The two most important things your can do between now and the end of the year to double your business for next year.
On today’s episode talks about his upcoming meeting with his partners to plan next year, and goes on to explain why he’s simplifying his value ladder and his life. Here are some awesome things you will hear in this episode:
So listen here to find out how you too can simplify your value ladder.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Hey everyone, so I’m out walking, I just took the garbage out. If you look out here it is getting close to Christmas time, Thanksgiving is over. For those who are watching the video, these are the lights we have wrapped around our house, lighting up for the Christmas holiday, which is kind of fun. So I’m just going to walk around here so you guys can see my face and get enough light to connect on camera. For those who are listening in, I hope you had an amazing holiday, Thanksgiving, getting ready for the end of the year.
The end of the year is always a fun time for us marketers and entrepreneurs because it’s focusing and planning for the beginning of next year, which is coming soon. So it’s kind of fun, we got not this week but next week, Todd and Ryan and everyone’s flying here to Boise and we’re going to be doing a big partner meeting and planning out the rest of this year, world domination for next year and set our big HAG’s, our big hairy audacious goals, figure out what we’re going to do and reverse engineer that to make it possible.
It was kind of fun, I was watching a podcast I did last year that basically said, “These are our goals, here are the five Hail Mary passes we’re going to do to try to hit those goals.” If you haven’t listened to that podcast, rewind to about a year ago and listen to it. That’s what’s going to be the goal of this meeting. We’re going to set our big goal, what we’re trying do and then I’m not going to just have one execution plan, but here’s four or five things we’re going to do to hit that goal, if one or two of them hit, then we’ll hit these crazy big goals. That’s what we’re going to be doing, not this week, but next week. So I’m sure I’ll be doing podcasts from there talking about it.
But I’m excited for that. If you haven’t done that yet, make sure this year before the end of the year that you spend some time and block it out with your team and do that. Figure out again, what’s the big goal, and reverse engineer what you gotta do to make that happen. And then from there figure out 3 or 4 different Hail Mary passes that you gotta throw to get your big goal. So that’s kind of what we’re going to be doing, I’m excited for it and it’s going to be fun.
So what I wanted to share with you guys tonight really quick before I head back in, because it’s a really beautiful night. It’s not too cold, it’s just kind of nice for a little walk around the yard. So what I’ve been working on, on my side, and I talked about this a little bit after inner circle meetings, one of the big aha’s. It’s kind of funny how we go through these cycles, we know things and then we forget them and re-realize them. But the Dotcom Secrets book we talk a lot about the value ladder, right. And it’s funny because ever since we launched Expert Secrets we haven’t talked as much about that. Because Expert Secrets is all about figuring out the first part, the what and how. What are you selling and how are you selling it.
So it’s like figuring out how to create your offer and how to position yourself, create your mass movement, figure out what you believe and what you don’t believe, what’s your future based cause, who are your people, all those kind of things. And then you create a message, presentation to get people to follow you to sell your products and that process takes a little while. You gotta re-do your presentation four, five, or six times until you get it perfect, and then you’re driving traffic and you keep doing that. And eventually if you do it enough times, follow the process, do a webinar live every single week for a while, keep tweaking and changing based on what we talked about in the book, eventually you hit it and you know you hit it because you go from $0 to a million dollars fast.
That is when you’ve figured out the what and the how. What it is you’re actually selling, and how you sell it. So eventually you get that figured out. Now the next phase is really shifting back to the Dotcom Secrets stuff. Now you got customers coming in, and this is where entrepreneurs start freaking out because then they start talking about the value ladder. I need upsells and downsells and backends and frontends, and they start going crazy.
And what I want to talk about is the big aha I had from the inner circle meetings. I’m watching the people that are crushing it and the ones who are struggling, and the consistency amongst the people in the inner circle that are killing it is that most of them came in and had one thing figured out, and they got that working. That’s about the time they joined the inner circle, right. Because people need to be making about a million bucks a year to be in there. So it’s kind of the fit, right. So they came in the group then, and then they’re trying to figure out what’s the next, how does it all work?
And really what’s interesting, the people who are growing the fastest, what they’re doing is they’re very systematically building out the backend of the value ladder. And most value ladders are simple, in fact, traditionally most people making money, they focus on the middle first. The webinar or something like that in the middle. They build out the backend, whatever that thing is, and then that’s done. You have the middle and the backend and it stops. You don’t keep creating any more backend stuff. That’s the end of it.
And then what your business is moving forward is creating new front end offers that bring people into the middle of the value ladder, which is essentially the backend. And I started looking, it was interesting, I lost my way, I’d forgotten these lessons. It’s funny, I kind of created them in the Dotcom Secrets book and I forgot some of them. It’s been a little while since I revisited those thoughts. And what I realized is that my value ladder came and kind of split up and broke off and there’s all these different things that people could do. And it was, we’re monetizing a bunch of them, but there’s confusion.
So it’s interesting, there’s actually two programs that we have, both that do well over a million bucks over a year that I am turning off. Not because they’re not awesome, they are. Not because they’re not making money, they are. It’s because they don’t, they’re deviants, they deviate off the value ladder. My value ladder’s very, very simple moving forward. So the rest of this year, I’m trying to get these few things in place to execute on that. But it’s very simple.
What it is, we have a webinar where I sell Clickfunnels, Funnel Building Secrets, which is the new Funnel Hacks, Funnel Scripts and Traffic Secrets. Those four products, bundled together, own six full months of Clickfunnels for $2,000. That’s what I sell, that’s the thing.
I did a webinar a couple of weeks ago, it did really well. That’s what I sell, that’s the middle of the value ladder, $2,000 thing. On the backend of that we have our Two Comma Club Coaching, which will be releasing here probably at the live event. And that will be where we take everyone to and that’s the value ladder, that’s the backend. Inner Circle is full, so we’re not taking any more people in there. So we’re going $2,000 for Clickfunnels and then whatever the pricing is on the Two Comma Club coaching that’s coming up and that’s it. And that won’t deviate, that won’t change. That’ll be the same for forever.
