage points, that’s worth more than 10,000 new customers to me. But I never did it because it wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t in front of my face all the time. So as soon as I made the important become urgent through this process, it became urgent and it’s been huge since then.

So there you guys go, it’s been 7 days. Like I said, I’ll probably do another recap when it’s been 30 days or so and kind of keep giving you more stats as I get clearer numbers on things. Like I said, I’m in the Inner Circle the last 4 days, so today’s my first day back and half the team’s gone. But I’ll get deeper into the numbers and stuff and share more as we keep going on.

But I hope that helps. Appreciate you all, thanks again for watching the video. If you haven’t watched it, go watch it, go share it, go comment, go like, have some fun, because that’s what we do. And tomorrow, by the time you guys listen to this, will be Clickfunnels 3rd birthday. Yes, we’ve only been in business 3 years. We passed 50,000 members, we’re going to change the world thanks to you guys. So thanks for everything. I hope this helped, appreciate you guys and we’ll talk soon. Bye everybody.

Sep 20, 2017

My live presentation from the viral video launch party.

On this episode Russell gives a presentation at the viral video launch of how Clickfunnels went from $0 to $100,000,000 using growth hacking and sales funnels. Here are some of the awesome things in this episode:

  • Step by step how Russell was able to grow his business without you outside funds.
  • How he was basically paid to introduce people into the Clickfunnels world.
  • And why funnels are the key to growing your own business without having to take money from venture capitalists.

So listen here to hear this awesome presentation that can teach you how to grow your business using sales funnels.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am still planning on giving you guys a huge recap of the viral video event, bubble soccer, everything else that went down at the event, because some crazy stuff happened. I’m also trying to get permission from Gary V to let me share some of his presentation with you guys here. So that’s the game plan. If I’m able to do that, you’ll see it soon. And you’ll see my recap soon as well. But this week I’ve got my inner circle here, so I am in there locked away.

So what I did want to do is I got the video clip from my presentation at the event about how to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in sales, how we did that by using sales funnels and growth hacking. And it was a shorter presentation, but I think it was really, really cool. I’m sure I talked really, really fast. I was also really tired, I’d only slept one hour the night before. So if it doesn’t make any sense, that’s kind of the context of why. But hopefully it will give you guys some ideas about how to scale a company.

You hear me talk about the Dotcom Secrets book a lot. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins, and sometimes when you hear that it’s depressing if you don’t have a lot of money, so I’m not going to win. And that’s how I felt, especially when we launched Clickfunnels and we’re competing against two companies, one that had 40 million dollars in funding and one that had over 100 million. How do you do that? And this presentation shows you how we did it. So after we do a little Marketing Secrets intro here, I’m going pick right up with my presentation from the event, I hope you love it. Thanks so much and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

I put together this presentation because like I said, the biggest question I get, especially from people who are building their own companies is “how in the world have you grown Clickfunnels so fast without having any money, any capitol, any outside funding at all?” So I put together this presentation this morning. Like I said, I had one hour of sleep last night, then I got up and started working on this presentation.

But to kind of walk you through what we did and some of the mind shifts that I think are different that will hopefully help you guys as you’re growing and scaling everything you are doing.

So the title of my presentation is how do we use growth hacking and sales funnels to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in less than three years, we’re a week away, without taking any outside funding. So the first thing I want to go over really quickly, for those that didn’t know what I was talking about earlier, I’m going to go over what a funnel is really quick.

So what is a funnel? If you look at, actually let me step back. The reason why I want to talk about this is it’s been interesting, I’ve been doing this internet marketing game for 15 years now. This is my 15th year in the business selling all sorts of stuff, and it’s interesting because recently there’s been a whole bunch of books coming out on growth hacking, all these cool new ways to growth hack. And it’s funny because we get the growth hacking books and read them, it’s like, that’s all the internet marketing stuff we’ve been doing for the last decade. And now it’s like, real businesses are catching on, figuring out these things that are really, really cool.

So that’s kind of why, my thoughts on this presentation. Showing all these funnel things, this is the growth hacking, this is the movement, this is where things are going that we keep talking about.

So what’s a funnel? To explain a funnel, I think the easiest way to begin, is to show what a funnel is not. So this is a traditional style website. This is what Clickfunnels is kind of going against all the time. Most people have traditional websites, they have all sorts of ads. They’re paying for Facebook, Youtube, Google, all these things and they’re driving it into these websites, and it’s literally slamming a whole bunch of people into a brick wall.

I know that because this is how I got started. I was trying that thing and it did not work. I always say that a traditional website is kind of like having a really bad sales person who is shy and all they do is hand out brochures, and then pray the person comes back. That’s a traditional website. What a funnel is, is basically having the best salesperson on planet earth, come and meet the person at the front door, find out their name and walk them through the process. Find out what they want, how they want it and giving them exactly what they want.

So that’s kind of what a sales funnel is. My whole philosophy in business kind of, like I told you guys in the last presentation, when we started Clickfunnels three years ago, we had two major competitors that we were looking at. Number one had just gotten 43 million dollars in funding and number two had just had over 100 million dollars in funding. I’m coming in with me and Todd and we’re bank rolling it with our big old credit cards and we’re like, “Okay, we’re going against these huge giants that have hundreds of millions of dollars, how are we going to win?”

One of my first mentors, Dan Kennedy, he used to say this all the time. “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.” So I’m looking at these companies who have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and I’m like, I’m screwed. I’m not going to be able to win. These guys could out spend me every single day.

And I started looking at this more and more and I didn’t get it at first. It took me a couple of years before I understood this concept of whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. Like I told you before, I went to college here at Boise State, I wrestled here and I used to carry my buddies on back up and down the football stadium, every single day before practice, this is my hometown. Here in Boise, one thing we’re famous for, those who are not from Idaho, we’re famous for potatoes and the very first product I ever put together was a DVD teaching people how make potato guns.

You probably heard me tell this story before, but it was a DVD how to make potato guns. I set it up online, I was learning about internet marketing, it was really simple. I had a one page website, I had Google ads. That’s all that we did back in the day. So I went to Google, started buying ads, I was spending about $10 a day on Google ads, and I was selling a $37 DVD on how to make potato guns. So I spent $10 a day on ads and I usually averaged about one sale per day. So Russell as a college kid was making a whopping $27 per day profit, I was putting into my pocket, which was pretty awesome.

And that was kind of my beginning. And then what happened, a little while into this whole game, Google shifted how everything worked and I got in big, big trouble and literally overnight, my website was the same but I went from spending $10 a day in ads to spending $50 a day, overnight. So I was spending $50 a day and sending it to the exact same website, but I was only making one sale. Same thing. So I was losing $13 a day.

And my beautiful wife, after about 3 or 4 days of that said, “You have to stop. This is not a good business. This is really, really bad.” So we stopped and eventually had to cut up our credit cards and I thought I’d missed the bubble. I’m like dang it, we missed it. And those are actual pictures of us cutting up our credit cards, back in our first home.

About that time I had a friend who was also in the business and he came back and said, “Russell, I think I’ve figured this out. My little website..” He had the same problem. Google raised their prices, algorithms changed, and a bunch of my friends got out of the business. One of my friends came back and he’s like, “I figured it out. I started adding in these things.” He called them OTO’s which stands for one time offer, or basically an upsell. He says, ”I’m charging upsells to my products and I start making more money from every customer, and now I’m able to afford my ads again. I turned my ads back on.”  I was like, “That’s cool, but I don’t know how…How can I do that? I don’t know how to do that.”

I was like, “I have a potato gun DVD. What should I do?” and he’s like, “Well, people who buy potato gun DVD’s, what else do they need? How else can you serve them?” And I was like, “Well, we could buy them, the next piece is they have to buy a potato gun kit, so they’d have to buy pipes and a BBQ igniter, all these other pieces.” And he’s like, “Well you should sell a kit.” I’m like, “Well I don’t want to make kits. That would be really not cool.” And he’s like, “See if you can find someone.”

So I ended up finding a guy in Northern Idaho who actually was drop shipping potato gun kits, did a partnership with him and I made my very first funnel. This is my funnel transition. So people who buy my DVD, I’d upsell a $200 potato gun kit and we’d send it out in the mail. So what’s cool is I’d turned the Google ads on back in the day, and what happened is I was still spending about $50 a day, but then one out of three people would start buying the potato gun kit. So we did the math on that, one out of three people, means I was averaging about $60 in additional sales with every DVD that I got, that I sold.

Which means I was spending about $50 a day on ads, and now I was making $102 in ads, and all the sudden it worked again. That was magic. Literally when I made that shift I went from losing money to making $52 a day in profit. I was like, this is it. Biggest thing in the world.

For me obviously, potato guns is a very small market and I didn’t stay there long, but the concept of that rang through my head, I was like this is how it works. And my moral that I learned from this whole experience was that funnels make me money, websites make me broke. So my obsession for the last decade of my life has been this. A lot of you guys have been to my events for the last decade, teaching this concept. Showing you guys, this is the key.

So when I started doing this and realizing it, that message I had heard from my mentor kept coming back to my head saying, “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.” That was the key. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. So as we came into this game of Clickfunnels and looking at people with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital behind them, I’m like how in the world can we compete with that? I was like, I can’t do it. Head for head they can all outspend me, but if I can build a funnel that’s right, I can change everything.

If you look at the reason why we have grown as fast as we have, is because we can literally outspend everyone. We get probably three or four times a week, different people trying to put money into CLickfunnels, and most of these we tell them no, but a couple we’ve entertained because it’s interesting and we’re curious what they think we’re worth, it’s really fun.

So we were at lunch this day with this group and I’m talking to the guy and he’s going over everything, and he asks the question they always ask on Shark Tank, “How much does it cost to acquire a customer?” And I hate when people ask this question because he’s not going to get what I’m going to tell him. I was like, “Well we’re running Facebook ads, for the home page, we’re spending about $120 to acquire a free trial member.” And he was like, “Oh that’s amazing, based on that, what I can do is go and put in $50 million in cash and we get this many customers…” and all this stuff and I was like, “Well, well, real quick. We actually turned those ads off.” And he’s like, “You turned those ads off.” And I’m like, “Yeah. I gotta pay for this out of my own pocket. I don’t want to lose $120 every customer.” And he’s like, “Well how are you guys growing fast?” and I said, “ The reason why is because we have funnels.”

And I explained to him some of my front end funnels, like my book funnels, some other funnels. I said, “Look, for every single person that comes to one of my funnels, if they buy one of my books, we spend on average about $10-12 on a Facebook ads, or other ad platforms to sell a book, but then through that funnel we average about $32. What happens is we spend $12 and get someone to buy one of our books, we make net, $20 of cash in our pocket, and then we introduce them to Clickfunnels. So every single customer, before we tell them about Clickfunnels, they actually pay us money and we put that money in our pocket.”

He’s like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” And I explained it again. And he said, “That doesn’t make sense.” And I explained it three or four times and he stopped and said, “If what you’re saying is true, that will change business forever.” I was like, “That’s my whole message. That’s what we do. That’s what funnels are all about.”

So I want to walk you guys really quick through this and then we’re going to have Gary come up here in a minute. But one of the key concepts you guys need to understand, and this a concept we call a break even funnel. Those of my inner circle members who are here, we spent a lot of time on this, but the break even funnel is a funnel where you break even, so you can literally get customers for free. When you have that, you can grow your company as quick, as big, as fast as you want. So we spend a lot of time on that. So this is a break even funnel, where I put a dollar in advertizing in and get at least a dollar back out, and if I’m good at it, I can get two or three dollars back out. Now I’ve got a customer, I’ve got some cash, now we can put them into the other things that we have.

A couple of examples of some of our break even funnels, I grabbed these from some slides this morning to show you some examples. This is my Dotcom Secrets book, this is a couple of months ago stats. We got about 5400 leads, we sold 23,095 books, our average cart value during that time was $30.81, so we spent $45,000 in ads, we made $52,000 in sales so our profit was $7,763. Most people would look at a company our size and be like, that is a waste. You just wasted a lot of….you just made $7 grand, that’s not a big deal.

But that was to get customers. We got 5400 people that then, the next week we would say, “hey, by the way, there’s this really cool thing called Clickfunnels.” And I got paid $7,000 to get those 5400 people onto my list. That was one of our front end products. This is a split-testing book, same kind of thing. We had 2,000 leads come in last month, 1300 book sold, average cart value was $12. Ads we spent $4000, sales was $18,000, so we made $13,000 but now we got 2000 people that we can introduce to Clickfunnels. So we got paid to get all these customers.

One more example is Perfect Webinar, same kind of thing. Leads, sales, I’ll go through this quickly. We made $4000 and got 1600 customers we introduced into Clickfunnels. Now if you walk through those three funnels alone, and we have about a dozen or so front end funnels that we use in different platforms and things, last month from this, basically our front end revenue was $96.000, our ad costs were $81,000, so we netted a whopping $14,000. Most people would be like, “Man Russell, with a company with 120 employees, you’re going to go broke fast.”

But what’s amazing about that, is that it brought in literally 30 or 40,000 new people into our world, who then we took them through the rest of our sequence. They’re introduced to us, now we can go and build a relationship with them, talk to them, serve them, help them understand what we do, what we believe, and introduce them to our other products and services. And for us, obviously that is Clickfunnels.

So if you look at that, what it means for us, is we literally get almost a thousand trials for free every single day, like clockwork. That comes back to what we talked about before. That’s how we’re able to grow so fast. We can literally outspend everybody in our market. There’s nobody else that can do that.

And what’s cool for you guys, whatever business you’re in, that’s the key. Remember whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins, and when you figure that out, it makes it so you can grow really, really quickly. Any kind of business, any kind of venture, anything that you want to do. So that, you guys, is how we use growth hacking and sales funnels to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in just three years without taking on any outside funding. Thank you.

Sep 19, 2017

Cool message I got a few minutes before starting our viral video launch event.

Sep 18, 2017

Russell’s thoughts as he enters the last phase of the viral video launch.

In this podcast Russell is worn out and tired but he talks about finishing what he started even when he’s burned out. Here are some of the awesome insights you will hear in today’s episode:

  • Who taught Russell the concept “99 yards doth not a touchdown make.” and what it means.
  • What other circumstances Russell has used that quote to help him get through.
  • And why it is so important to give it your all until you complete something, even when all you want to do is quit.

So listen here to be inspired to keep going and moving forward and finish what you start.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today’s episode is called 99 yards doth not a touchdown make.

Hey everybody, welcome again to the podcast. I’m glad to have you guys here. I’m doing this the day before the viral video launch. And if I’m completely honest, I feel like garbage. I didn’t want to get out of bed today, I didn’t want to move. To kind of give you some context of everything, everyone’s like, “oh you’re launching a video, that’s gotta be pretty easy. The Harmon Brothers did the video.” I’m like, “Yeah but there’s a lot of stuff on this side that happens.” Like we completely changed the entire online sales process. So new sales letters, new sales flow, everything, which when you see it, it’s pretty ninja.

That alone is usually a couple week project to get it right, and so that’s been happening and doing that all this week. Number two is we rebuilt our whole onboarding process. You will see if you go to Clickfunnels.com and create an account, or if you just login as of tomorrow, you will see the whole onboarding process. We’ve got online game, we’ve got these video walk through’s. I think I recorded 150+ videos for the new walk through process. So we’ve been doing that and getting all that programmatically created. Plus all the videos and copy and things like that. Boom that’s number two.