And all I will be doing, from this point forward for hopefully the rest of my life, the rest of my business career is just creating cool frontends. So I’ll have the Dotcom Secrets book, which is a frontend, then the Expert Secrets book, which is a frontend, eventually we’ll have Traffic Secrets, the Marketing Secrets and other ones. Perfect webinar, all these other things. I’ll just be having fun and creating frontends, but the only point of frontend is to get people to ascend up to the $2,000 and from the $2,000 to the Two Comma Club coaching. And that’s it, that’s my business.
And I get to figure out cool and new ways to sell frontends and that’s all I’m doing, selling frontends. That’s it. So it’s very simple. So all of your creative juices in entrepreneurship is on figuring out the next event, the next backend and all that kind of stuff, it should be simple. It should just be, what’s a cool frontend we can drive more people into. And that’s kind of the game, so I’m excited. You’ll see some of the tweaks I’m making now with this severe hyper focus on the value ladder.
Somebody buys the Expert Secrets book, if I know that this is my severe hyper focus thing, what’s the process I’m taking them? They buy the book, they go through the upsell, downsell process, the thank you page I’ll have a live presentation right there of me pitching the $2,000 thing. Right there and after they finish that it’s like, “Hey, do you want to apply for coaching? Come here.” And it’s just, that’s the process, very simple, very easy. We’ll just replicate it over and over again.
So anyway, I’m simplifying my business, simplifying my life. Hopefully those of you listening to this will simplify earlier, not later. Because sometimes we get all excited and then next thing we know there’s a billion things happening and….simplify now.
Anyway, that’s all I got for you. I’m heading in right now; get to bed because we got a crazy week starting tomorrow, which I’m excited for. Hopefully this gives you guys a couple of things. Number one, hopefully it gives you guys some thoughts on doing your team core planning meeting with you and your partners. If it’s just and your employees or whatever it is, if it’s just you and your spouse, or just you. Sit down and plan next year’s goals, figure out, reverse engineer what you need to do to actually execute on that and hit them and then figure out what the 3 or 4 Hail Mary passes are you’re going to need to throw to be able to get the big goals.
And number two is really map out your value ladder, try to simplify it as much as you can. That’s what I’m doing. You guys will see it, coming January first, a bunch of new, fun, clean, simplified things will be coming out of team Clickfunnels here. So I’m excited for it. That’s all I got.
If you haven’t got your tickets for funnel hacking live yet, they’re getting close to being sold out. We sold a ton of them over this last weekend. So if you don’t have your tickets yet, now is the time, go to funnelhackinglive.com. That’s about it. With that said, appreciate you all, thanks for listening, thanks for subscribing and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.
This is the marketing secret I’m dusting off from the archives of one of the greatest campaigns we ever ran.
On this episode Russell talks about going old school with a technique he used to use that worked every single time. He gives all the information you need to be able to do it for your business. Here are some cool things on this episode:
So listen below to find out what awesome technique Russell used in the past with massive success, that he plans on using again.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I got something exciting I want to share with you right now.
Alright everybody, there’s something I talked a lot about in my inner circle recently, it seems like a lot of people are launching membership programs, membership sites. Have you guys ever had something where you did something really successful for a long time and for some reason you stopped doing it and then you don’t know why you did?
So that’s one of these ideas that came out, so I shared it with a bunch of them and they’re all going crazy and a bunch of them are all trying it out right . I was like, man, this should be a marketing secret that I share with everyone else. So I’m bringing it to the podcast.
So this is what it is. This is a way, if you’ve got a membership site, to stimulate growth really, really rapidly. It can help you get a hundred signups in like a day, or 200 hundred or 1,000 depending on how big your thing is. How to get a whole bunch really, really quick. I haven’t yet done this with Clickfunnels, but I’m going to. Maybe I’ll do it on January 1st….anyway, I don’t know.
But I used to do this back in the day on our membership sites and I saw initially, the person I modeled and did this first was a guy name Alex Mendosian and they did it to fill up a whole bunch of people in their software program, which was kind of cool. So I watched them do it, and then I did it four or five times afterwards and it worked amazingly well every single time and then for some reason I stopped doing it. Because that’s what we do, when things work we just stop doing them sometimes. The ADD-ness of an entrepreneurs mind.
Anyway, so this is a really important, really cool one. So this is the strategy. I will walk you through all the pieces, and hopefully it gives you guys a tool you can use anytime you want to sell some stuff really, really quick. So what we do, is we would promote it, I did it back in the day of the teleseminars. I think it would still work with teleseminars, in fact, it’s almost….anyway, who knows. It will definitely work with webinars as well, or Facebook Live, or a lot of different ways you could do it. But the big key is you’re promoting an event. The event is to talk about something cool. A new discovery you’ve figured out which is brand new to whatever you do.
There’s different ways to position it. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book there’s 5 different curiosity hooks we have in there. But my favorite one for this is, “Oh my gosh, I figured out this thing, I want to show it to you guys live. So you have to be on this thing because I’m going to teach you, show you, walk you behind the scenes of this new thing that just came out.” A new discovery is the hook that I love for this the most.
For example, last time we did this, this was back when we had, when we were focusing more on business opportunity seekers as opposed to entrepreneurs, and we had figured out a way to generate leads, it was really cool what we were doing. We were going to CPA networks and there were these offers that were getting a thousand sales a day and the people who had these offers, would actually sell you the leads. It’s not a strategy that I believe in or I would recommend or I don’t think anyone should ever do, but it was a really cool thing.
So we were tapping into these CPA networks so that offers, basically when someone would opt in for an offer and then they would buy that person’s product and we would get the lead put into our auto responder, kind of like code reds, but a little different. We were getting a couple thousand leads a day coming in and it was really, really cool. I probably shouldn’t have told you that because now some of you guys will be like, “Teach us that.” But don’t. It’s a horrible idea. It will get your auto responder shut down; people won’t know who you are. It’s not spamming, but it’s as close as you can get without having legal issues. So don’t do it, it’s bad.
But back then, it was the new opportunity, the new thing. I was like, oh my gosh this is amazing. So what I did, I did this teleseminar. I was like, “Hey I want you guys to jump on and I’m going to show you this new way that we found out to get an extra three thousand leads a day. And it’s happening every single day, it’s crazy.” People are like, “What?!” They’re going crazy, they want the thing. So they get on, and this is a mini, it’s not a perfect webinar, so don’t think of it as the perfect webinar. This is me talking about a new discovery I just had and I’m going to teach them what it is. I said that with emphasis on purpose. I’m teaching what it is. What is the thing.