Then we’ve got the new online cookbook. We created a Funnel Hacker Cookbook, so that book is launching this week. That’d be a 350 pages cookbook. And then this week, I was like I need some training with this so we also happened to have had the FHAT event this week, it’s still happening. It’s a 3 day event where people come and we build out an entire webinar with them. So day one I spoke onstage with them for 3 hours, then went to lunch. Then after lunch I jumped in my office with a blank slide deck and power point and I ended up creating over the next 4 hours 222 slides for a presentation to teach the cookbook that night.

Then I went and ate dinner. After dinner I got it up, I set up the entire kitchen with a bunch of Lego’s that you will see. Then we taught, I did a presentation for 2 ½ hours teaching how to use the cookbook, how it works with Lego’s and it was really cool, because we needed that training video. Then we took that and we’re chopping it up into 74 mini videos, which Brandon Fischer was doing all of it yesterday, which is crazy. And then we still had this live event.

So yesterday, Steven was running the event, which was nice. So he ran the event all day. While he was running the event, I was working on the sales letter, the process and I realized that a bunch of the videos I had created for one purpose, for the onboarding, didn’t actually work for that thing. So I went and recorded 22 more videos yesterday for that. Recorded the videos plus had to work on all the other stuff. And then after that I had to run home, I’m a scout master, so I went to 11 year old scouts, taught the kids how to swim yesterday. Then I went back to the office and the FHAT event was still happening, and I got on stage from 9:00 to 12:30 at night, in the morning, teaching how to do the stack, which was awesome.

And I was just like so tired. And then today is happening and I woke up and I’m just like, I’m dead. Hosting an event and then launching an event, launching a cookbook,  we’re launching an onboarding process, new sales letter, new demo pages, plus all the marketing sequence and automation I still gotta create today. Then tonight I have my family pictures. Why?

So I woke up today feeling like crap, I still feel like crap. I honestly, if I’m being completely honest, the last thing I want to do today is everything I’ve got to do today. But as I woke up this morning, I heard something ringing through my head. It was this quote I heard from a teacher, and it’s 99 yards doth not a touchdown make. The back story behind this, I went to BYU, Brigham Young University, my freshman year, I was a wrestler there. Towards the end of it I decided I was going to go serve a mission for my church, so I signed up for some missionary prep classes and my missionary prep teacher’s name was Randy Bott. He’s written three or four books on going on a mission and all that kind of stuff.

He’s teaching the class and he’s talking about how for Mormon missionaries, you’re out for two years and you go through this whole process. And for two years you’re out knocking on doors, you call home on Mother’s Day and on Christmas, you don’t get to date girls, you don’t get to watch TV, you’re just out there for two years and it’s tough. I remember he gave this lesson one time and he titled this lesson, 99 yards doth not a touchdown make.

He talked about how you go out there and you’re serving this thing for two years and he said that let’s say you served really good mission and the last four or five months you kind of just relax and take it easy and goof off or whatever. He’s like, if you do that, the destiny of your life will change because you decided to slack off. He said in a football game, you can work your butt off. Drive 99 yards all the way across the field, get to the one yard line and if you don’t kick that in, don’t cross the goal line, if you don’t make a touchdown you get zero points. It’s not like, oh well they did a really good job, we’ll give them three. No, you either make it or you don’t. 99 yards doth not a touchdown make, you gotta score a touchdown or you don’t get the points.

That was kind of the moral of that lesson. And I remembered that as I was on my mission, especially toward the end when I was tired and I was ready to get home and I remembered that ringing through my head. 99 yards doth not a touchdown make, you’ve gotta get in the end zone, you’ve gotta finish this strong. So I did.

I remember when I was wrestling, same thing. My senior year of wrestling, I was wrestling a guy, I think at the time he was ranked 7th in the country, and I went out there and I don’t think I was ranked at this time. I had lost some matches I shouldn’t have early, so I dropped out of the rankings. I’m wrestling this guy, and on paper I should not have beat him. I went out there and I remember wrestling him, and at first he came out really hard and strong and was beating me and then I came back and was fighting back, fighting back, fighting back and eventually I ended up tying him and we went into overtime, and in overtime the thought that rang through my head was 99 yards doth not a touchdown make.

I have come all this way and killed myself. I cut weight, I didn’t eat for a week, I did all these things. The match I was fighting and fighting and fighting, if I lose now, if I stop now, it’s over. I can’t stop, can’t stop. I went out there and I remember in overtime I took him down and I remember jumping around like crazy. And the news was there, it was so cool. The news captured that, and that night it was on the nightly news showing me taking this guy down in overtime, it was awesome.

It’s just interesting how that one phrase has helped me. Now I’m looking at today and I woke up and I just don’t want to do this. I want to go to bed, I’m tired and my nose is stuffed, I’m beat up. Today I’m going to go, I’ve got 5 or 6 hours to do and then I gotta get back onstage for two hours and present. When I get done with that, I gotta go home and get family pictures, then I’m going to come back…sorry, my nose is stuffed, as you can hear. I gotta come back and I’ll probably be here at the office until 2 or 3 in the morning tonight. Then tomorrow morning I wake up and gotta still do my presentation for tomorrow. Then we got 400 people coming and I gotta speak and entertain and I’m MC’ing the event. And Gary Vaynerchuk’s speaking, I’m speaking, the Harmon Brothers are speaking and then we’re going to launch the viral video and then from there we’re going to go down and play bubble soccer until like 10 o’clock at night.

So tomorrow’s going to be tough too, but 99 yards doth not a touchdown make. I think a lot of times in business and other things, people work so hard and get so close to the end and then at the end they take their foot off the gas and then what could have been amazing, ends up being good or not anything at all.

So for you guys, I want you to know first off, even I get burned out. Sometimes, like today, I don’t want to do this thing. The last thing on earth I want to do is turn this car off and walk in there, but I’m going to do it because I’m on the one yard line, and I know that the difference between champions and the people who aren’t, is this last piece, pushing it over the edge, getting it out. It’s the last execution where most people quit or they ease up or they step off the gas. Instead I’m going to step on the gas and we’re going to blow through thing and freaking make a touchdown. It’s going to be awesome.

So that’s what’s happening today. Hopefully this gives you some motivation for those of you guys who are struggling or tired or worn out. I understand, I’ve been there. Push through the pain, you’re almost there, you’re on the one yard line, just get through it, just push to the end. 99 yards doth not a touchdown make, that last yard is the one that matters. So don’t give up, you’re almost there. I’m almost there. I’m almost there, you’re almost there, let’s do it together. Okay, I’m going inside you guys, have some fun. I’ll see you guys on the other line, I’ll see you guys in the end zone. Bye everybody.

Sep 15, 2017

My thoughts as I detox from Lucky Charms.

On today’s episode Russell talks about the effects of putting negative fuel in your body instead of positive. Here are some of the informative things you will hear today:

  • What started Russell on a carb binge that he couldn’t stop.
  • Why eating junk will make you feel like junk.
  • And why putting positive fuel in your body will help you compete in business and you’ll be more able to get a billion things done in shorter period of time.

So listen here to find out why putting negative fuel in your body could be making your work suffer.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? It’s a late night Marketing Secrets podcast out in the pool house before I head into bed. But I got something for you.

Alright everybody, it’s been a fun day, a long day. I am beat up and tired and ready to go pass out. But I’m out here trying to get a bottle of water because I am parched. We’re about probably 3 or 4 weeks away from our kitchen being done with the remodel so we can move back into our house, which is going to be oh so nice. I cannot wait.

So typically, it’s interesting, this is kind of off topic sort of. Still on topic though. So typically when I’m doing everything throughout the day, I do really, really, really, really good. I do intermittent fasting, so I don’t eat breakfast in the morning. I take about a billion vitamins and supplements in the morning and I feel like I’m glowing. I feel tons of energy and I feel really, really good. When I do eat during the day, Melanie, my assistant makes me this huge salad. It’s a, I don’t know, 1600 calorie salad with spinach and kale and salmon and peppers and oil and avocados and it’s the most amazing thing ever. I eat that all day long and then I’m full and not hungry the rest of the day.

Then at night I’ll eat just whatever my wife makes, I’ll eat just the meat and vegetables out of it, and that’s it. And I feel really, really good and I get through the day. It’s just like I can get so much stuff done. I was joking recently, on an earlier podcast about funnel years. How each day is a funnel year, anyway, how much stuff we can get done in a day.

Today was Saturday and my wife had a church thing that she was going to be at all day, so I was playing dad. So this morning I woke up and started good, and then my wife had bought Lucky Charms. Lucky Charms, I don’t know about you but that is by far the best cereal in the history of mankind. In fact, when I was a kid, we used to get Lucky charms, then we found out we could Marshmallow Matey’s which came in the bigger bags. Every year for Christmas we’d get one sugar cereal from Santa Claus. So we’d always want Marshmallow Mateys. So all the kids in my family would get our own bag of Marshmallow Mateys, and then get a salad bowl and fill the whole thing up with Marshmallow Mateys and spend like five hours eating all the oats out of it, and then at the end drinking all the milk with the marshmallows. It was insanely good. In fact, last year for Christmas I trained my kids on how to do that, because the tradition has now been officially passed on.

Anyway, for some insane reason, my wife didn’t just buy Marshmallow Mateys, she bought freaking Lucky Charms, which are the best thing ever. She bought two boxes of them. So today I’m eating my supplements and I look over and see a box of Lucky Charms, I’m like, I don’t got enough willpower to stop myself from Lucky Charms. I just don’t. That and cookie dough, I can’t say no. I won’t even attempt it, I won’t even try. So I’m like, done, boom. One bowl of Lucky Charms, two bowls of Lucky Charms. And then for me it’s a slippery slope. I’m like, I’m already on a carb binge today I might as well just go all out.

So then for lunch I was like, “Hey kids, let’s go out to eat.” So we went to a hamburger place and we had hamburgers and French fries and I ate everyone else’s French fries, they were really good. Then I came home and I was like, I could barely keep my eyes open and my whole body is shutting down. I’m like, I can’t keep my eyes open and my wife gets home and she’s tired because she’s been at this emotional thing all day, crying her eyes out and everything. And then the kids are like, “We’re hungry.” And I’m like, “Ugh.” And they’re like, “We want pizza.” And I’m like, “Sweet, get my phone.” And ordered Dominos pizza and chicken wings and that was amazingly good.

And then tonight there was a wedding reception so we went over and they had cheesecake, so today was a carb day. I pounded the carbs. But it’s funny because I am now walking back in and go to bed and I just want to, it’s kind of mostly for me, and hopefully for you guys as well. I feel like crap, my voice hurts, my throat hurts, my brain hurts, I have brain fog. I can’t focus, I can’t concentrate. I feel like ugh. My body hurts, my legs hurt, it’s just like ugh feeling.

And I know there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who are, that’s the fuel you’re putting in your bodies most days. If I put that fuel in my body, I don’t know how I could get anything done. I got nothing done today, other than playing with the kids. I feel like crap, like garbage.

Anyway, I just wanted to put it out there. First off, for me to remember what I feel like now. A lot of time we associate the pleasure on our taste buds, with the food we eat. We eat Lucky Charms and we’re like, this tastes so good. But I want to consciously remember this, that I feel right now, because I want to associate this with carbs so I quit eating them. Because they just thrash you and destroy you and make you feel like garbage.

So for those of you guys that I’m competing against, please keep eating crap. I love it. It makes it so I can get more done in a week than you can get done in a day. But for the rest of you guys who I’m coaching and consulting and I want you to succeed, look at your diet. Seriously shift how you are eating. If you’re trying to figure out how to eat for energy, a couple of things I would recommend. Number one, Google intermittent fasting. That’ll change your entire day around, even if you’re not trying to lose weight. Just shifting so you don’t eat in the morning, fats in the afternoon, and carbs at night. It will keep your energy high throughout the day, so you can compete and do well.

And then the Bulletproof diet is really, really good. Most of you guys know I’m Mormon, so I don’t drink coffee, but there’s different ways to make that. But anyway, Dave Asprey, his whole mission and stuff is really, really good. I love his stuff, minus the coffee. But you can do Bulletproof other things in the morning if you want, or you can do coffee if that’s what you like to do as well. But that whole concept of high fats, I strongly, strongly believe in that. It’s been a huge thing that’s helped me succeed as an entrepreneur.

The last one is Anthony DiClementi’s Biohacker’s Guide, which is another amazing book. It gives a ton of ways to eat for energy and other things for energy as well. So anyway, it’s just some help you guys. If you’re struggling, and it’s hard to get through the days and it’s hard to focus and have concentration and you just want to go out and thrash everyone, think about the fuel you’re putting in your body. Because this right now, how I feel right now is a testament of what Lucky Charms, the devil….I think I also had Lucky Charms for dinner. I may have had some for lunch too. Box number two is almost gone. Look at this thing. Lucky Charms, are you kidding me.

That’s why I don’t like my wife to go shopping sometimes. She buys all the good stuff that I can’t say no to. Anyway, so just think about that. The fuel you put in your body is effecting how you’re competing. This business is a game, it’s competition and I know that the athletes out there understand that, but a lot of people who maybe have not been in athletics, don’t understand that. You’re in competition, you’re competing with people like me who are obsessed with this kind of stuff. And what you put in your body does matter.

So look at that, figure it out. Even if you don’t want to lose weight. I doesn’t matter about losing weight, it’s about keeping your brain sharp for 8, 10, 12 hours a day so you can get a lot of crap done and accomplish what you want to do, so you can serve the people you need to serve. So there you go guys, I hope that helps.

I’m going to bed tonight, I’m going to crash and tomorrow I’ll be back on cue, because I got a big week coming up. If I survive this week, it’s going to be 90% diet, 10% motivation, 30% inspiration, and a whole bunch of happy thoughts in the middle. That’s not 100%, that’s way over. Anyway, it’s going to be fun. Alright guys, I’m out. See you tomorrow. Bye.

Sep 14, 2017

What I realized that’s holding people back from taking the next step in their business.

On this episode Russell talks about what the secret is to go from a million dollars annually to ten million to a hundred million. Here are some informative things in today’s episode:

  • What advice Russell had for someone in his Two Comma Club when it comes to making more than one million dollars a year.
  • Why it’s important to opportunity stack instead of constantly opportunity switching.
  • And some of the things you can do to go from 7 to 8 figures per year.

So listen here if you want to be grow your business from a million dollars a year to ten million and even one hundred million!

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. You guys are catching me at a rare time where I’m actually doing housework. My wife is gone and a couple of my kids are at naps or birthday parties, and I gotta do a couple of chores. So I was working on them and listening to a podcast, thinking and all the sudden I was like, I gotta share this. So we’re doing an impromptu Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright you guys. I’ve got someone in our coaching programs who I love and care about and respect and someone who has had a lot of successes. Two Comma Club winner for sure, sorry my wife’s license plate thingy broke and it’s been flapping out and it’s been like 6 months and she keeps hinting toward the fact that it needs to be fixed. So I’m finally taking the hint, I get it hun, I love you.

Alright, so I’m fixing her thing while we’re talking. Anyway, this person launched a webinar and got it to a million bucks and then kind of transitioned to, and I think loved the market and the thing initially and then kind of fell out of love with it, and because of that transitioned to a new product. He created the product, did the ads, launched another webinar, had success there, and then another one and has kind of transitioned a couple……and that person is kind of frustrated because they’re like, “I’m stuck at a million bucks a year.” And they want to grow, they want to get to $10 million, not because of the money but because of the impact. They want to grow and there’s goals, and how do I get to $10 million a year?

And they’re frustrated and I was just thinking, and they messaged me yesterday so I was talking to them and thinking through it and then for the last day or so it’s just been in my mind, resonating. What’s wrong? This person has all the skill set, they have all the talents, they have all the abilities. Why are they not getting to the next level? What’s the thing?

So I started thinking back about what I’m going to be speaking a lot about at Funnel Hacking Live, but the process of going zero to a million, a million to ten, and ten to a hundred. Sorry, I’m such not a handy man, I can’t figure out how to get these things to work…..so that was my thoughts, we know that from going zero to a million it’s all about figuring out the what and the how. What are you selling that people actually want to buy? And how are you selling it? Are you doing it through a webinar, are you doing it through Amazon? What’s the thing?

And after you figure out the what, this is what I’m selling, and this is how the people want to buy it, what typically happens is then your business explodes really, really fast. I tell people that they know when they’ve hit their what and their how because they’ll go from zero to a million dollars really, really fast. Dan Henry is a good example. As soon as he figured out his what and his how, he went zero to a million in five months. It’s a pretty simple concept. But it takes a while initially. Some people spend their whole life figuring out the what and the how.

Sometimes they figure out what to sell, they’ve got the coolest product ever, but they can’t figure out how to sell it. Or they know how to sell, they just don’t have the right product. Things like that. So for this person, they’ve done that multiple times, they figured out the what and how and made it up to a million dollars, and then they shifted to the next thing. And I was in that cycle for like 12 years, so I’m probably a good coach for this, because I’ve done it, a lot. I had a lot of good businesses, but nothing that was great.

So, I can’t fix this license plate, I’m giving up. I tried, I get brownie points for trying right.

So the what and the how, I started thinking, I was like, okay zero to a million’s what and how, from a million to ten is all about the backend and frontend funnels. The frontend funnels bring more leads in, the backend funnels go deep inside that thing. All the sudden I had this epiphany. I was like, oh my gosh this is it. So I started thinking about Clickfunnels. Clickfunnels for example, as you guys know the thing, I had five or six different funnels that I had tried before we had the one that hit. And the one that hit was the Funnel Hacks webinar, it was just like boom and blew up.

Now if you look at fast forward now, Clickfunnels has been live for a little over three years. Almost three years, I don’t know. Something like that. So almost three years and what’s interesting, if you look at and do the actual math of the Funnel Hacks course, $997. We sold about 10,000-ish copies, a little more than that, but let’s say 10,000 for numbers sake. So that means ten million dollars we made from the webinar, which is awesome. Anyone else has a ten million dollar webinar, that’s great. But a ten million dollar webinar comes and goes. I’d say it’s probably one of the best of the best of our industry, but that wouldn’t have been that good of a story. “Russell made ten million bucks.”

If you look at that now, we will, where are we now, we’re in September. By November Clickfunnels will have passed a hundred million dollars in collected sales. I know because I have this countdown clock, where every single day my accountant lets me know how much further we are away from that. Because I want to know how long it took us to go from zero to a hundred million dollars. And we’re close, we’ll hit it this year for sure, it’ll be in November. So that’s exciting, right.

But I was looking, and the webinar only made ten million. That means the extra 90 million came from something else. So where did that stuff come from? And that’s when it came to going deep. Going from zero to a million is all about the what and the how. From a million to ten is about the frontend and the backend funnels. So frontend is more ways to bring leads in, so we had the books, Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets, The Perfect Webinar, things like that to bring leads into the business. Clickfunnels.com is a frontend, all this stuff like that.

Then you’ve got the backend funnels, you’re going deep. So what’s cool about it is I started selling other things related to funnels. So there’s so much stuff I could share with you guys, but if you read the Expert Secrets book, we talked about opportunity switch and then opportunity stack. So every business you only have one switch. So I switch people into funnels and I stack things within that market. And when we do this correctly we have compounding interest. I’m going to explain that here in a minute. But I switched over to like where someone comes into Clickfunnels, then we’ve got other products and services to help them better at that thing that we opportunity switched them into.

So we switched them into funnels and then we’ve got Funnel Scripts, we’ve got Fill Your Funnel, which is our traffic course. We’ve got our certification program, we’ve got our Clickstart funnel for people getting started in clickfunnels. We have Clickfunnels, we have software for crying out loud. We have all these other things, that are all tied back to funnels, so that’s how we were able to go super, super deep.

And for this person, the problem they had is they got to a million dollars and they just switched. And then they got to a million dollars and they switched. And they keep kind of switched opportunities on the person, they switched what they’re doing, they’re switching their focus, switching their branding. And I have nothing against that, I did that as well. If I would have stuck with the very first thing I would have done, we never would have Clickfunnels probably. Todd would have figured it out eventually, I’m sure.

But that’s the thing, you gotta figure out that what and how. Not only for your customers, because again, you figure out the what and the how for your customers, boom, you’re at a million bucks fast. But then it’s like, is this the business I want to be in forever? I didn’t want to be teaching micro continuity forever. I didn’t want to teach 12 Month Millionaire forever. All my first million dollar projects, there was a whole bunch of them. I think there were 7 or 8 that we had that were million dollar winners in the early days. We’d hit a million bucks and then it was kind of stale and I’d switch to the next thing and next thing and next thing.

And to get from a million to the ten to the hundred is about focusing deep. And one of the major reasons why, number one is because of compounding interest. Again, I’m not a finance guy, so my finance people out there know this way better than me. But some famous dude said that the greatest invention in the world is compounding interest. And the same thing is true with compounding customers. Every single person who buys the Expert Secrets book, or the Dotcom Secrets book, or watches the webinar, or buys Clickfunnels, I am switching those people.

All those, the goal of every single one of them, just to be completely transparent with no hidden agenda, the goal of all of those is to convince people that their new opportunity, their vehicle is funnels. So I’m convince, hey you’re an expert you need a funnel. Hey, you have an internet business, you’re a Dotcom Secrets book, you need a funnel. Hey, perfect webinar, you need a funnel. Hey Clickfunnels, you need a funnel.  That’s my only goal. I want to be completely up front. All my frontend funnels, that’s the goal. To convince people that wherever I’m grabbing at, that they need a funnel.

In fact, I’m working right now on a report called NetworkMarketingSecrets.com, yes I own the domain. How cool is that? And that’s the whole reason for that frontend, to convince every network marketer on earth that they need a funnel. And I’m doing the same thing for other markets. That’s my whole thing.

Now as soon as someone believes that they need a funnel, which they do. Then I’m stacking, I’m compounding on top of that. So then I compound, if you have a funnel you need Funnel Scripts. If you have a funnel, you need Traffic Affiliate Funnel, you may need to become certified, you may need this…..So that everything else is just opportunity stacking within the opportunity I switched people into.

So if you’re looking at your business and you’re stuck at one to three million bucks, which is kind of where a lot of….I was stuck at for a decade. I understand this world. It’s because we keep switching our customers. We keep opportunity switching them. We’re switching them from opportunity to opportunity to opportunity, and what happens after a while, they kind of lose faith in you. They’re like, this person is telling me all these other things.

The reason why we’ve done more in the last three years than the prior decade, times like 5, is because everything I’m doing, people look at it and they’re like, “Russell’s still preaching the same thing. Funnels are the key. There’s this other thing, how to get traffic in your funnels. Oh that makes total sense. Oh, here’s the live event teaching more funnels.” Everything we’re doing is stacking upon that. So it’s not like I’m switching people from opportunity to opportunity, I’m saying, “Look, you chose the right road, this is the path, the new opportunity to focus on. I’m just going to give you more tools and assets to amplify your experience and make it better for you.”

That’s how went from a million to ten to a hundred is that part. Funnels are awesome but I make money off Clickfunnels, I make money off Funnel Scripts, I make money…..all these other pieces that lead more people into it.

That was what I told this person. I came back and said, “Look, I think the biggest problem is not that you don’t have the skills, you do. It’s not that you don’t have a great product, you do. It’s that if you were so passionate about that market when you hit a million dollars, you would have went deeper. Like what software can I create for these people? What certifications? What events? You would have gone deeper trying to think of those things, which are the backend funnels, which where the majority of profit, for me it’s where the other 90 million dollars came from.” But because they weren’t as passionate about it, the made the million bucks, they figured out the what and the how for their customers, but it wasn’t right for them.

If it was right for them, they would have sat there all day long and thinking about how they can serve this customer more? What else do they need? What else do they want? They would have heard the person’s voice over and over and over again and they would have known.

Clickfunnels came out of me knowing, we heard people talk about funnels all the time. All these other things are people telling us over and over again what they want, what they need. So we’re creating those things for them and that’s how the business grows and grows and grows.

I think that’s the key, figuring out the what and the how for your customer, but also making sure it’s the what for you. Because if it’s the wrong business for you, if it’s not something you’re geeking out about, you’ll keep switching, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to hit the perfect business the first time. A lot of times, getting from zero to a million the first time is about you getting the skill set and understanding the market and learning all these kind of things.

But at the same time if you’re going there and you’re at a million bucks and you’re like, “I’m not happy here.” That’s okay. It’s okay to back up and shut it down and figure it out. You’ve got all the skills, the hard part done. It’s easier to re-figure out. You just gotta figure out what it is that you’re so insanely passionate about, what market segment, what people, what problem do you want to solve so much so that it’s going to keep you up at night trying to figure out the next thing. What else do I create? What’s the next product? What software do they need? What events? What other training? If they bought this course, what’s the next thing they need?

And that’s, I think, the key. So anyway, I just got excited because I was talking to this person and sharing that with them, this whole idea of compounding interest. That’s the coolest thing. Every single person that buys one of my books, they come into my world and now they’re going to buy the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. You look at all the other revenue, it’s all free.  I don’t have to pay for that customer. All those kind of things, so it just keeps growing and growing and growing. As opposed to when you have different things in different markets, things like that. It doesn’t compound.

That was my problem before, we had 12 companies we launched in a 12 month period of time. I wish it was once a month, but we were launching 12 at once. So it was even worse. But the interesting thing is just thinking about, anyone who bought the couponing product would never buy any of the other products, that was the biggest mistake. And then people who bought the weight loss product never bought the other ones. And it was just like, that was the issues. It wasn’t compounding. We had to re-create customers every single time.

I think the first time I understood it, I was hanging out with Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher, they had a whole bunch of businesses and I think I’d kind of strayed away from this because they went deep into the survival market, then they did it within survival and stuff like that. But what Ryan told me, “Anytime we launch another business, one of our rules is that our existing customer base, they have to be wanting to buy it. So that way we’ve got free traffic. Everything is compounding. If someone buys from this business they might also buy from this one as well.”

And while I agree with that, I would go a step deeper and not do it just in the same market, not just parallel markets, I’d just pick one market and then opportunity stack as deep as you can go.

Anyway, that’s what I got, it’s hot here in the garage. Hopefully it’s not too echo-y. I’m going to go figure out how to try and fix this license plate for my wife. So she’ll be impressed with me. That’s the goal. Just so all the women out there know, men’s only real purpose in life is to try to impress their spouse. That’s it. We’re good with everything else. So I’m going to try to do that so when she gets home she will be impressed. Anyway, appreciate you guys, thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye.

Sep 13, 2017

My new formula for getting your message in front of the masses.

On today’s episode Russell talks about what he has done to be able to connect with a broader audience of entrepreneurs. Here are the awesome things you will find in this episode:

  • Why people like the Harmon Brothers don’t know what copy is, yet they write amazing copy.
  • What Russell did to be able to appeal and connect with a broader audience of entrepreneurs rather than just marketers.
  • And how you can connect with a bigger audience and how that could help you.

So listen here to find out how Russell connected with a larger audience and what the plan for the future with them is.

---Transcript---

Good morning, good morning everybody. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. We are now watching right now Studio C, which made me think of something really funny, and that’s why we’re kicking off this episode of this podcast.

Alright everybody, it’s a Saturday. We are less than a week away from our big viral video launch. There’s so many more pieces going into it, it’s kind of crazy. We’ve got, I’m a little stressed out, I’m not going to lie. We’ve got a sales page, the demo sequence, the onboarding, the offboarding, the gamification, the show me how walk through’s, all going live in the next six days.

The program too is coming out on Monday, which I’m excited for. And then in between there we also happen to have a three day event. It’s so funny. Yesterday we were filming a video thing for Funnel Hacker TV, we were talking about funnel years and how each funnel year is one day. So it’s like, oh we’ve got like four funnel years before the next live event. And we’ve got six funnel years before the viral video launch. We’ve got plenty of time. So start saying that guys, everyday in the real world is a funnel year because you more done in a year than most people get done in a day, if you’re using Clickfunnels.

I actually have something I want to talk to you about today. I’ve been watching, ever since this whole viral video thing, it’s been fun this whole new science of marketing that’s been opened up my mind, that was different before. It was funny, we were hanging out with the Harmon Brothers, and these guys are script writers and all sorts of stuff and I’m talking about copywriting. I was like, “Who’d you guys study?” They’re like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “I don’t know, Gary Halvert, did you listen to Vince Vanga? Who are the guys you studied for copywriting?” They’re like, “Who’s Gary Halvert?” I’m like, “What?” and they’re like, “yeah, I don’t know who that is.” I’m like, “What about Dan Kennedy? What about….” And I’m naming off the legends, all these things and they’re like, “Never heard any of them.”

I’m like, “How are you guys the best video copywriters on earth and you never heard of copy?” It’s just so funny. They’re like, “We just…” They get sketch comedy writers who are really funny and then they try to weave sales principles into it. It’s funny because it’s just interesting. One thing they said is that, “We just go Kickstarter and all the best Kickstarter campaigns and watch those videos. What are they doing? What’s consistently working?”  If I was trying to train again in copywriting I’d be like, “Go to Kickstarter and watch like 8,000 videos and you’ll learn good copy.”

It’s interesting. Then one of our main writers for our script was Matt Meese from Studio C, which if you don’t know what Studio C is, that’s what I was just watching a minute ago. Go watch Studio C. It’s like the best show on TV, it’s like Saturday Night Live, but it’s a bunch of Mormons who do it, so it’s clean and family friendly. It’s awesome. You guys will love it, it’s awesome. But it’s the same thing. The guys who write the scripts for Studio C, they’re some of the best copywriters in the world and they don’t even know what copy is, they just know how to engage people and grab intention and interest and desire. They’ve learned it through a different format, which is cool.

Anyway, with that said, it’s been fun. I’ve been trying to think of different ways to grab people and get them. My first test is, it’s been interesting, this is my podcast you guys are listening to. So I do the podcast, and sometimes I do a podcast and I don’t hear much and other times I do a podcast and I get all these messages from people who are like, “Thank you. It was so awesome.” Sorry that’s my pool over there making a lot of noise, I’m going to come on this side.