So it’s the what, not to be confused with the how. There’s a what and there’s a how. So this is the what. This is what this new thing is. So for 45 minutes I told the story about how I figured this thing out and where I met this person and how it worked and I showed them exactly what it was and here are the offers that the CPA offers in there. And here’s how you plug in your auto responder and this is what it was. And from there we’re getting three thousand leads a day, coming in consistently.
So I showed the what and people were going nuts. Oh my gosh, I want to do this. But the problem is they know the what, but they don’t understand the how. How you actually do it, how you find the offers, the people, how do you negotiate, how much is it going to cost? All those kind of things. So they know the what, but not the how.
So you show them the what in a 45 minute thing and this is basically you telling the story about how you figured out the what. If you tell them the story about how you figured out the what and the result you’re getting from the what, and they’re like, “What the dump?” that’s a Brunsonism I think. “What the dump?”
And then at that point you step back and say, it’s a clock, so you start at the top of the hour, spend 45 minutes. And at that point where they’re like, “What the dump? I need this.” You say, “Wait, I actually am not going to show you, I don’t have to show you this right now. But for all of my members over here inside of Clickfunnels, inside of my membership site, inside of whatever my thing is, I’m going to be doing a 90 minute break down and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this. HOW to do this.”
“So if you’re a member, congratulations! Log into the members area, the call in number or the login number for the webinar is right there on the dashboard. It’s there, go login, jump on the training. This is a live training, I’m doing live. I’m not recording it, I’m not going to share it ever again. It’s happening one time and one time only. If you want it, now is the time. So go login to the members area, and go login.”
“If you’re not a member yet, you’ve got exactly 15 minutes before this training starts. In 15 minutes the clock hits the top of the hour, I pull it off the page, and if you wait to sign up til 5 minutes later, you missed your shot. It is gone forever. The only way to ever understand the how on how to do this, is to be on that live training. In fact, we got 3 other experts, the people you need to meet, the person who’s going to help you get this thing started, whatever it is, is going to be there on the call. But this is a onetime only, not being recorded, and it starts in exactly 14 minutes. So you better hurry now. Go sign up right now for the trial at whatever.com.”
You push them into the membership site fast. People freak out. They’ve got this 15 minute window to go signup, get their account, get logged in, get the downloading, so they can get in on this special live training to show them the how. So that’s the marketing secret. That’s the trick you guys, it’s like the coolest thing ever.
So again, to kind of recap, you’ve got to have a really cool new discovery. You have a new discovery and you want to show them what it is. You get people to come onto either Facebook Live, the teleseminar, or the webinar, it doesn’t matter the vehicle you’re doing it through, just get it on a live event that’s happening so you build some curiosity, anticipation, getting excited. You get on there and say, “This is the what. I’m going to show it to you.” And you tell the story about how you figured out the what, you show them the big result that you got from this what.
And you say, “look, in 15 minutes for all of our paid members, we’re starting the how training. So go login and jump on the how training, we’re going to show you what to do. If you are a member, congratulations, it’s in the members area. If you’re not a member yet, you have 15 minutes before this puppy goes live, so now’s the time to start running. And go.” And you’ll watch your phone with all your stripe notifications, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.”
I’ve seen times when we’ve signed up 4 or 500 people in 15 minutes for membership sites, which is insane. So it works. Let’s say your list is smaller, you only sign up 100 people. It’s fine, the conversion rates on these, especially if you have a free trial for the membership site, the conversion rates on these things are like 50% of the people who are on your webinar will sign up, it’s crazy.
Again, I have not done one for a long time, but I’m going to probably do one for Clickfunnels here maybe in January. That’ll be fun. I’m going to do it, you’ll see me execute on it. But most of you guys should have enough intel to be able to do it faster.
So there you go, the what and the how is pretty awesome. I hope you guys love it, I hope you guys use it. Let me know if you do, and if you got any value from this, please share this episode and all episodes with your friends, your family members, other marketers, people you know could benefit from this. Again, this is the Marketing Secrets podcast, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.
A conversation I had today explains the reason why most businesses end up suffocating and dying.
On today’s episode Russell talks about something awesome he witnessed with his kids school. He goes on to talk about discussing marketing with another parent at school and why he considers it the lifeblood of a business. Here are some of the insightful things in this episode:
So listen here to find out why you need to become obsessed with the marketing of your product, rather than the product itself.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing today.
Alright everybody, it is the day before Thanksgiving. We have 20 bubble soccer balls being delivered to my house; we’re going to be playing a huge bubble soccer game on the smurf turf, which is really exciting. Or the Astroturf, we call it smurf turf because of the blue here in Boise. Looking forward to that.
But everything’s getting ready. We had wrestling practice this morning with the kiddos, and I had some cool experiences that happened there. One that was just a special moment that I want to share with you guys and one that was the reason why most people aren’t successful in business. So I’ll give you both and hopefully you’ll learn a lesson from the two.
So number one, it’s really cool. At the kids school, there’s a kid, it’s kind of a crazy story. Apparently his mom and him both found out they had cancer about the same time, together. It’s a cute little family, a little kid named Nico. So at the Junior high, or middle school, whatever you call it, it’s gotten around this story, and trying to help them out. It was just cute, all the kids wear Huskies for Nico t-shirts. Dallin had a shirt on today that said Huskies for Nico. They do fundraisers for Nico and all these things, it’s just such a cool thing how they’ve gotten the school behind this one person, this one cause or movement.
And its cool, I always talk about building mass movements and things like that, but I think a lot of times these little private, intimate movements that mean so much to people and really help people to become something more. And it’s just cool watching this and watching my kids participate in this movement for a little kid in their school named Nico.
So today at wrestling practice we got all these, probably 60 or 70 wrestlers out there training to be warriors, trying to be tough and everything. In the middle of practice Nico and his dad came in, and when he walked in the whole room went silent out of respect for him. It was just one of the neatest experiences that I’ve witnessed in a long time. I got chills sitting there watching and all the kids sitting there looking at him and talking to him. They came in and they presented him, because Nico was a wrestler as well before all these problems happened. So they gave him wrestling t-shirts and sweatshirts and stuff like that. And then they had Nico lead a cheer. So they brought everyone in and did their cheer. And it was such a special, such a cool thing. So anyway that was a fun thing that happened today.