For example, the entrepreneurial scars podcast I did, tons of, people messaging me from everywhere, “Thank you that was so cool.”  Entrepreneurs struggling with vacations, that one hit. And there’s a whole bunch of them that people resonate with more than other ones for some reason. So I was thinking, podcast is a really cool format to teach and train and get inside people’s minds and I love it. But it’s not, podcasts are hard to share, it’s hard for them to go viral, those kind of things. So I was like, I’m going to start taking the podcasts I have that have the most impact and people connect with the most and I’m going to try to turn those into a video, a viral video that will call out my people.

If this is resonating with people so much so that they are able to get a hold of me, which is not easy. I have a lot of walls every direction, but if they get to me it means it was worth focusing on. The entrepreneurs struggling on vacation, when I was in Hawaii with my wife, I was like I’m just going to record a little video of this, and instead of it being off the cuff, like I am right now. I was like I’m going script it out and write a minute and a half, two minute video about why entrepreneurs suck at going on vacations.

So I wrote the script, set up a camera at the beach house, recorded this thing, got home and had Kevin on our team go through and make a little viral video thing, it had music and energy and just kind of…. It’s probably more produced than some of the others I’m going to test. Sometimes less produced do better. Anyway, who knows. But if you look at it, it was not me talking about funnels. Funnels is my world, but I needed to go a level bigger if I want to go semi viral, or niche viral, whatever they call it. I needed it to go one level bigger so that it would grab my people.

So for me, I want entrepreneurs who are selling stuff through funnels. That’s my dream to get people, but a lot of entrepreneurs don’t know that yet, so I gotta connect with them at a level we can connect at. So I’m going to call out entrepreneurs. So entrepreneurs, I think the video title is like, “Why entrepreneurs suck at vacations.” In fact, I had the audio a couple of episodes back, so you guys who are listening to the audio podcast heard it last…A week ago today actually. But you can just hear it, it’s me at the beach house, doing it. It’s calling out entrepreneurs, calling out my people and then trying to have them connect with me.

So I did the video, put it together, we launched it and you know it’s not like, 18 million views or anything like that, but I think we’re at 70 or 80 thousand views in the last 7 days, which is awesome. That means 70 thousand entrepreneurs have connected with me. And the comments are crazy. “Oh my gosh, you understand me. That’s how I feel too.” And they’re tagging their wives, and friends, and kids and all sorts of stuff. It’s just cool.  It connected, all these entrepreneurs I’m connected with now, they’re like, “Who’s this weird dude that I connected with?” Now they shift from being just entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs who now read the book or whatever and get deeper and deeper with me, and eventually they are building funnels, which is where I want everybody to be. Because that’s how you change the world, you build funnels.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. I’m going to be doing more of those, I’m going to be doing, probably the next one will be entrepreneurial scars. I might go down to the courthouse or something and record it there, be like bankruptcy or I don’t know, I gotta write a script for it first.

I just thought it was a really cool thing. The reason I’m telling you this is I want you guys to think about this. Think about the thing that you’re selling. So whatever it is you’re selling, try to go one step broader. So that more mass appeal. Who are the people you would love to have buy your thing, even though they’re not ready yet, so go one level deeper. Who are those people? And then what message do you have that they would be like, “Yes, you get me. That’s me.” That’s what we’re looking for. And then try to make a little video speaking to those people, so they’ll connect with you.

So for example, vacations. Entrepreneurs suck at vacations because we want to get back to work. Entrepreneurs relate to that. That’s how I called out my people and they’re connecting now and it’s really, really cool. So for you, how do you call out your people? Who are your people, first off? You’re product, going one step broader than that, so people that don’t know who you are yet, but they would connect with you. Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense.

So for me, I’m not talking about necessarily marketers, I’m talking about entrepreneurs. Marketers are people who get what we do, they understand, that’s why Marketing Secrets podcast, that’s why all these things….You guys are marketers, you understand, you’re excited about selling it. You guys will resonate with the message no matter what, so I’m trying to go one level bigger so that it has the ability to go more viral, but also has the ability to connect with more people. Then bring them down into our funnels, into our world.

So this is what Fill Your Funnel, this is the front of the value ladder, this is how you’re casting a wider net and bringing them in. So you’re figuring out who are your people, calling them out and then what are things that you believe that they would resonate with. That the rest of the world would think is really, really weird. Honestly, it’s funny when I was making that video. I was really concerned because my wife was there, I was like, “I don’t want to offend her.” But that’s how I feel. And I know other entrepreneurs feel this way, I’ve talked to them about it. People tell me all the time. I go on vacation and people are like, “How was your vacation?” I’m like, “It was good, so glad to be back so I can stop stressing out.” Which is just, I know that that’s how I always felt.

So think about what are the things that you feel because of what you do, or because of who you are, that other people like you will resonate with, but the rest of the world will think you’re weird. That’s who you’re looking for, those kind of things. And then create something around that and just put it out there. Who knows. It may go viral, it may not. It doesn’t really matter, but just do it.

So for me, I’m going to try to do it once or twice a month. Try to pick a podcast episode I’ve done, or come up with an idea, or something that’s just like, here’s a cool story I can tell that the entrepreneurs will connect with and will get them to like me, follow me, friend me, whatever. And then through the process I can get them to buy the book, get into the culture, etc, etc, etc.

I hope that helps you guys. If you haven’t seen the video yet, again the audio podcast was a few episodes back, “Why Entrepreneurs Suck At Vacation” if you go to Facebook.com/RussellBrunsonHQ, that’s my fan page, you can see the video there for sure. Or at this point, probably if you Google, “Why do entrepreneurs suck at vacations” It’ll probably show up, who knows. But it’s worth watching and sharing and tagging your family and friends on it.

Hope that helps you guys. I’m going to go back in and watch some Studio C with my kids, because it’s amazing. Here it is, right here.  You can see it back there if you’re watching on the TV show. Awesome sketch comedy gives you good idea for writing copy, and it’s really fun. So thanks guys, I’ll see you later. Bye.

Sep 12, 2017

Against all traditional investing advice, this should be your number one focus after you launch your company.

On this episode Russell talks about paying your house off quickly so you can have the ability to risk more. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear in today’s episode:

  • Why Russell is giving the opposite advice as nearly every investor there is when it comes to paying off your house.
  • How Russell was able to keep his wife in the dark about some of the hardest times in the business.
  • Why having the stability of a paid off house gives entrepreneurs the ability to risk more.

So listen here to find out what would happen to Russell, worst case scenario and why he wouldn’t lose his home or family.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a late night, in the wrestling room edition of Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright, alright everybody. I spent almost 5 or 6 hours today with the kids in my little piece of heaven cleaning today. This is an external garage at our house that I decided to turn into a wrestling room, for those who have never seen it before. It’s awesome. I got wrestling mats, gladiator walls, Bulgarian bags, paintings of my favorite wrestlers back here, throwing dummies, the girl stuff here for the girls. These are actually the wrestling mats I used to wrestle on in high school, they were on my back deck growing up. So there’s a little nostalgia for you, that’s cool.

This is the weight room side of it, so this where we do what we do and it’s awesome. And as I was working today, we’re out in the middle of nowhere so there’s lots of spiders and bugs and stuff, so we got all these bugs trappers and stuff. So probably every three or four months I come and do a deep clean where I have to get the vacuum out and throw away all the dead spiders and re-clean it, and it’s kind of a nightmare. But it’s really fun that now it’s clean. It’s so clean right now, I love it. It makes me want to work out.

So during all this craziness today of cleaning and having fun like that, I was checking my phone a couple of times throughout and I saw a post from Julie Stoian, and I thought it was interesting because she asked, “Should I pay off my house or should I pull the money out and use that for other investments and things like that.” It’s funny because I gave my answer and it was like, the exact opposite of what I think a lot of people thought I would think. I think it’s good, so I’m going to give you my advice right now.

Because I know when I was a little kid, my dad, who is an entrepreneur and has a couple of businesses and is someone who first got me all excited by this whole thing. He used to always tell me, “You gotta pay off your house, you gotta pay off your house. Pay off your house as quick as you can.” I remember because I was like, that’s good advice and then when I got older I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and other investment books and they always talk about how a house is a bad investment and you need to keep the money as low as possible and use that to pay off….you know keep your house just down in the minimum. Pay your monthly payments and then keep that money and go and invest in other things that can produce more money.

And logically, that makes sense. If I was an investment dude, teaching people investment I’d be like, “Yes, you should not pay off your house, keep the equity in there as low as possible, strip the cash out because you can use that in other investment vehicles.” So it makes sense as an investor. But I don’t consider myself an investor. Now I am dabbling into crypto currencies, Todd Dickerson, my partner in Clickfunnels is making insane amounts of money so he’s showing me the ways of the crypto world. But I still don’t consider myself an investor. I consider myself an entrepreneur.

It’s funny because when I first started reading those books, I started believing that and believing that. And then I talked to my dad and I was like, “Dad why don’t you pull all your money out.” Because my dad’s like, buys house pays them off, cash flow. Buys houses, pays them off, cash flow. And he has his own house. I was like, “Dad, what are you thinking? You’re crazy.” And I remember one night he kept telling me, “Russell, you have to understand, there’s something about knowing your house is paid off, knowing that worst case scenario, your house is there and that gives you the ability as an entrepreneur to go and risk.”

And I was like, huh. I don’t think I really got it. You know, I heard him and I’m like, young son thinking he knows everything, but I don’t think I got it at first. I was just like, okay whatever. Then the next decade of my life started happening after that, and in that decade I’ve seen some really big ups and some really big downs, and some really bigger ups and some big downs. And right now I’m on an up cycle. And there may be a time where I go back down and that sucks. That’s scary, and I have a lot of fear and anxiety around that, just because I’ve cycled twice and I know that feeling. I know the fear and all those things. I have a constant, I think part of what drives me so hard, and people always ask “Why don’t you slow down dude, you’re doing pretty well.” And it’s because I have this internal fear. I remember what that was like to cycle and I’m trying to protect myself through the hustle or I don’t know whatever that is. So I think that’s a big driving force for me.

But during these cycles, and luckily we recovered from them. But a couple of things that I noted. Things got really bad a couple of times, but at the same time, I never, this is probably wrong, but I never told my wife about a lot that was happening, and she found out later. Actually, she was at the last Funnel Hacking Live where I did the presentation on all my failures, as you guys saw a few episodes back. And she was like, “What? I didn’t realize it was that bad.” I was like, “Well, I didn’t really tell you. I’m supposed to be the man.”

But for her, I knew that I had to have security. So I knew how much, there was an amount of money every single month that she got that would cover our house payments and our bills, stuff like that. I just knew that as long as I could make at least that, I was okay risking and trying and doing things. As long as, worst case scenario, my stability, my foundation was set. That was it.

During those rocky, scary times, I knew that worst case scenario, I could always produce enough money so that nothing at home was effected. It gave me the ability to risk, to roll the dice and try things. So for entrepreneurs I think sucking the cash out of your house and investing it in other places is the worst advice ever. Because then you’re on this unstable foundation. Sure you have more money to invest and in theory you can make more money and all these sorts of things. But it takes away your ability to risk.

Risk is what makes an entrepreneur great. We have to go out there and risk and jump off cliffs all the time. But risk is scary. The only way for us to be able to increase the level of risk tolerance we have, I think is also increase the stability tolerance on the other side. Paying off your house is smart because worst case scenario, if everything, all the crap hits the fan and everything falls apart, if you’ve done that and paid off your house, worst case scenario, you still have the stability of a home for your wife and kids and whatever.

That is the key. That gives you the ability to go and do the crazier things. So that’s my advice for all you guys. Pay off your house. Pay it off fast. Pay it off as quick as you can, because as you do that, as the stability, the anchor gets stronger and stronger and stronger on this side, your ability to risk over here, without the fear of losing that, it gives you the ability to risk more and do what you need to do. Because entrepreneurship is a lot of literally rolling the dice.

This viral video we’re doing, I keep telling everyone, typically my investments in our business are very strategic, we create a funnel, invest some money, get it converting, then ramp it up really fast. I’m not risking a ton. This is the biggest one, where it’s like, to create the video we had to write a $500,000 check. There’s half a million dollars, right. Put it all in black. With the launch party, with everything we’ve done it’s probably another 3 or 4… I mean it’s close to, when all is said and done, it’ll be close to a million bucks. All on black, okay let’s go and hopefully it will work.

But the nice thing is because of the stability on other things we’ve set up, I can take that risk and it’s okay. Because worst case scenario, it’ll be okay. I’ve talked about this on other episodes of the podcast. The thing that so often keeps entrepreneurs from success is the fear of the worst case scenario. You have to be able to look at the worst case scenario and be okay with that. And if you are, then you can jump forward. Some entrepreneurs may never look at the worst case scenario. They’re just always, we don’t want to look at the thing that we’re scared of.

So we see the thing we want and we’re kind of going forward, but there’s this nagging thing in the back of your head. Worst case scenario, what if I go bankrupt, what if my wife leaves me, what if my kids think I’m a bad dad. All these fears that are happening and we try to ignore them, but because we’re ignoring them, they’re still buzzing in our ear, in our subconscious mind. So because of that they keep coming and keep coming.

I always tell entrepreneurs, if you want to be free and able to risk you have to stop, look back and be like, “What’s the worst case scenario back there? If everything goes to crap, what happens?” and until you’re okay with that, it’s so hard to move forward. So a lot of us we have to stop and say, okay, what’s the worst case scenario?

And I remember that. A lot of times I’ve had a couple times the worst case scenario was bankruptcy, worst case scenario was losing my house, and those are scary. At the beginning you have to have that initial risk and you have to be okay. If I lose my house, it’s okay. If I go bankrupt, it’s going to be okay. But as you start rolling up into bigger opportunities, bigger risks, bigger things like that, it’s nice to look back and say worst case scenario, I lose my money on this deal. I still got my house, got my wife, got my kids. That security gives you the ability to risk big.

So pay off your house, there’s my advice. It goes against all the famous investing dudes, but I think they’re wrong. I think most of those aren’t entrepreneurs like us. That’s what we do. We’re entrepreneurs, we’re risking, we’re making the world a better place. I mentioned this on the entrepreneurial scholars podcast, the episode a few back. If entrepreneurs don’t risk, the whole world comes to a screeching halt. The government put in bankruptcy and all these laws and things to protect us so we can risk. So that’s why it’s vitally important. It’s awesome.

So there you go, here’s the mirror. What? Here you guys are, we’re all talking together. How cool does that look? If you’re listening, you have no idea what I’m doing, but if you’re watching the video at marketingsecrets.com this is what you see. Alright you guys, appreciate you all. I’m going to go back in and put my kids to bed, it’s been a fun day. Doesn’t it look good? It looks clean. Ready for some workout, ready for some people to bleed out of our muscles. It really hurts sometimes. Anyway, appreciate you guys. Pay off your house, it’ll give you the financial stability you need to risk everything and change the world. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.

 

Sep 11, 2017

If you want success, the first step is STOP STOPPING!!!

On this episode Russell talks about getting his stalling kids ready for bed and yelling at them to stop stopping, which reminded him of what Setema said at Funnel Hacking Live. Here are some of the awesome things to look for in this episode:

  • Why yelling at his kids to stop stalling, made him think of people who need to stop stopping when it comes to business and life.
  • Why it’s always important to keep moving forward even when you hit roadblocks.
  • And why its physically impossible to have success when you stop from every roadblock that gets in your way.