And then afterwards I was talking to one of the dads, and the dad’s a successful real estate dude here in Boise, and it’s kind of funny because he’s like, “Hey I recognize you. I see you in my newsfeed every single day.” I’m like, “Sorry about that. Wish I was better looking.” But it was kind of funny because he was in there and we were talking for a while afterwards and it was interesting because there’s a big reason why more people aren’t successful. It’s a mindset little tweak and it’s something he had, definitely. So I want to share with you because if you’re stuck in this mindset tweak, it’s what’s keeping you back.
I did a podcast episode, I don’t know a hundred podcasts ago talking about not outsourcing your lovemaking, and in there I talked about if you look at a business, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If you’re selling houses, cars, supplements, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, you’re selling. That part doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, the marketing is the only thing that matters. It’s the only thing that’s actually the lifeblood of a business. It’s what drives leads and customers and sales. It’s the only thing that actually matters.
I could take my marketing systems and plug them into any business and it will work. Because business psychology’s insane, how we can get leads and it’s the same, how we convert those leads is the same. So we’re talking to him and he’s like, “Yeah, I saw Clickfunnels. I just haven’t done it yet.” I’m like, “Oh, whatever.” It doesn’t affect me at all. And he’s like, “Can I ask a question? Do you guys do stuff for real estate agents? I watched the viral video with the squirrel and the prospector, sounds like it’s only for selling products.” I’m like, “No, it’s for, it generates leads, sells products, whatever you need it to be.” And he’s like, “Oh, do you have anyone in real estate doing it?” I’m like, “Yeah, we have tons of people.” Off the top of my head we have like a half a dozen people or so that are killing it, real estate agents using it.
In fact I even told him, “There’s a guy that’s got one of the biggest brokerages here in Boise, he’s using it.” He’s like, “I hired some marketing company to do that for me and they’re trying to get us leads.” And I’m like, “So is it working good?” and he’s like, “No, not really. I wish we could just get rid of all the leads, but all the other agents underneath us, they want the internet leads so we have to do that and I don’t like it. I just think it’s done. Right now we’re selling about a hundred houses a year, if we got to the point where we had 200 houses a year, then we could afford to hire a full time marketing person to generate leads and stuff.”
As a marketing guy here, I wanted to grab the guy and be like, “What are you…how do you not understand this?” it’s like saying, let’s say you’re struggling in your marriage and you’re like, “My wife and I when we start having, when marriage gets good and we’re happy and everything is perfect, then we’ll go to counseling.” No, counseling or whatever it is, is what gets you there. It’s just funny, when we’ve grown high enough that we can afford someone to generate leads, then we’ll generate leads. No, you can’t afford not to. You should stop everything you’re doing and the only thing you should do is generate leads.
It’s funny because he’s like, “The biggest person in town, they sell a thousand houses a month, but they’re doing all of it online and generating all these leads online, but they’re able to do it because they’re selling so many houses.” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. It’s because they’re doing that they’re able to sell so many houses. It’s not because they have so many houses they can do it. It’s like the chicken and the egg. It’s like you’re trying to cut off the oxygen to your brain, your brain will stop. So don’t, it is the lifeblood….”
And he’s like, “Can we hire you guys to do that stuff for me?” I’m like, “No, we certify people that can do it, but if you really want to be successful, you have to become the head of the marketing. You cannot outsource your lovemaking. You can’t do that in business and expect it to be awesome. In your marriage if you’re like, okay this is my wife, I’m going to outsource the lovemaking to somebody else, your marriage is going to fail. It’s the same thing in your business. It is the lifeblood, it is the thing that gets customers into your world and gets them to like you and believe you and trust you and give you money. It’s the most important part of business.”
I think the biggest problem, it’s funny, if you listen to the Emyth by Michael Gerber, he talks about this. People are technicians and they have an entrepreneurial seizure and they think they want to start a business because they work at a cake factory and they see the dude who runs the cake shop and they’re like, “This guys a moron, I could do a better job than that.” So they start their own business and they’re not entrepreneurs, they’re dudes that build cakes. It’s like, the dude that builds the cake, anyone can build a cake. You can hire a lot of people to do that. It’s the person who is going to actually sell the crap out of the cakes that runs the business. If you don’t have that, your business dies.
It’s funny, in 2008 when the economy crashed and all these companies were crashing, I see all these people in the companies that their first instinct was not, let’s lower costs on stupid stuff. They all cut their marketing and their sales budget. I’m like, okay we’re struggling, let’s cut off the lifeblood to our head.
Like in wrestling, when I’m wrestling somebody, there’s a little, for those watching the video, right here on both sides of your neck there is a thing called a carotid artery. And if I’m wrestling someone and I get them in a front headlock, if I put a little bit of pressure right there, against the carotid artery, that fast the blood flow stops to your head.
It’s not like someone chokes and eventually you die. But with the carotid artery, if I touch it right, that fast you will black out. It’s really fun when you’re wrestling somebody, when you’re getting it, you get it and boom, and his whole body goes limp and you flip him over and you pin him. Because it’s the blood that goes to your brain. If you cut off the blood, it’s like a second and you’re out cold. And I take it back off and the blood keeps coming and you’re back alive.
So companies go and cut off the lifeblood and then the company dies that fast. That is what’s keeping you alive. In times of bad economy, triple down on the advertizing, triple down on the marketing. You guys all know that. I’m preaching to the choir here. But for everyone else, I just wanted to kind of talk about that because I thought it was so funny.
I told him that and he’s like, “Oh, lead generation for me is nurturing the clients we have and things like that, and we can’t outsource that. That’s my lovemaking.” Or something. Anyway, so that’s all I gotta say. I don’t even know what to say. If you want to grow a company, focus on the marketing and sales of the thing. I know most of you guys are in business because you love the thing you do. That’s awesome. But if you want to have a lot of people use that thing, you’ve got to become obsessed with the marketing of the thing. That is the key, the marketing of the thing is the business. The business is not the thing.