So listen here to listen to Russell say “Stop stopping” a million times to burn it into your brain so it motivates you to always move forward.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, it’s Russell Brunson, I’m about to go to bed, but I want to talk to you about something. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets.

Alright, so it’s been a crazy week. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little tired. We’re coming up on the big viral video launch, which has been early mornings, late nights doing a lot of things, a lot of stuff working, a lot of stuff not working. We’ve had some let downs, it’s been nuts.

It’s been fun, I don’t know about you but I just love this game, I love the journey, I love everything about it. And it’s been so much fun, but I had a funny story tonight. Actually what this came from initially is Setema, some of you guys heard him speak at Funnel Hacking Live, he’s been in Inner Circle, he was in the Inner Circle last year. And he gave this one presentation it was so cool.

He had four or five points he was going over and I remember one of them that had a big impact on me. I never found my notebook. All I remember is he said, “You need to stop stopping.” And then he started talking about people who go and hit roadblock and then they stop. You need to stop stopping. He said that things happen and then people stop. He’s like, “you gotta stop stopping.” And he kept saying that over and over again.

It was funny tonight, we got back after a long week, we had this big party at one of the neighbors houses tonight. It was probably about 250 kids at this thing, it was nuts. My kids are out there swimming and partying and Collette and I came and took the younger kids home and then I just went back to go grab them. I grabbed them and they’re all cold and tired and hopped up on sugar. You know how it is. Summer parties, I guess end of Summer parties.

Anyway, so I go and get them loaded in the car, drive them home and came into bed and Dallin, my oldest, he’s getting ready for bed and he has this thing where he kind of stalls and stalls and stalls and he kept stopping. And tonight, after the 5th or 6th time I’m like, “Come on bud, let’s go. Let’s go.” And then he was putting his shirt on and he kind of stopped there and he’s just sitting there and I was like, “Dallin, you have to stop stopping.” He’s like, “What Dad?” and I’m like, “Stop stopping.” He’s like, “Wait, what?” I’m like, “Stop stopping.” I kept yelling it and he starts laughing.

Anyway, I was getting Bowen for bed, and he kept doing it too so I’m like, “Bowen, you have to stop stopping.” And he was like, “Wait, what Dad.” And I’m like, “You have to stop stopping.” And he’s like, “Oh that’s really cool.” And I’m like, “I know.” And then I did it to Ellie. Everyone else was passed out. Collette passed out a little earlier too, with Aiden. And Norah was long gone.

Anyway, as I had fun doing that and yelling at the kids and telling them to stop stopping, I just kind of realized how powerful that is.  I was like, I gotta grab my camera just because I think that this is why most people don’t succeed. And not just in business, this is like any part of life. Good relationships, people just stop. In business they stop. In development, in sports, how many times do people just stop.

I’m not perfect either, I’m guilty of this as well. But I think one of the reasons I do have success in this avenue of my life, in business and stuff like that is I just stopped stopping. You hit something and you keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going. So for any of you guys who have a habit of stopping, you start working on a project and you stop. You start doing this thing and then you stop, and then you start doing something else and then you stop. You get stopped by whatever. It could be Facebook, phone, friends, food, something, all F’s. A bunch of….I was going to say something inappropriate, anyway, they’re all F’s.

You gotta stop stopping. I think that’s it for most people. You get a little turbulence and you stop. You gotta stop stopping. So this is it. I’m going to say it ten more times so it gets rung into your head so every time you’re moving forward on something, you’re getting direction, you’re getting momentum and start moving in this thing, you hit something and you want to stop, I want you to hear me yelling in your ear, “Stop stopping. Keep going. Stop stopping. Go, go, go, go. Keep going. Yes, it’s a trial. Stop stopping. Yes, it’s a hurdle, stop stopping. Yes, that’s frustrating, stop stopping. Yes, I know there’s pain associated with that task, you don’t want to do it. You gotta stop stopping. Just keep moving forward. Stop stopping.”

So there it is. There’s my rant for you guys tonight. Stop stopping, keep moving forward, that’s the goal. If you do that, you’ll get what you want. If you stop, you won’t. It’s physically impossible if I want that thing over there and I start walking towards it and I stop, I can’t get it. I’m like, but it’s hard, or I’m tired, or I’m hungry, or I’m blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank with your excuse. If you stop you’re never going to get there. It’s impossible if you stop. You gotta stop stopping and just walk and keep going despite all of the fear and stress and pain and all the other stuff that happens with it. Because I know it’s there, I’ve felt it before, you’ve felt it before.

But I think about all the things in my life that have been great, it’s because I stopped stopping. Wrestling was hard, I didn’t eat most days. I would way in Monday, this was in high school, I’d be at 160 and Thursday I’d be at 130. I couldn’t stop, I had to keep going forward, I learned how to stop stopping and literally stopped eating. But yes, I stopped stopping and kept moving forward. I became great at that.

Business was the same thing. I would stop because we’d get hit and didn’t move, and after years of doing it, I figured out how to stop stopping and keep moving through all the pressure and the pain and noise and keep going. There’s other aspects of my life where I haven’t been as good, where I’ve stopped. This is good for me too. There’s two avenues in my life where I’ve stopped. I gotta stop stopping too.

So this may be for you but it’s probably for me. So Russell, stop stopping. You, whoever you are listening right now, it’s time. It’s time to stop stopping. It’s time to move forward, let’s go. I’m going to go and stop stopping if you commit too. Alright? Cool, stop stopping. See you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Sep 8, 2017

On this episode Russell goes over the final step of the Clickfunnels onboarding process and helps you understand why the copy, or the words within your funnels, are so important. Here are some exciting things in today’s episode:

  • Learn why good copy is just as valuable as a good salesperson is offline.
  • Hear what kind of resources are available to help you write copy successfully.
  • And finally see how all the training you have received in these last four episodes fit together to help you be successful with funnels.

Listen here to the last step and help yourself have even more success with Clickfunnels.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell again. Welcome to the last of this sequence in the Funnel Hacker Onboarding process. This is the Marketing Secrets podcast and if you missed videos 1-3, this is number 4. Go back and watch those, it’s part of a sequence to help you understand why you need funnels, what’s the micro internal value ladder you’re creating, what is the offer you create in each step inside the value ladder, and this one is all about the copywriting. How you sell each one of the offers so you can provide value to every single step inside of your funnel.

Hey guys, this is the last of the onboarding videos, I hope you enjoyed and had a chance to watch all of them, because we’re going to go into copywriting. This is salesmanship, for some reason people understand this in the real world, they have to sell something. But for some reason, I don’t know what it is, when we get online we forget all these amazing, important principles.

So this is all about copywriting, about selling your actual product. You’re not just a product, you’re selling it every single step. You’re selling on the ad, you’re selling to get them to click. You’re selling on the landing page, to get them to give you their email address. You’re selling on the sales page to get their credit card. You’re selling on the webinar registration page to get them to register. You’re selling on every single piece of this and so many times we don’t value or remember that.

So this is the last of the onboarding videos here inside the new Clickfunnels onboarding process that I wanted to share you guys here on the Marketing Secrets podcast because I think it’s important, and I hope you love it. So watch this video right now and hopefully it re-commits you to mastering selling at every single step inside of your funnel.

Alright, welcome back. We are moving on to the last step in your initial funnel education and this is one of the most important and yet what people understand the least. It makes me laugh because if you look at traditional selling of a product or service, people know this. How do you sell the product or service? We call this online, inside of our funnels we call it copywriting. It’s the words on the page, the headlines, the words in the video, the words on the webinar, all those things. It’s the words.

It’s funny because in traditional business, let’s say you are starting a vacuum company, going door to door selling vacuums. If you come to the door and knock and say, “Hey, I got a vacuum, it’s $800.” Nobody’s going to give you money for that. Yet for some reason in our funnels, that’s what we do. We have a picture of our thing and we have a price and an order button. And that is not how things are sold. If you want to make a lot of money selling vacuums door to door you hire a really good salesperson to go and sell the product.

Good salespeople can make a lot of money. I’ve got friends selling vacuums, selling knives, selling pest control, selling alarms door to door, and some of these guys make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year selling door to door because they’ve gotten really good at selling.

So inside of our funnels we have this value ladder we’re taking people through. We have the value at each step, we have the offer at each step, but the last piece is we have to sell those things. We have to actually sell them. Just because you have a picture of a vacuum cleaner with an order button, nobody’s going to buy it unless you actually sell that thing. And that’s one of the disconnects for some reason that people know offline, but they forget when they come online. So that thing, those words, all the stuff on the pages is what we call copywriting.

Copywriting is something, you can hire people to write copy for you and really good copywriters charge a lot of money, or you can learn how to do it yourself, and there’s a couple other ways to do that. A couple things I recommend, number one is if you haven’t read the book, Expert Secrets, the reason I wrote this book is because a lot of people after they read the Dotcom Secrets book, they understood funnel structure. Here’s page one and page two and here’s the right order and those kind of things. And I watched as the Clickfunnels community started building amazing funnels and so many people would drive traffic to those funnels and they never made any money.

They come back to me and say, “Russell, why is this not working? You said funnels were the greatest thing in the world.” I look at their page and literally it’s like the landing page and here’s a picture of an ecover with an opt in box. I’m like, “What’s that?” and they’re like, “Well if they give me the email, they get that.” And I’m like, “I wouldn’t know that.” Again, they’d have their product with a picture of the product and a $300 order button. You need to sell the products.

So the reason I wrote this book was to help people understand how you actually sell things. How to position your offer, how to make an irresistible offer. What are the words and phrases and how do you tell the stories in a way to sell your product. So I recommend getting this book, if nothing else, to understand how to put all the words on the pages the right way.

Inside this Expert Secrets book, some people think it’s only for if you want to be selling information products, but the concepts in here are true for whatever it is you’re selling. Understanding how to tell a story in a way that sells your product or service. The best salespeople, online and offline, are people that are really good at telling stories. And this book walks you through how to tell stories, a stories structure, all those kind of things. So if you read this it will help you understand how to actually present your product in the right way without having to learn all the techy, copywriting stuff that’s honestly hard and confusing and to be completely honest, it’s kind of boring.

The Expert Secrets book will make this exciting and live for you and show you how to tell your story in a way that gets people excited about buying your vacuum cleaner, or coaching, or consulting, or supplements, whatever it is that you are selling. So that’d be number one, get this book and study the sections on how to tell your story.

Number two, one of the short cuts that we created because a lot of people struggle with this piece. They create the funnel and they send people and they don’t make money and they’re just like, “Russell, how do we do it? We’re providing value, we’ve got really good offers, but it’s still not working.” Again, the last step that makes this all magically work, is the copy.

So what we did, Jim Edwards is one of our partners here at Clickfunnels, he went through the Dotcom Secrets book and took all the sales scripts in here. He went through the Expert Secrets book and took all the sales scripts and storytelling scripts inside of here. And we created a separate company, we created a software program called Funnel Scripts and what that is, is a really cool tool where you’re like, “hey I need a headline for my page.” And you may not know what to do or what to put in, so you answer four or five questions, you click a button and it’s going to pop out 150 of the best headlines in the world wrapped around your product and your service.

If you’re like, “I need a video and I don’t know what to do.” You fill in a couple of pieces, you click a button and boom it gives you the entire video script. All of the scripts and copywriting for all your pages are done in there and it has helped so many people save so much time and have so much success. It is an external product, you don’t have to have it to be successful, but I recommend looking through it and getting a copy because it’ll make your job so much easier.

So with that said, what your homework is for today, it’s going to be kind of fun, a hybrid of different levels you can take it at. When you click the button down below it’ll take you over to the video, there’s a video of Jim Edwards and I talking about copywriting, helping you understand how it works, how the scripts work, and that training alone will give you the foundation you need if you want to go and start writing your own copy.

Number two is I highly recommend getting this book so you understand how to tell your story on each of the pages inside of your funnel. And then the third thing, if you’re able to invest in it, there’s the software called Funnel Scripts, again it’s a separate company. But Funnel Scripts is a really good software that will write all the scripts for all the pages in your funnel. There will be a link there for a webinar, you can watch it. The webinar will show you how Funnel Scripts works, it’ll explain the whole process, you can see demos of it and then you can decide for yourself if it makes sense or not.

But if your funnel is struggling or you’re struggling writing all the words and the headlines and all those things that are typically not second nature to people, Funnel Scripts will make that process so easy. I’ve seen people who in the past would spend four or five weeks trying to write all the copy in their funnels, get that process done in a like an hour, hour and a half sometimes. It’s very simple and it’s very easy. So that is a shortcut that will dramatically speed up your success.

But the copy is probably the most important part of the funnels. You have the value ladder, you got the offers, and the last thing is the copy to actually sell those things. And you’re selling everywhere, you start at the ad. Someone sees the ad, what’s the copy on the ad? What are the words, what are the things that get people to click on the ad? Then they come to the first page of the funnel, what are the words to get them to want this offer so you can provide value to them.

Then they opt in and go to the next page and it’s like, what are the words that make them want this offer so they get value and they want the next thing from you and that’s the last piece. It’s so vitally important, I want you to understand. Copy is the key to make these funnels tick, lights them on fire and gets people to take action when they come into your process. So I want you guys to understand. So again, click the button down below, watch the training video to help you understand copy better, then read the book to understand how to tell your story, and then number three if you’re able to get Funnel Scripts, go and get it because it’ll speed up the process so much for you.

So that’s kind of the game plan. With that said, that is the end of this walk through and this should hopefully give you the foundational information you need to understand why funnels, and why offers, and value and all these different pieces that are essential for you being successful. Now you understand the core basics of funnel marketing and hopefully, my goal with this was to help you not just become really good at Clickfunnels, but to help you understand the marketing behind it so you can have success with your funnels.

We have a philosophy, a motto, whatever you want to call it, here inside of Clickfunnels we talk about with our customers all the time. You probably heard me talk about it, but it’s a concept of you’re just one funnel away. The key to making that funnel hit, is this. It’s all the pieces we just went through. It’s understanding the value ladder, creating offers, having the copy, all those pieces, those are the keys. And one funnel, again you hit one funnel and it’ll change everything for you. And I want you guys to understand that. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this training and congratulations, we’ll give you your badge now, and now it’s time to make your funnels profitable and making you some money.

Sep 7, 2017

On this episode Russell goes over the third step in the new Clickfunnels onboarding process, which is creating an offer. Here are the amazing things you will hear in today’s episode:

  • Why creating an offer is one of the most important, yet least understood parts of the process.
  • What the difference between having a product and having an offer is.
  • And how to create an offer that is sexy and attractive to a customer.

So listen here to find out why creating an offer is so important.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell again. Welcome to the third of our onboarding videos here in the funnel hacking series. This one is obviously in the Marketing Secrets podcast so this, if you’ve been watching the last two days these are clips from the new Clickfunnels onboarding process to help you understand the core concepts of how to get your business, idea, product, service off the ground inside of Clickfunnels.

If you missed 1 and 2 go back, these are part of a sequence, there’s a series of four. The titles inside of Marketing Secrets will be the Funnel Hacker Onboarding 1, 2, 3, and 4. So go and watch 1 and 2 first and come back here for number 3. Number 3 we’re talking about creating an offer.

Alright, so this is probably one of the most important, yet least understood parts of this whole game, it’s how you actually create an offer. It’s one of those things that I think I have done so often over the last few years, I forget what goes into it. It’s been interesting as we’ve launched Two Comma Club Coaching, Steven’s been working with all these people going through it and one of the biggest questions people have, and I don’t think people say it like, “I don’t know how to create an offer.” But they’re struggling, their offers are really bad. So they’re stuck at that point, so we’re like how do we fix the offers. And we’ve been going back and forth brainstorming how you explain this.

This video you’re going to watch is part of the new Clickfunnels onboarding process, it’s all about how to create an offer the right way. And hopefully this gets the wheels in your head spinning. More so you understand what an offer actually is. If you understand, and some of you think you know what an offer is but you’re still not doing it. If you understand it I think it’ll help. So let’s watch that video right now, it’ll help you guys actually craft your offer the right way.

Alright, welcome back. This is a concept that is one of the least understood, yet one of the most important. I’m hoping that I can do this justice so you understand. This is a concept that we call creating an offer. What is an offer? An offer is, if you were asking somebody for their money or their email address or their phone number or their attention, you’re trading it with them. It’s all about trading something for attention, money whatever.

And it comes down to an offer and why a lot of people struggle in this business is that they don’t understand the concept of making offers. Now, what I learned when I got started over a decade ago was that you have to create a lot of offers to find out what people actually like. What is an offer? An offer is not a product. I see a lot of people who move from selling things on Amazon and they come over to CLickfunnels and they’re used to on Amazon selling a product.

The problem with selling a product is that typically if you’re a product, you’re a commodity. When you’re a commodity what happens is that everybody races down to the bottom. For example, when I had my supplement company, I was selling my supplements as an offer and there were people selling the exact same supplement as me on Amazon and we were selling ours for $67 a bottle, and they were selling theirs for $19.95 a bottle. I was making way more money than them because I had created an offer.

So an offer is taking things and combining them together. If I’m just selling a supplement bottle, it’s only worth whatever that thing is. And then people are going to price shop and figure out what’s the cheapest and they’re going to go for it. If I sell, if someone’s selling a supplement bottle and I’m selling the same supplement, but instead of just the supplement mine comes with a weight loss guide, food calorie tracker or whatever, these are things I can bundle together into an offer and now this worth way more than the other thing over here.

If you look at companies like Groupon and Living Social, I’m not a big fan of people running their businesses into those things, but if you look at them, they’ve become really good at creating offers for local businesses. A lot of local businesses I saw prior to Groupon would run ads that were just like, “Hey we’ve been in business for 49 years, we’re family loved and locally owned.” That was what they were selling on their pages, but that’s not an offer.

An offer is like, “Hey, if you come to us we will give you this thing.” Now most of Groupon and Living Social offers, they are big discounts. Come in and normally it’s this much money and you’re going to get this much. And that is one way to do offers, by giving it a really good offer, a special offer discount price. But then a lot of you guys don’t want discount prices, which I understand as well. So an offer doesn’t just have to be discounting prices. It can be bundling things together.

If you think about this from a, if you’re a doctor or something like that, an offer, a product is like, “Hey we do adjustments.” Or “Hey we fix eyes.” An offer is like a treatment plan. “Hey when you come in you’re going to get this and get this and we’re going to put together this cool thing.” So your ability to have success with funnels and any kind of business is your ability to create really good, irresistible offers. What’s an offer that people have to have so bad that they’re like, “Oh, I have to give this person my email address because I need that thing.”

What’s the offer that you have? We talked about before the value ladder, we’re taking people through the steps of the value ladder, so I’m trying to give value to people, but with that, the way that I get that value is that I create an offer for them. Sometimes offers are free, sometimes they’re paid. Let’s say for example somebody comes to, in fact, the offers starts clear back on the ad. The ad is not going to say, “Hey, we’ve been family owned and operated for 49 years. Click here to find out more.” That’s a horrible offer. That’s the worst offer ever.

But if it’s like, “Hey are you struggling with whatever, this kind of pain or whatever? If so, find out how we can get rid of your pain in the next three weeks.” Boom, that’s an offer. They’re like, “What is that?” so they click on the page, they come to the next step in the funnel, the very first page they land on and there I’m making them this offer. “Hey, so if you want to figure out your pain, I wrote a report, it’s a 6 page report, and it’s going to walk you through the fastest ways to get out of pain. If you give me your email address, I will trade you this thing.” Okay, I just made them an offer.  That was an offer.

So then they trade it and on the next page, I’m like, “Cool, we just sent you the thing, but if you’re still in pain, we’re a local client here, we’ve been doing this for 50 years…” and what most people would do on this page is be like, “Hey we sent you the guide, we’ve been family owned and operated for the last 29 years. Blah blah blah, you should come into our clinic.” The problem with that is there’s not an offer, you’re just bragging about yourself and nobody cares about you.

What do they care about? Them. We used to have a saying, WIIFM, what’s in it for me. So what’s in it for them? So instead of saying, “Family owned and operated.” The offer’s like, “Hey, thanks so much we just you the pdf in your email and it’s got your 6 ways to get out of pain. But right now, I’m sure you’re hurting and I want to make you a very special offer. What we’re going to do is if you call the phone number right now, I want to get you out of pain immediately, so call this number or buy this thing, and when you do that we’re going to give you this, this, and….” And you create an offer for them.

Come into our clinic and we’re going to give you natural headache medicine, we’re going to give you an adjustment, we’re going to give you a free massage, or whatever that thing is, you create an actual offer for them. They buy that, the upsell then is to give them another offer. But every single one of these steps in your funnel, from the ad to the landing page to the upsells, the downsells, to the registration, anything you’re doing in any kind of funnel, it doesn’t matter which one it is. It’s all about creating really, really good offers. And that’s how you provide value for people as you’re moving them through the value ladder.

A lot of people they think about offers from a standpoint of this is the product I’m actually selling, but again it’s not just the selling of the product, it’s every single step. The offers on the ad, the offers on the landing page, and the offers are shifting as you’re providing more value through the value ladder.

Now one way to do this, there’s a concept we talk about a lot here in Clickfunnels, our internal community we call this funnel hacking. What funnel hacking is all about it going out there and seeing what other people are doing and getting ideas for other offers. And sometimes you’re looking for offer ideas from people that are in your same industry, so say you’re a dentist, let’s say you’re selling information products or whatever, you can look, how are other people creating offers that irresistible, sexy offers. We’re looking at those type of things and funnel hacking other people and saying, “On their landing page they offered me this and then on the upsell they offered me this.” And just getting ideas of different ways to structure offers.

Now if your funnel’s not working, there’s usually a few reasons why one might not work. One is the traffic might be bad, but if the traffic is good and they’re coming to your funnel, one of the biggest things to look at if it’s not working is, nobody’s opting in because your offer sucks. We gotta talk about this internally. If your offer sucks, you need to crank it up and make it more sexy. “My offer right now is to come into my clinic and you get three visits for the price of one.” And if nobody’s coming in, it means your offer’s lame. Nobody wants it. You gotta change the offer, make it better and make it better.

A lot of times I might make 4, 5, or 6 different offers before I find the one that people resonate with, that’s the one they’re excited for. Now they start coming in. You figure out the right offer, everything else is taking care of itself. So that’s what I want you guys kind of thinking through. Again, it’s something that’s kind of counter intuitive because most people in business are used to going to Amazon and seeing a picture of the bottle and the five bullet points of why it’s awesome and here’s how you can get it super cheap and we got two day delivery.

That’s not an offer. People that compete like that, people like me come in and we destroy them because it’s like, let’s create a sexy offer that makes it so this product is worth way more, even though it can be a similar product, but I have these other things that I bundled together and made it an actual offer, it’s worth more money.

I can charge more money, and if I can charge more money, what do we know? Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. The reason why my supplement companies blew up, again because these guys I was competing against on Amazon, they were able to spend up to $20 to sell a product, where my bottles were $67 and we upsold them bigger bundles, we had other things, so I could spend 2 or 300 dollars to get a customer, where they could spend $19. It’s all about creating offers and understanding that.

So I want you guys thinking through that. How can you create an offer, what could the offer be on each of the steps inside of your funnel? This is your homework. Take the funnel you created from the funnel cookbook walk through, look at all the different pages, on the last video you kind of looked at value ladder. What’s the value I’m trying to give them here and here and here? And now you’re figuring out what’s the offer I’m going to give them in each step in this process? What is the thing that we’re trading here? I’m giving them value, they’re giving me something and I’m giving them an offer and they’re giving me something, email or credit card, or registration or whatever it is for your funnel and then think about the next page. Now that they’re on the webinar, what’s the value I’m going to provide and what’s the offer? And then the next phase.

And so, hopefully you see how these things are tying together, you have the value ladder, how you are giving value at each level in the process and then what’s the offer that we’re wrapping that around to actually give them the value and then that’s the next step.

And then the next video we’re going to go through is actually going to talk about, what are the words, we call this copy. What’s the copy on each of the pages in this process to actually sell that and get them excited about giving you their money, or their email address, or whatever the thing might be. So that’s the next step. That’s your assignment for right now, so go do that you guys. We’ll see you on the next training.

Sep 6, 2017

On this episode Russell talks about the second step of the funnel hacker onboarding process, the value ladder. Here are some cool things to look for in this episode.

  • You will see how the value ladder works.
  • Find out how to get your customers to ascend the ladder.
  • And see why providing value to your customer will help you get what you want out of them.

So listen here to find out how to get customers to ascend the value ladder so you can get more of what you want out of your customers.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to video number two here in our Funnel Hacker Onboarding series inside the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed yesterday’s podcast talking about why funnels, why they’re important. Today we’re talking about the value ladder.

Alright so with that, before I show you the video, a lot of times when people think about value ladders, because I think the way I explained it in the Dotcom Secrets book, I talk about going from funnel one to funnel two, to funnel three which is true, but for most people, they spend so much time mapping out the value of, “this is where I’m going to go in the next 20 years. Eventually I’m going to do high end coaching and then I’m going to coach the president of the United States. Then I’m going to become the president of the United States….” They’re going so deep in this huge value ladder, which is good so you understand where you’re going, but it comes down to the micro. What’s the value ladder here, when someone hits my landing page? What’s the value of getting them here, when they opt in, what’s the value?

So that’s what this training is about. It’s kind of micro level of value ladders and how they kind of work together. So let’s watch that clip right now, I hope you guys enjoy it. We’ll see you on the next episode:

Alright welcome back. In the last video we talked about what is a funnel. By the way if you haven’t had a chance to read the Dotcom Secrets book, I would recommend it because this what we go deep into. What is a funnel? The whole concept of whoever spends the most money to acquire a customer wins, is all talked about in here. We talk about funnel structures and it’s a really good book to help you understand the strategy behind funnels if you don’t have it yet. So click on the button down below, there’ll be a page where you can go and get the book, I think it’s $7.95 shipping and handling. But that’s what this is all about, to help you understand funnel structure better.

Now one of the core concepts inside of here that I want to share with you, because it’s such a key to understanding how funnels work is a concept called the value ladder. The way the value ladder works, if you look at this image right here, on the left hand access you have value. This is how much value you’re giving someone. As the arrow goes up, the higher the value is. On the bottom access it has price. And as you go to the right the price gets more and more expensive.

Now most business owners, the most ideal thing would be able to provide the most amount of value for somebody and get the most amount of money. For example, we have a coaching program that we charge a million dollars to create somebody’s funnel for them and that’s amazing. In a perfect world I could go to every single person and be like, “Hey, its a million dollars, I’ll create a funnel for you and it’s going to be awesome.” And the problem, if I walked up and saw you on the street for the first time and I was like, “Hey my name is Russell Brunson, I know I look like I’m 11 years old, but if you give me a million dollars, I will build a funnel for you.” You’re going to think I’m insane because I’ve provided zero value to you at this point.

Yet that’s what a lot of us as business owners are doing. We’re coming and we’re pitching our most expensive high thing and shooting for the fences but people have not received value from us, so they don’t want that. So if you look at how businesses work, they move this thing called a value ladder where initially when someone first comes into your world, they’re kind of testing the water and feeling things out. So what you want to do is try to provide value for them, right there, for free. And if they get value, if they dip their toy in the water and they’re like, “Wow, that was really cool. I had a good experience with so and so.” And they receive value, us as humans will naturally want more.

We’ll start ascending up and say, “That was a really good experience, what else do you have?”  and we’ll move up the value ladder where you have a chance to offer them more value, but they’ll give you more money. And then if they receive value at that level, they’ll naturally want more and they’ll keep moving through this ascension until you either stop selling them something or until you offend them.

And that’s how business works, so you understanding the process of this value ladder, and you know this in the real world. If someone came to you the first day and said, “What do you do for a living?” You would tell them and try to explain some stuff and try to give them something like, “Oh cool, that’s awesome.” And you build some rapport and there’d be some value there and then the next thing you do is offer them something else.

It’s the same thing, if and when you met your spouse. The first time you met them, the first thing is you ask them on a date. And you provide value. If you have a good time on the date then you go on a second date and it keeps going on until you get married. There’s this logical progression. Yet, for some reason online we all forget that. All these common sense rules fall out of the world because we’re like, “They’re pixels and things and it’s traffic.” No, it’s people and you have to understand that.

So what happens is every single funnel is a value ladder. When somebody comes to my very first page I’m saying, “Hey, my name is Russell Brunson. I want you to give me your email address.” If I stop there, you receive no value. Why would I give you my email address? If you come to the page and I’m like, “Hey, my name is Russell. I wrote a really cool report called blah blah blah…” Whatever it is and say, “I’ll give you this report for free, just give me your email address and I’ll send it to you.” And you’re like, “Huh, okay.” You give me your email address, I send you this report., you get the report and get some value, you’re like, “That was really, really good. Russell’s a cool dude.”

Then on the next page in the funnel it’s like, “Hey, I sent you the report. Go check it out. I think you’re going to love it. But while you’re here I want to make a really special offer to you…” And try to provide value again, “Normally I sell this thing for blah, but I’m going to give you a special discount because you’re here right now.” Or whatever that thing might be. Because you’re a first time subscriber, normally the first thing I want to sell you is this thing. A lot of times in my business we do books for really cheap, or we do, if you’re an offline business maybe it’s a free exam, whatever it is. Something you’re providing value. If someone gets that, they buy the next thing.

And then the next page is like, “hey you just bought my book for $7.95, the book’s coming, you’re going to love it but some people like to learn in a classroom situation. I have a home study course that’s this.” Or whatever that thing might be. Same thing works in ecommerce. People always tell me, “That works in information but not in ecommerce.” But the same thing works in ecommerce. One of our number one Clickfunnels sellers right now, he built a huge funnel, it was one of the most successful funnels I have ever seen and it started with a flashlight. “Hey this is a tactical flashlight. Would you like to buy it?” and people bought the flashlight and they started thinking, how else can I provide value to this person? He started bringing them through a value ladder.

He said, “Look, you bought a flashlight for this price, how would you like a second one at 50% off?” and boom, like half the people said yes. He’s like, “Hey, now you got this flashlight do you want a kit? Like a carrying case we can put it in?” and people were like, “Oh yeah. Sure. Yes.” And boom, it took them to the next thing. And he kept thinking how else do I provide value? “Do you want rush shipping?” “Yes.” “Do you want this?” “Yes.”