The thing is the fulfillment of whatever you want to do, but the business is the marketing of the thing. And that’s the only thing that actually matters because without that, your company dies. With that, the lifeblood goes off to your brain and instantly you’re out cold. That’s why I look at us versus other SAAS companies, other SAAS companies are focusing on hiring these huge teams of people to do whatever, I don’t know what they even do. We focus on marketing, marketing drives it.
So there you go guys. I hope that helps some of you guys who are thinking and wondering, “I’m going to hire a marketing team.” It’s hard to do. You can do it, but if you really want to grow, you’ve got to become obsessed with the marketing of your thing. You’ve got to not try to outsource your lovemaking and realize that that is the business. And if you want to be in business, you want to be an entrepreneur, like the entrepreneurial seizure you had trying to start this cake company or your whatever thing is that you sell. If you want that baby to survive and to live, being obsessed with the thing is not going to do it. It’s being obsessed with the marketing of the thing.
So I hope that helps, I appreciate you all. I’m going to go, I got a couple of hours to work, get my to-do list killed, crushed so I can have a Thanksgiving that’s not stressful. For those who know, us entrepreneurs, my buddy Alex Charfen always says, we’re all about momentum. So it’s like, Thanksgiving scares me because there’s no momentum. I gotta get so much momentum over the next four hours; before I gotta go back home that it will knock down any dominoes tomorrow that are standing up when I’m trying to relax with the family. So that’s it you guys. I appreciate you all, have an amazing day. Bye.
If you structure your value ladder right, you’ll never have to do a payment plan.
On this episode Russell answers a question posted on Facebook about why he doesn’t do payment plans. Here are some of the awesome things he has to say in today’s episode.
So listen here to find out why Russell doesn’t usually give an option for payment plans.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? It’s Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Tonight we are going to be hanging out with some Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Alright so, why am I talking real quiet? Because it’s late at night and the wife and kids, everyone is asleep. Why am I eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Because I have committed that by Funnel Hacking Live I’m going to be in shape. So, Bart Miller who helped dress me at Funnel Hacking Live, he just went through this big body transformation, got ripped with a six pack and everything. I was like, “Alright Bart, we’re going to do it, just get me in shape.” So we’re going to do it, but it doesn’t start until the day after Thanksgiving, so I got a week to eat garbage. I’ve been eating really healthy for the last 6 months, right now I’m going to go as unhealthy as possible so I’m eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch at like midnight. How great is that? I’m pretty excited about that.
Alright, I was just going through Facebook right now and somebody asked a good question, they said, “How come RB (I’m assuming that’s me, hopefully), why doesn’t Russell use payment plans on anything?” It was fun because all the, everyone’s just kind of throwing out their guess of why they think I don’t use payment plans and stuff like that. I’m just going to tell you why.
A couple of things, first off, it’s not that I don’t believe in payment plans. I think a lot of times you will make more money when you offer payment plans, but there’s just things about it that drive me crazy. Especially online, one of the big ones to drive me crazy is the fact that there’s no repercussions if someone signs up for a thousand dollar course and you give three payments or whatever, and they do one of the three payments and then they don’t do anything else. There’s nothing you can do, you can’t go after them, you can’t call them out. It’s just kind of frustrating.
In the digital world, unfortunately there are a lot of people who, they’ll get one payment through, they’ll go through some of the course, then they’ll feel okay not doing it. It just kind of bugs me. That’s not really the real reason. You know the real reason why I don’t do them for the most part, and I won’t say that I won’t do them because there’ll be situations I’m sure I will in the future. One of our new higher coaching programs will be having a payment program, which I’ve never done that in the past, but we will be just to be helping people with cash flow and stuff like that.
But the main reason I don’t is because, one person commented and said, “Russell doesn’t do it because Russell’s rule is don’t sell to broke people.” And well, that’s mostly true. It’s not that I don’t like broke people or that I don’t want to help them. But if you study my stuff, especially Dotcom Secrets, in the book I talk about the value ladder. I’m taking people up the value ladder and I know full well that people likely come into my world and they don’t have money when they first come in. So I’m like, okay how can I provide the most value possible so they have everything they need to be successful? On the front end, on my books, my perfect webinar training, things like that that are free plus shipping or really, really low price. I don’t hold stuff back on that.
Dan Henrie’s a good example, he struggled for years, read the Dotcom Secrets book, learned how to do my webinar, did it and made a million bucks in 5 months. I’ve been giving away the perfect webinar now for 2 or 3 years, just the script and the video and power point slides. And people always ask me, “Why do you give it away for free, your best stuff?” I’m like, “Because if someone uses it and they make money, they can afford my expensive stuff.”
So for me, that’s really more of my goal. I want people to come in and I want them to use the stuff I have and it makes them more money and then they can come for the next things. If they’re jumping up four or five tiers, if they have money that’s fine, they can short cut success, but I almost feel like sometimes, it does not serve your customer to short cut their success.
When we first started doing Funnel Hacker Tv the very first time, I was just taking businesses, a few I liked, the people, the entrepreneur, but they weren’t having success yet. We would come in and just do all the work for them, launching their businesses. And what we found is people weren’t ready for that. We’d launch it and hand it back to them, and the people who get these businesses back, they hadn’t learned all the stuff they needed to have success with it. And they struggled and then despite the fact that I gave them the keys to a Ferrari, they couldn’t drive the Ferrari.
I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice. Sometimes people just jump too far too fast, spend a bunch of money they don’t have, and then try the thing and it doesn’t really work because they don’t have the foundation stuff they need to get there. Business is all about for us, increasing our capacity. When you first start a business you have a big capacity to do a lot of stuff. I did, when I got started my capacity was, I struggled to read a book. Then I read a book and I was like, that book was awesome, and my capacity expanded a little bit and I did more and it expanded, more and it expanded.
Now 15 years later we run a huge company where we’re one of the top two or three most visited websites in the world. Making a lot of money, doing a lot of stuff, helping a lot of people, all those things. But if I would have just been handed this 15 years ago, I promise you I would have destroyed it. Not because I wanted to, but because I wasn’t ready for it. And I think a lot of times, I know I could sell more stuff if I offered these huge payment plans to let people in, but the reality is someone comes in on a payment plan they can’t afford and they’re trying to learn stuff and then they can’t afford it, and then they go buy traffic and other things they need to do and they can’t afford it, it doesn’t really serve them more, or me.