So the value ladder is always thinking about that. So every time I’m working on a funnel, I’m thinking about this. Somebody, they see an ad, they see something, they click on something, they come to my page, the first page in my funnel and I’m thinking how do I provide this person value? What do I want in return? I want their email address or maybe their credit card, want them to register for a webinar, whatever the action is on that page, I’m thinking how do I provide value to this person?

And if I do it in a cool way and they connect and have a good experience, guess what? They’re going to want to buy again and again. And that’s how you build a business the right way.

So as we do more and more of these trainings, we’ll go more into value ladder because the value ladder is happening in a bunch of different places. It happens inside your funnel. Every page in your funnel is the next step of a mini value ladder. Also, we’ll talk about this in the next major training, after someone goes through your first funnel, usually we have a second funnel and that’s a bigger piece of the value, it’s kind of like the micro and the macro. These things are happening all the time, but for right now I just want you thinking about that.

Every single interaction you have with somebody, you need to provide them value. And then if they like that they will naturally ascend up and want more value and I can charge them more. If they like that I can provide them more and we keep taking them through this process. That’s how I can go right now and get people to pay me a million dollars to build a funnel for them, because I’ve provided value at all these levels.

I provide value through my books, through my software, through my training, through my events, now when it comes to them it’s like, “Yes, I trust Russell. I have rapport with him. He’s awesome. I believe that he will do what he’s going to do.” And now they’re willing to invest the big money.

For your business it’s the same thing. You gotta start thinking through that. I want you guys to understand that concept of the value ladder. Your homework for right now is map out a value ladder. This is not talking about all the products and services you might sell over the next ten years, I’m talking about just this initial funnel. The funnel you started building in the last walk through, you have all these different pages right, depending on which funnel you picked inside the cookbook.

I want you thinking, if someone lands on this page what’s the value I’m providing them in exchange for whatever is happening, their email address? If I go to the next page, what’s the value I’m providing in exchange for them to give me their credit card? What’s the value I’m providing to get them to buy the upsell? What’s the value to get them to register for the webinar? Whatever that thing is for your business, I want you thinking through that and writing out every single, look at all the pages in that funnel and think through what’s the value ladder I’m taking them through inside of this funnel?

And that is the key. In the next video we’re going to talk about now that you got the value, how do you structure the offers. The next video will be about the copy to sell the things on the pages. But right now I just want you conceptually thinking what do you have to offer people? Of all the products and services and ideas and the things that you have, what’s the logical progression you can take somebody through to give them more and more value, so they can build a relationship with you? So they can buy your products, buy your services and you can change their life. That is the goal.

So that is the assignment right now and the other thing is if you don’t have a copy of this book yet, I highly recommend the weblink down below to go get it. And again, this will teach you all about funnel structure, it’s going to teach you about value ladders, a whole bunch of other things. This will help you understand the strategy of funnels in a much deeper way. So get the book if you don’t have it yet as well. Thanks so much. See you on the next training.

Sep 6, 2017

On today’s special episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast, Russell shares a video for the new onboarding process in Clickfunnels. He talks about the four core things you should know and goes into detail on the first one, which is what a funnel is and does your business need funnels? Here are some awesome things you will hear in this episode:

  • What the four core concepts are that you will need to know to use Clickfunnels effectively.
  • What the difference between a website and a funnel are.
  • And hear about Russell’s first experience using a funnel and if it worked well for him.

Listen hear to find out more about the first core concept you need to know for the Funnel Hacker Onboarding process.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’ve got a really special episode, actually the next 4 episodes are kind of some special episodes I want to share with you guys, that I think you’re going to love. So let’s get into it.

Alright so, on this first episode, I want to give you some back story on what’s happening and why I made these four special episodes for you. Right now inside Clickfunnels we are working towards our big viral video launch on the 15th. With that we are trying to change a whole bunch of things, fix the onboarding process, make thinks simpler, simpler for people. Because if we get a huge influx of customers, especially people who don’t really know our marketing, or understand what funnels are or how they’re doing it, we have to really simplify the process.

So that’s what we’re doing, a simplification of this whole thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, our Clickfunnels support has gotten so much better. We shifted from it taking on average, a little less than an hour to get live response, now we’re at a 3 minute medium. So many cool things we’ve been doing trying to prepare for this thing, which is now like two weeks away for us. It’s kind of stressful, not going to lie.

One of the cool things we’re having is this really cool gaming, badging system so when somebody comes into Clickfunnels there’s like this gamified onboarding process. You’re doing things, you’re moving throughout it, it’s going to be really cool. So by the time some of you guys are listening to this, it’ll actually be live so you can go and see it.

But in there, a couple of things with Clickfunnels. With Clickfunnels we’re teaching how to use the software, but also people have to understand the marketing behind it or else they’re not going to be successful with the software, so it’s kind of interesting. So I tried, how do I teach all this funnel psychology and stuff in a very short, compressed period of time? So we did that with one of the little badges that people will win here inside of the onboarding process. So that’s kind of what’s going down.

So with that I basically created four different videos that are the core foundational things to get people onboarded to understand the marketing behind funnels very, very quickly, very rapidly. So that’s what these episodes are about. I’m actually going to just play those four video clips. Now in the video clips I’ll say, “Click on the button down below.” And “You’re going to get this thing over here.” And “This is your homework assignment.” Just know that those are from the onboarding process. If you actually want to get the homework assignments, if you want to see the things I’ve talked about, you do actually have to login to Clickfunnels and go through the onboarding to get those.

But I want you to understand because I think, it hopefully made sense. Maybe it makes no sense. But I tried to really simplify the process of four core things that are the four things to really understand. Number one is why do we have funnels? Why is that important? Number two is the value ladder. A lot of times you think about value ladder from a high level, like first I’m going to do a book, then I’m going to have an event, then we’re going to do one on one coaching. But I want to talk about value ladder from a micro standpoint, instead of the macro.

So it’s like landing pages, how do you give value on that. And then what’s the value on the sales page, and the upsell page. How do you do that? So we go into the value ladder in video number two. Number three then is how to create an offer which is something, it’s funny in my mind, I think this common sense to me, or intuitive or I’ve done it so long I don’t think about this. But it seems like as we’ve been doing the Two Comma Club Coaching that one of the biggest problems and questions people have that Steven deals with everyday is how do we create an offer. So I’ve never really talked about that.

I guess I assumed, I think I assumed that people understood and I found out now that they don’t. So I go deep into how to create an actual offer, which I think is cool. Hopefully it was good, maybe it’s lame. But hopefully it turned out good to help you understand, “oh that’s what I need to be doing. I need to be creating lots and lots of offers. That’s the key to this whole thing.”

And then the fourth step was understanding copywriting because copywriting is like the last layer, it’s how you actually present the offer. So we have why you need a funnel, inside the funnel what is the value you’re providing each step inside the funnel. Then from there what’s the offer you’ve created in each step inside the funnel to actually provide that value and then the last one is the copywriting, which is how you actually sell the offer, which provides the value, which is how you get someone through your funnel. That’s kind of cool.

So anyway, that’s what I’m going to share with you guys. So over the next four episodes we’re going to go over that. So this first one we’re talking about why do we need a funnel. Some of you guys have obviously been funnel hackers forever and you know this stuff. Some of you guys might be like, “What the dump is Russell talking about?” So that’s what we’re talking about now, why funnels. I’m going to show you guys that clip and that’ll be what’s happening here on this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey this is Russell again and today I’m excited. Because today we’re not just talking about Clickfunnels, which is one of the coolest things in the world but for you to really utilize Clickfunnels and really have success from it, I think it’s vitally important that you not only get good at using the software and using the tool, but you actually become a marketer. Clickfunnels was built by marketers like me, for marketers to be able to market their products and services.

Sometimes people come in and have a product, they have a service they want to sell and they throw it into Clickfunnels and build a funnel and then they’re like, “No one’s buying it, nobody’s coming to my thing, no one’s giving me their email address. Why not?” It’s because it’s not just something you put up there and hope that the best happens. It’s something where you have to understand the marketing behind it.

So what I want to do during this walk through is to help you understand some of the core, fundamental concepts of marketing that are essential for your success inside of funnels. Because if you understand these things when you’re building funnels, your funnels will become profitable, they’ll actually make money and you’ll have success with Clickfunnels. And that’s our number one goal for you. So that’s kind of the game plan.

So to kind of step back, because I know that a lot of people when they first get into Clickfunnels, they don’t even know what a funnel is. So depending on where you’re at, you may know exactly what it is, you have a hazy idea, or you have no idea at all. Most people obviously have heard of a website. When I got started in this business 15 years ago, websites were the thing. And It’s funny because I remember back then everybody would come and they’d say, “Do you think I need a website? Everyone’s talking about websites. Should I get one?” and now we kind of laugh about that because there’s no business, I don’t think, that doesn’t have a website. You have to have a website to exist.

So we just kind of assume it now and that’s kind of what funnels are today. Funnels are the future. They are the evolution of websites. It’s where everything is going. People always ask me, “Well do I need a funnel for my business?” And I always kind of chuckle because they don’t understand the strategy, when they do it’s like, “Oh wow, there’s no point to a website, the only thing I need is a funnel. It’s where everything’s going.”

So that’s what I wanted to really help you guys understand. I think the best way for you to really understand it, I’m going to tell you guys a story about how I kind of got it. And when you understand this, it should hopefully make more sense inside of your business.

So first core concept you have to understand, I learned this initially from one of my very first marketing mentors, his name is Dan Kennedy, and he said this, “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.” Now when I first heard that, it didn’t make perfect sense to me. I was like, “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would I want to spend a whole bunch of money?” And I remember hearing that and it didn’t really resonate with me. But bear with me as I share this story with you, it’s going to make, you’re going to find out, this is the key. The most important thing to understand in business, in marketing, in funnels. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.

So let me tell you my story. When I got started in this business back 15 years ago, I was in high school and I’d built my very first website selling potato guns. Now I’d created an information product, I setup a website, I’d done my best and back then the way everyone got trafficked to the websites was by using a website called Google. So I went to Google and started buying my very first Google ads. Now as a college student, I didn’t have a ton of money, so I was able to invest about $10 a day into Google ads. The good thing for me is I was selling this DVD for $37 and what happened is on average, for every $10 I’d spent, I’d sell about 1 DVD.

So you do the math on that, I was spending $10, making $37. So I had $27 profit that I was putting inside my pocket. What happened is a little while later, Google shifted their algorithms and kind of changed how things worked. And the price for every single click started going up and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. What happened is one day I woke up and the ads that I was running were exactly the same. I was getting the same amount of clicks, the same amount of people on my website. But now instead of spending $10 a day to get the same amount of traffic, I was spending $50 a day.

If you do the math on that, you spend $50 a day, make $37 a day, I was losing $13 every single day because of my website. Now I don’t know about you, but I really quickly, my wife and I realized that we couldn’t keep doing that and stay in business. After four or five days I had to turn off my website and it was over for me. And unfortunately for me and for so many entrepreneurs that’s where most entrepreneurial dreams die. You’re spending money and you can’t be profitable and it just falls apart.

I started learning this lesson. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. I couldn’t spend more than $37 a day, because that’s all I was making. I was capped at that. And that’s if I just wanted to break even. And so a few months later, I had a friend who was in a similar business to me and he called me up and said, “Hey Russell, I think I figured out this secret. I started adding upsells to all of my products.” And I was like, “What do you mean upselling?” he said, “Well, it’s kind of like McDonalds. You’ve been to McDonalds?” I said, “Yeah.” “You know when they you offer you a hamburger..” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Did you know for them to sell that hamburger they actually lose money? The money for the ads, the promotion, the marketing, they actually lose money. So they sell you a hamburger for $2 or $3 and it costs them $4 or $5 to get you there in the drive-in.”

“But they added a little sentence on there. They said, ‘Hey, would you like fries and a coke with that?” and the majority of people say, ‘Oh yeah. Throw that in there.” and they did that, the fries and coke is where they make their money. So they spend $3 or $4 to get someone there, they sell a hamburger for $2, they lose a dollar, but they ad fries and a coke and all the sudden, boom. They’re profitable.”

When he said that, the light bulb went off in my head and I said, “okay, well how do I do this?” and so he showed me his website and he had similar websites to me selling little information products. He said, “Look, what I did is I started having upsells, trying to sell the next thing that someone would need if they bought my first product. “ And I said, “How would work for my potato guns? I don’t know.” And he said, “Well, when somebody buys a potato gun DVD what’s the next thing that they need?” and I was like, “Well, the next thing is they’d have to buy the pipes and the glue and the BBQ igniter and all those pieces that you have to go the store to get.” And he said, “You should make the kit and just upsell the kit.”

So I was lucky, I found someone up in Northern Idaho who actually sold potato gun kits and we did a partnership and started adding those as upsells. So I transitioned up my little website into my very first funnel, I didn’t know that’s what it was called at the time, but it was a funnel. So someone would buy my DVD and then the next page we’d upsell them a potato gun kit.

Now if you look at the math how this all worked, I was still spending $50 a day on Google, that didn’t change. They didn’t lower their prices for me. They were still charging me the same amount. And I was still averaging about one sale a day of my DVD. So I was only making $37, so I was actually losing money. But then, what was cool is that one out of every three people who bought my DVD ended up buying my upsell and buying my kit.

You look at the math, my kit was $197, that means one out of three, I made an extra $65 dollars for every DVD I sold. That means I spent $50 a day and I was making $102 a day. So you do the math behind that, I was actually making $52 every single day. Now that is when the whole light bulb went off in my head. That’s the secret. If I can spend more money to acquire a customer, then I win. That’s when I realized that websites made me broke, but funnels actually made me money.

When I started my career, after I did that, I started getting excited, I started realizing wow, there’s so many ways to do funnels and I could put funnels into any business. And I started doing that and started going into really competitive markets where there’s tons of competition. I would look and see these people, all they had was a website selling a product and I would take that concept and start upsells and downsells and adding different things in there and start competing against these people. And what’s crazy is they could spend however many dollars a day in advertizing. I could spend two or three times as much money and still make more money and very quickly I started beating out all my competitors in every market we went into.

That’s when I realized, just like Dan Kennedy told me, that whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And that’s why funnels are so important. Especially if you’re struggling in your business right now. If you have a business and you’re break even or you’re losing some money, a funnel is the secret. That’s what gets you from breaking even to becoming profitable.

If you’re doing well but want to grow, a funnel is the secret. It’s how you start taking your business and scaling it. You make more money for every single person who comes into your funnel. The funnels are the secret to growing business and getting your message, your products, your services out into the world. That’s why we’re so excited about funnels.

So I wanted you guys to understand the concepts behind those things. Obviously there are lots of different types of funnels, as you learned in the earlier walk-through, inside the cookbook we had 22 different types. So some of the funnels are specifically for selling a product, like my potato gun DVD, where I sold a DVD and then I upsold a potato gun kit. Some funnels aren’t for that. Some funnels are for generating a lead, then you can send emails to them and sell them things in the future. Some are to generate applications so you can call them on the phone. Some are funnels to get people into your actual location.

It doesn’t really matter, there’s different funnels for different situations. But all a funnels is something where you’re taking somebody, and you’re taking them through this process to get the end result. What’s interesting is that I think a lot of people think that funnels are this mysterious thing, yet it’s happening every single day right now. In fact, if you run an offline business, I promise you, you already have a funnel. It may be a really bad one, but you have one. Think about this.

Let’s say you’re a chiropractor, or a dentist or something. Somebody sees an ad, they drive by and see your billboard, they see your place, they get a referral, something, and they come to your location, they walk up to your door, what’s they first thing they do? They open the door and walk in. Something’s happening, they’re coming into this funnel and they’re greeted by somebody. It could be your front desk receptionist or whoever. They’re saying something, they’re trying to get them to schedule an appointment or set up a call or whatever the thing might be and then after that happens they take them to the next step and the next step and every business has it. There’s some kind of funnel, some kind of process you’re taking people through all the time.

The online funnels are the same thing. People think its something different, but it’s not. If I’m driving an ad from Facebook, they’re going to come somewhere, to a page, and maybe on that page I’ll try to ask for their email address, or maybe I’m selling them a product, I’m taking them down a path, just like I would if I was selling somebody face to face.

So the coolest thing about funnels is it’s not something new or different that you’re not used to, it’s the same thing you’re used to just in an online format. When you start realizing that, you start realizing funnels are happening everywhere around you. For me, I started noticing them over and over and it gets me so excited to see it and now it’s coming back. How do I do this for my business online? So that’s kind of the game.

Now, I’m going to be walking through a lot more of these things through the next training videos down below, but I wanted you guys to understand, that’s what a funnel is. I want you to understand the one core concept. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. That’s how you grow a company, that’s how you beat your competitors, that’s how you sell more products, that’s how you get your ads more out there, that’s how all the things you wan t in business, all come off that concept. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And the way you’re able to spend more money profitably is by having a funnel.

So I hope at this point I’ve sold you on funnels. They are the key to everything in life, at least related to business. So I hope you understand that. With that said, your assignment right now is just to kind of think through that and understand that and understand the power and importance of funnels. Think about your existing business, think about the business you’re in right now. Let’s say you do have a regular website, how do you take all these things and how do you restructure them into an actual funnel? Where are you seeing funnels right now? If you have a regular business, do you see the funnel right now? What does that look like? What’s the process somebody’s coming through? And then what can you do to fix those things. And just start thinking about those things because it will get you excited about funnels. With that said, thanks so much and I’ll see you guys on the next training.

Sep 2, 2017

Bonus Episode - Why Entrepreneurs Suck At Vacations

Sep 1, 2017

How to recover quickly, when you keep on getting knocked down.

On this episode Russell talks about spending his day putting out giant fires, so he can get up and do it all again. He explains why it’s important to get back up whenever you get knocked down. Here are some of the awesome things happening in today’s episode:

  • Find out what kind of issues Russell had in one day and how he was able to get up and move forward.
  • Hear Russell’s backstory of how he learned to roll with the punches and continue to move forward even when facing obstacles that seem insurmountable.
  • And find out why you too should get back up and keep going whenever you get knocked down.

So listen here to hear Russell’s inspirational story of how he makes it through the kind of challenges that would keep a lesser man down.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to a late night Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. It is a beautiful night. Do you hear the crickets out there? It’s kind of creepy when you get to the darker spots. I hope you guys are doing awesome. I wanted to make you guys a video and run a podcast today about something I think really, really, really important. There we go, there’s some light for those who are watching the video version. If you’re on the podcast, it doesn’t matter. You can hear my voice.

Alright, I want to talk about something interesting that I realized today that I think is what keeps a lot of people back. It probably kept me back a lot when I was first getting started. One thing, I’m sorry I’m looking for, I’m at the pool house, I’m drinking some Keto OS because I love the stuff, so I have one every morning and one every night. It is my sweets and that is what I’m doing. That’s what I’m looking for, if you’re wondering what I’m doing and why I’m talking weird.

What I want to talk about today, for example, we had a lot of crap happen. Not little things either, huge things. Things that are devastating. Thing that in my past would have crippled me. I would have stopped and been like, “Ugh, ugh, ugh.” And it’s interesting because I see people now days who are in business and they’re moving forward, moving forward and trying to do stuff. And not just business, honestly, it’s all aspects of life. It’s their personal life, it’s their family life, their relationships, it bleeds in a lot of different things.

But for this purpose it’s business, where something really crappy happens. You have these plans and things you think are going to be happening and then you hit this wall and you’re like, you throw your hands up in the air, I don’t know what to do. So you just stop, right. You just give up.

Like I said, I think there was a time where I probably did more of that. And I think I’m lucky. When I grew up, I was a wrestler, as a lot of you guys know. One thing that happened with wrestling is and it’s probably a good thing, I was really bad at first. I’d get beat a lot. In fact, my brother Scott, who is going to be editing this video, when we first started wrestling, he’s my younger brother and he was beating me at first. As a big brother it was really embarrassing. Luckily, I loved wrestling and he didn’t so I was able to pass, but he would have been beating me my whole life, which would have been really embarrassing.

But because I was getting beat at first, I wasn’t like the best kid so I got beat a lot, and then I came back and I learned how to beat people. Probably the best example of this, my junior year in high school, my goal was to be state champ, I thought I was going to make it. What’s interesting is, as I was going for it, my first match my junior I wrestled this guy named Nick Fresquez from Hunter High School. Sorry there’s the ice coming out. Anyway, I told everyone I was going to be state champ. I was talking all the conference stuff, and my very first match wrestling Nick Fresquez, who is returning, he’d taken second place at State a year earlier, he’s returning back and he beat me. My very first match the whole year, I was devastated.

Luckily for me, my dad filmed the match, so what we did for the next four months, every single night we watched that match and then we’d practice in how to beat Nick Fresquez. And then I never saw him, I never wrestled him the rest of the year, but then at the end of the year, sure enough he was on the opposite side. He was ranked first in state and I was ranked second and we came against each other in the finals, I wrestled him. In the finals I beat him because I knew his moves. I practiced them every day for four months. In fact, I actually beat him, I think I told you guys this story before. But I beat him with the same move he had beat me with, which is kind of fun.

So I was used to getting beat up and then coming back and learning how to win. Getting beat up, come back and win. So that has helped me through my life. I think in business it’s the same thing. I would start and get hit with something, sometimes it’s like hitting a road block. How many of you guys have felt that? Or like hitting a wall and you’re just stuck and you’re like, I don’t know how to overcome this. This is an insurmountable object and I don’t know how to overcome this. And we hit those things.

So that happens all the time, like I said, in business. And what’s interesting is most people don’t get past those. They hit the wall and then they freeze up and stop and then they go watch the TV or quit, whatever those things are. It’s interesting because I see that a lot with our entrepreneurs, who a little road block or hiccup will come and then they just stop. And it’s like, don’t stop, keep going. Keep going.

But I think what happens, is the more you do it, the more your capacity increases. Your ability to handle those things and take them and plow through them and keep moving forward on them, you know what I mean?

So today we had so many things. We were supposed to watch this viral thing, if you go to….who knows if it’s still live when you watch this, but cfgoesviral.com was this really cool thing. What I wanted to do, I wanted to make where somebody, they opt in to this thing and then they get a referral link and they refer other people, and they get a dollar for everyone they sign up. And it was going to make this huge viral thing that would grow really, really fast. So we spent the last 2 weeks getting all the things put together, creating the video and sales page, the structure and the flow and the funnel. Everything was working, we tested it, and I wanted to build it inside of Clickfunnels, but we couldn’t because it’s this feature we don’t have right now and Todd’s like, “We could build it in the future, but we don’t have time to do it, because all this crazy stuff is happening for the launch.

So we didn’t, and there was this third party service we decided to use. So we used this third party service, we start trying to test it and all these things aren’t working. We got it working so it pretty much worked and we did the launch and sent emails out and we started a Facebook Live. It was all exciting and instantly all these people started coming and then guess what happened? Boom, the whole thing crashed within minutes.

We called the guys up, the service and we’re like, “Dude, our sites are down.” And they’re like, “Uh, we’ll call you back.” Okay, that’s not good. And the whole thing is down 15 – 20 minutes it’s down. And finally we see, everything goes offline, they reset their servers, it comes back up and it’s working, but we had to pause emails and everything at the time, so he comes back like 15 minutes later and he’s like, “It’s been 15 minutes, nothing bad has happened. You’re good to go.” We’re like, “Dude it’s because we stopped everything. We stopped the ads, we stopped everything. If you look at this…” I think we had 5% of our emails sent out and we just crushed their servers and it was just done. And we’re like, “Dude, you don’t understand. We’re trying to 100 thousand opt in’s in 7 days. To get that, there’s probably going to be a million to a million and a half, maybe two million people that are going to come through your links. Can you handle that?” and they’re like, “No, we can’t handle that.”

We’re like, “We told you numbers ahead of time.” And they’re like, “Well people always tell us numbers but no one ever hits them. We didn’t believe that was going to happen.” I’m like, “We just launched this viral contest. People are signed up, they’re sharing links. We can’t stop this now.” But the service wasn’t working. And it’s just like, most people, and me 5 or 10 years ago would have been like, “We’re screwed. What are we going to do?” But it was like, “Okay, we gotta keep moving forward. What are we going to do? What do we gotta fix?”

So I messaged Todd and Todd’s like, “Alright, I’m pulling an all nighter.” So he went and Jamie Smith came in and they spent the whole next 4 or 5 hours coding this whole thing out and rebuilt from the ground up the entire company software that we did and then built it into Clickfunnels. The testing is all done and they’re going to roll it all out first thing in the morning and then we’re going to relaunch the viral campaign right afterwards and hopefully get the same impact. But that could have been devastating.

That was one thing. And it was like 4 or 5 things like that just today that happened. Insane. The bigger a company gets, the more fires there are. I’m like, there are like 4 huge fires….no 5. 5 huge fires that I put out today. That was one of 5 huge fires.

One of them was some yahoo causing fistfights and threatening to kill people in our Facebook group and it happens to be a friend. He comes in and then we block and he starts threatening me and all sorts of stuff. That’s happening and then the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. All these fires are happening at the same time. I can’t stop because we still have this launch happening.

I spent probably 4 hours today working on the new sales letter for when the viral video goes live, which is so cool. I can’t wait for you guys to see it, I’m so excited. And then on top of that, I gotta record like 40 videos tomorrow, so I was writing the scripts for those and mapping out the sequence and timeline. Plus we’re working on the event funnel for Funnel Hacking Live. So I had to go through and finish another round of edits for the schedule. Then message all the potential speakers, invite them to speak, get the flow done. And then the viral video party, we had to shift the whole timeline, so we’re calling Boise State and trying to shift…..

It was all these fires, fire after fire. Any one of those should have crippled us, or me, or our entire team. They should have stopped, but we didn’t. We kept going forward. I don’t know why I’m sharing this, other than I think most people stop way too fast. And I don’t know if it’s just from doing it so many times and so often.

It’s funny, I remember somebody told me once… I think Dan Kennedy told me, “Once every quarter an entrepreneur will face a crisis that will either make or break his company.” I’m like, “Once a quarter? Dude, we’re getting that 4 times a day. 4 quarters of the day and consistently.” And the bigger we get, the more those things are. The one nice thing is that typically, you don’t have the company blow up overnight. So I’m lucky that I had 10 years of cutting my teeth and trying this thing and bankrupting two companies and going up and down and all sorts of failures, so that when I had the big success my capacity has increased and I’m handling things pretty well.

I screw up a lot. Just so you guys know. There are public screw ups, where a whole affiliate system that we built out crashes in the middle of the launch. Anyway, there’s just things that happen but most people just stop too fast. It’s kind of like lifting weights. The only way to keep moving through those things, because some of you guys hit those things and you stop and I know your….hopefully one or two of you guys hearing this are saying, “That’s me, I hit and obstacle and I freeze.”

So what I want you to understand, it’s like lifting weights. You’re pushing and pushing and you can’t do anymore and it freezes and it can’t keep going. That’s good, it’s tearing your muscles and they repair and you gotta go back again, you gotta go back again, you gotta go back again. And if you keep doing that, your capacity will increase and you’ll get better and better until someday you will have so many problems like me that you’ll have them four or five times in a day and you’ll just shrug it off and it’ll be fine.

That’s just, I don’t know the exact process to doing it, it’s just doing it. It’s just like when the thing hits you and you’re like, “Gah, that sucks. Alright let’s go.” Boom. If you’re in a fight and someone punches you in the face, you’re like, “Oh, that hurt so bad but I’m in the middle of the fight. Let’s go.” And you just go right back in. That’s the kind of attitude you’ve got to have when the thing punches you in the face or it knocks you down or whatever. Because most of those things, it’s like you’re this far away from success.

In fact, on the new sales letter for the Clickfunnels page, you’ll see it. Some of you guys know the viral video is about a Gold miner and all this stuff. So there’s an image we have and it’s a drawing and it says “The miner who quit too early”. And it shows this guy pick axing and he’s digging into this huge mountain and he turned around and he’s walking away and then you look at the side picture, a side cut of the mountain and you see he’s an inch away from all this gold.

And sometimes that’s how it is. We get punched in the face and we knock back and we’re like, “dang, I don’t want to do that.” and you just stop. And it’s like, ugh. All you gotta do is step back up and get back in that fight one more time and then you’re there. You’re so close to it. That’s what most people don’t get to. Because it’s the closer you get, the more resistance there will be to the thing you want. As you’re coming closer and closer and resistance is coming, is your ability to get back up and keep going.

There’s a song in high school in the 90’s that we used to play, in fact I played it today after getting hit in the head like 5 times. I was like, “Hey guys, I gotta theme song to keep us going right now.” And it was that song, “I get knocked down, I get up again.” That’s it. You get knocked down and you gotta get back up again as fast as you can. Because the more resistance you’re getting, the closer you are to where you’re trying to get to. Just know that.

Know that whatever you desire right now, the closer and closer you get to that, the more resistance. So you have to increase your capacity to handle those attacks, otherwise you will crumble underneath it and you’ll never get to your goal. But also know that the harder those punches are, the more frustrating all those kind of things, it means you’re close. The closer you get, the harder it’s going to be and then all the sudden, boom. You’re going to be there.

But you gotta be willing to get knocked down and get back up again and take that next step. Take the leap of faith, take that step into the dark. Whatever that analogy is that you need, that’s what you gotta do. And when you do that, that’s where it’s at. I think most of us, I may be wrong, I think I’m right though. I think most of us, the times that we fail, if we fail and don’t get what we want, we’re probably one or two knockouts away from success. It’s just getting back up, putting the gloves back on and going back into the ring one more time. That’s it. Maybe get hit again, knocked down again and you’re like, “one more step, one more.”

It’s there, you gotta taste it, you gotta feel it. That’s enough now. That’s like 40 ananlogies. Hopefully one of those connected with you guys. I got sports analogies, I got everything in there. Alright, well I’m heading in. I’m going to drink my Keto’s, I’m going to go to bed. I got a big day tomorrow. I gotta film like 40 videos. They’re not as fun like this one. Alright, there you go guys. Appreciate you all, have a nice night and we’ll see you soon. Bye.

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