So I want people to grow with us. So that’s why we do stuff, the way low ticket stuff, mid tier, high tier things like that. That way people come in, they learn, they apply, and if they get value they should naturally ascend up, right. It’s kind of like in my stack I have a line that I say in there, it’s funny because it’s a really good closing line, and I’ve had a lot of people knock it off since I started using it, but it’s true for me.
For me it says, “I have a philosophy here at my company that if I can’t make you money then I don’t deserve yours.” And I honestly do believe that, which is why I don’t just go hard close them on these huge payment plans. We see a lot of people do product launches, they’re selling a $2,000 course, or twelve payments of $300. I’m like, the problem with $300, I remember me in those days and that was a lot of money. It almost does them a disservice. If I have twelve payments of $300, twelve months from now, I’m going to have my stuff in place and start buying ads again because I got this huge budget of $300 a month. So that’s kind of my thoughts.
So I hope that kind of helps. Again, it’s not that I won’t do payment plans, I will do them in the future. There will times and seasons I will do them. A lot of businesses I recommend them. So it’s nothing against them, I just think for me personally, that’s my goal, that’s my vision. Just try to blow people’s minds at every step of the value ladder, and if I do that correctly then they’ll be able to afford the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
You know, I could tell you probably a couple dozen examples of this but Dan Henrie is one of my favorites. He joined the Inner circle and he posted on Facebook. He was like, “I don’t know why I joined Russell’s inner circle, I feel like I got, I made a bunch of money and everything, I don’t really need to be, I don’t really want to be in it. But I feel like I owed Russell 25k for all I got for the free book I bought.”
How cool is that if your customers feel that way. Man, I got so much from this I feel like I owe you. I need to invest in higher ticket things because I got so much down here. That’s what I’m trying to create.
So there you go, I hope that helps you guys. I hope it helps you, again, obviously we’re talking about this for my business which is teaching business owners how to grow. So it’s very applicable because it’s like “Hey make money here and grow.” But it’s the same with any business. Let’s say your business is helping marriages right. You give them something free and it increases the spark in their relationship or it fixes something and they feel better, man they will want to give you more and follow you further and all that kind of stuff.
So anyway, it’s a fun game we play. I love it. I appreciate you guys, as customers, as friends, as subscribers, listeners, and I hope that you got some good ideas out of this, I’m going to get back to eating my Cinnamon Toast Crunch before it all gets cold, gets soggy. It’s a little soggy already so I’m going to go. And by Funnel Hacking Live I will be sexy. I promise you guys, I will have a six pack. And if not then I won’t say anything else about it. Alright everybody, talk to you soon. Bye.
A quick play-by-play of the last 24 hours of my crazy life.
On this episode Russell talks about the last 24 hours of his life and the events that made it feel crazy. Here are some of the interesting things you will hear in this episode:
So listen here to see why Russell’s last 24 hours have been such a stressful roller-coaster ride.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Tonight is going to be a late night reflections episode.
Alright, I don’t know if that’s really a thing, a reflection episode, but it has been, the last 24 hours of my life have been insane. I learned some really good lessons along the way. I just wanted to sit here and talk it out with you guys if you don’t mind. Hopefully you’ll get something out of it.
So some of the back story, we are in November, for those who are watching or listening to this later, it’s almost Thanksgiving; it’s about a week away. It’s been interesting, working on a lot of really neat, amazing projects and some things that I feel are part of, I don’t know, it sounds cliché but part of my mission in this life. It’s not building, it is indirectly building funnels, but it’s for who we’re building them for, what we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish with it. Things that are really, really good in life.
And what’s interesting, I know that everyone listening has got different beliefs, but what’s interesting is whenever you try to do something good, the adversary, call it whatever you want, fights against it. And I was starting this project with this group we believe in and start moving down this path, I was warned by a lot of people who were in this project saying, “As you start trying to move forward towards this thing, the adversary, or whatever you want to call it, is going to fight against you.” I was like, okay bring it on.
And it’s crazy because I’m starting to see, maybe not, maybe it’s just my mind, but as we’re moving towards this thing, I’m just noticing a lot of stuff happening. So the last 24 hours were crazy. So right now, I think it’s 11 at night. I just got my kids to bed. About 26 hours ago, a little longer than a day, 24 or 25 hours, whatever it was, a little over a day ago, I had just gone to bed as well. It was just a normal night, I was going to be staying up late working because my wife had just left to Disneyland yesterday, she’s out with her girly friends doing Disneyland. So I was like, I’ll have some time to work, catch up on some projects.
I was going to start on them, and by the time I got the kids down and was about to come and start working, I got a text message from Melanie saying, “Hey, this weird thing is happening.” It’s kind of cool, someone from my inner circle saw something where basically lawsuits were being filed against us. They’d seen it ahead of time. We got spies everywhere around the world. Anyway, so we looked at it and it was kind of a violation. Basically it was somebody had gotten, we found out later, it’s been 24 hours. But it was a text message that they’d gotten that they said that they didn’t want to receive from us.
So instead of just being a normal human being and being like, “Oh, I don’t want to receive this text message.” this person is filing this huge lawsuit against us. It’s crazy. So we got the name and number and all sorts of stuff and it’s crazy. Somebody signed up for Clickfunnels with a fake credit card, it wasn’t even a real credit card, logged in twice and never logged in again, their credit card failed. So our system, when your credit card fails, actually when you log into Clickfunnels, there’s a little thing saying, “Hey, if your credit card failed, would you like us to text you? If so what number?” So you put in the number.
So the credit card failed, so we texted saying, “Hey, we don’t want your websites to go down, you should login to your Clickfunnels account, add your credit card so you don’t lose your websites. It sent him two text messages, this was like 2 or 3 months ago. So this person, it’s insane, gets these text messages and files a lawsuit against us. A lawsuit, for crying out loud. For irreparable damages and on and on. It’s just nuts, nuts.
So it’s funny because I always heard about frivolous lawsuits and it’s just like, I always thought those were like, I couldn’t fathom that those were a real thing, that human beings were like that. But it’s just like, I just saw it, I’m seeing it right now. I’m like, holy crap. It’s funny because, it’s interesting, when you don’t have money you’re like, “Oh, if I just had money all my problems would go away.” I got bad news for you guys. Problems don’t go away, they just turn into different problems, more annoying problems, where literally people are shooting at you and attacking you all the time. It’s nuts.
So I get that message about that, so we’re trying to just research and figure that out. I can’t think about this, I got too much stuff to do. So I kind of put it on the back burner, sat down at the computer right there, my work computer where the Expert Secrets book was written. Sit down at the work computer, check my email, and there’s two emails. First email was from this organization we’re working with to try do a lot of good in the world and save a lot of kids lives, this thing that we’re moving forward on, do the ultimate good. Then the email that came in literally a minute before or after that one was from this other person.
I’m not going to tell the back story behind this because it’s not important. But it’s a person I dealt with three years ago. This huge email, I haven’t heard from him in over a year, huge email talking about, going on and on about how they’re going to sue me for all these crazy things. I’m just like, I can’t even, I don’t know how to handle this right now. It was just crazy.
I did my best to get a handle on it, but I gotta get this out of my mind because I gotta get some stuff done. So I was up until about 2 last night working, passed out, the kids were up this morning at like 6, so I got four hours of sleep last. Got up, got the kids ready because my wife’s gone. Luckily we have help, a nanny who comes and helps get the kids out the door and everything with school. And then, head in to the office, have a ton of stuff going on, obviously, we’re trying to coordinate so much stuff. I wish I could, just let you have a glimpse of all the stuff we’re doing at once. I don’t think people would believe it. There’s a lot happening, obviously. It happens when you’re trying to change the world.
It’s fun, we did a podcast with Nathan Latka, the top, if you’ve ever heard his podcast, it’s really, really good. I did a podcast 18 months ago with him, and we did another one to follow up with him now. We’re 5x of where we were at 18 months ago, which is insane. It was really cool recapping all the positive growth that we’re doing. It was cool, when the questions he asked at the end, he’s like, “Most business owners reinvest their profits back in their company, that’s where they get the highest return on investment. Where do you invest your money Russell?”
And I laughed, “You know, we reinvest money back in the company, but for me, I didn’t start a business to reinvest money back in the company.” He’s like, “So wait, real estate? Where are you reinvesting your money?” I’m like “I’m not reinvesting in anything. I reinvest it in my kids, my family. Right now we have an acre and a half, two acre lot next to our house that was just full of weeds, so this summer we knocked down all the weeds and put in a full Astroturf baseball/soccer field. We put in 9 underground trampolines, a volleyball court, a baseball field, a full basketball court and a track that wraps the whole thing. I’m investing my money back in my kids. I want to spend weekends and night with my kids playing games. That’s why I got in the business. The cash flow is nice, but that’s what I’m reinvesting my profits back into, you know.”
It was kind of just a fun answer because I’m sure most people on a business podcast don’t think that way, they think about whatever business, real business people think about. Anyway, so that was kind of fun and stuff.
But I had to deal with the issues. So we had to deal with this dude who got two text messages after he told us to text him and he didn’t update his credit card. And I started realizing, after we started learning all about the do not call list, and the do not text list, it’s just crazy. Basically we brought on all these lawyers and companies and all this crap in the last, all day today, which is crazy. But we found out, it’s interesting, these texts, there’s 150,000 known people, if they get a text message from you they will file lawsuits. That’s all they do.
So as soon as they get a text once, they get blocked across all these things. So it’s like we’re tapping on API’s, so we pull out all these known complainers and stuff, but it’s insane. So all these guys do is go out there and sign up for things and wait for you to text them. That’s it. This is a real thing. You hear about this, I always thought there’s no way that people are that evil. But they are, this is a real thing. It’s happening, it’s happening to me right now. So now we gotta fight this thing, it’s just nuts. Time, energy and money wasted for some moron who’s going out and looking for lawsuits. That’s it, it’s crazy.
So there was number one, then I deal with number two. Some of our lawyers came in and the lawyer basically, this deal from three years ago and I haven’t heard from him in over a year, the lawyer is just shocked. I can’t believe we’re hearing from him, it’s just insane. And sat down with me and went through everything again. “You guys are in the right. 100% in the right. My authority as your lawyer is we need to go and just destroy this person and put him out of his misery.” He said it nicer than that, but not much.
But I was just like, we’re in the meeting and everything and I think it was Dave or Brent, or someone on my team asked me, “What does your gut tell you, Russell?” and I was like, “My gut tells me I just need to do whatever it takes to make this go away.” I listen to my gut a lot, because I don’t think it’s my gut, it’s other stuff.
Anyway, I told my lawyer that, and it’s funny because I had this really rare chance to learn something today, something I teach my kids all the time. My kids, we get in these arguments with each other, especially my 7 year old and my 12 year old. They’ll get in these arguments about things and the older one is so mad because they’re trying to prove that they’re right to the younger one. I’m like, “It doesn’t matter, just stop. It doesn’t matter that you’re right or wrong, just stop fighting, please. Just stop fighting.” “But he’s wrong.” “It doesn’t matter, it does not matter who’s right and who’s wrong. It does not matter at all.”
And I try to teach that to my kids over and over again, just walk away, let it go. It does not matter. It’s funny because after we got done with the lawyer meeting and stuff and I wrote this person back and just said, “Hey, here’s the lawyer, you can figure all this stuff out.” And that person wrote back and said, “Please get on a call.” And I was like, I don’t want to get on this call. I just don’t. I don’t want to get this call.
So for me, I kneeled down and I prayed and I was just like, “What should I do.” Asking for help because I knew that I wanted to be like my 12 year old and be like, “No, you’re freaking wrong.” And yell at this person, but I knew that wouldn’t solve anything and just hurt everything. So I prayed for humility and prayed to know what to do and how to do it. I got all this frustration and anger so I picked up the phone and called this person.
I listened to the person, who basically starts yelling at me, telling me all these things that he thinks I’ve done wrong. At every point I just want to fight back and be like, “This is not true, that is not true. I’ve proved that’s not true.” And everything. But I sat there and bit my tongue. I was just praying in my head, “Let me know what to do, how to handle this and what to do.” Just sitting there and sitting there, taking it and taking it and finally just, “Dude, what do you want? What’s the real story, just tell me.” And we talked about it and I think we figured out a way to solve it. And it sucks because like my little kids…legally, people get justice with lawyers, justice needs to be served, you were in the right here, this is not your fault.
And I’m looking at this from another angle, saying, there’s two laws, there’s justice and there’s mercy, these two things. Legally, we always want justice for everything. There’s the other side of mercy. I don’t know about you, but there’s things in my life where I make mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. Made way too many mistakes to brag about, especially on a public form like this.
But there’s times in my life when I needed mercy from people and from things. There’s times when mercy came through to me and it saved me and helped me. In my physical life and spiritual life, in different things like that, and I’m just grateful for the times when I was extended mercy. And I think for me at the time, you don’t have to have perfect justice, extend mercy here and it’ll make everything better. I don’t know if that’s always the case, but definitely was the case for me today.
So that was the first two issues. And then, I’m all excited for my kids wrestling match tonight. This all happened by 3 today, then I had to leave to go the wrestling match. So I go to the wrestling match, we get there and I’m working with my kids because last week they kind of got beat up a little bit at the tournaments. So all weekend long I worked with them in the wrestling room at our house and got them better and better and better.
I got there and my first, Dallin my oldest of my twins was first match, he wrestled the perfect match, it was so awesome. All the stuff we worked on this weekend he was doing, it was really neat, really special to see that. He won and it was just so exciting.
And then Bowen had the next match, but it wasn’t until the end of the night. So he’s warming up and goofing off and having fun and Dallin is doing the same thing and then Brandii, who is our nanny, she brought all of our kids, and luckily this turned out to be a huge blessing. She brought the kids to the wrestling match, which was kind of stressful because I’m with Norah, holding little baby Norah and the other ones are running around and all sorts of crazy stuff.
And then Bowen is getting closer to warming up, so I gave all the kids back to Brandii and went to the other side of the mat and start getting Bowen all warmed up and then Dallin is there goofing around because he’s between his match, having fun and he goes over to the bleachers, the side of the bleachers and he saw someone jumping up doing box jumps on this ledge. There’s like a metal strip across this ledge, and he sees them doing box jumps and he’s like, “I’m going to do it.” Because he’s kind of bored, sitting around. So he goes to jump and do a box jump and misses it, hits right below his knee. I’ll actually show you guys this.
Those of you who are watching, this is like, parental discretion advised, this is kind of freaky. But if you’re listening you can’t see them, but he hits his leg and is like, “Ooh, that hurt but I’m fine.” But I look at him and I’m like, “Dude, you are not fine.” It was the deepest cut I have ever seen in my life. You can see this here, that’s his knee. It looks like you can see the bone. If you’re listening you can’t see this. I want to throw up just looking, it’s like the deepest cut ever. I looked down and I was just like, “Oh my gosh. You can see all the way to the bone with this cut. It is huge.”
And then there’s blood pouring everywhere, all over the mats, all over the thing. I’m like, “I don’t know what to do.” I’m just going to keep showing pictures while I’m doing this. I’m like, I don’t know what to do or even how to handle this. This is….So I’m kind of pulling him out of the wrestling room, and trying to warm up Bowen on the side of the mat, now I’m pulling Dallin out and there’s blood just oozing everywhere. My wife’s not there, I don’t know what to do, there’s no one, I don’t know what to do.
I come out in the hallway, and luckily the wrestling coach, he’s got some kind of medical background, I’m not sure exactly, he was there. I’m like, “I need help.” He’s like, “Oh my gosh. Yes, put him down.” So he puts him down, here’s some more pictures. Luckily, because I was kind of in shock I didn’t know what to do, so he goes and gets someone to go grab some gauze and they wrap the knee up. I was like, “We gotta take him to the ER, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to miss Bowen’s match. Bowen’s been training.” Ugh, look how deep that is.
So anyway, the coach is there and helps me wrap this thing up and then I ran over to Brandii, our nanny, who is over there….Here’s my little buddy, laying in the hospital bed, smiling during the surgery. There’s him all stitched up at the end there. Anyway, he’s laying there, and I grab Brandii, who is our nanny and said, “Dallin just cut his leg open and he’s gotta go to the ER.” So she grabs all the kids and comes back and I’m like, “I don’t know what to do.” Bowen’s trying to warm up and he’s all frazzled because of that.
So me and the coach pick up Dallin and run him out to the car, which is like at least half a mile. We get in the car and Brandii loads up all of our kids plus her kids and heads back to the ER. I run back in and I’m trying to…oh, I don’t have our medical cards on me, of course, because that’s how I roll. So I’m trying to find medical stuff to send with him and Bowen’s warming up for his match and he’s all frazzled because he saw his brother bleeding to death, he’s sure his brother’s going to die, his twin brother’s about to die.
So then I’m trying to keep him focused, get him warmed up, and he goes out there and wrestles, and poor little dude. He’s trying so hard, and he’s so much better, but he got thrown in the first 10 seconds and pinned. And he comes off just crying his eyes out and I think he’s more upset about his brother, but just all the emotions of that, they’re just little dudes right now.
But oh, it was emotional. I was trying to find Dallin’s backpack is in some bleachers, and then Bowen, getting all out the door and then racing over to my car and speeding off to get to the hospital. But I remember when we were leaving all the kids were like, “We’re starving, we’re starving.” At the wrestling match. I’m like, my kids haven’t eaten yet. It’s like 6:00, 6:30 at night. I’m racing to the hospital and I run off to a fast food restaurant, this is a crazy story, I’m sorry. I got no one to talk to, my wife’s gone tonight, so hopefully you guys don’t mind.
So I race to the fast food restaurant and I order food, I’m going through the drive thru and I’m like, “I need ten hamburgers, ten drinks and a kids meal because I got a little baby daughter.” So they pull me through and the lady’s like, “Hey, the manager wants to see if you want ten custard ice cream things.” I’m like, “You know what, yes. That’d be awesome.” So we had this car full of hamburgers, ice cream and water for me and Bowen. We’re racing back to the ER, we get there and we find Brandii with all the kids and I give her the keys and I’m like, “go feed the kids in the car.” And then I run in and Dallin’s in there and he’s about to start surgery to get his knee all cleaned up. Poor little dude.
The cut was so big and they had to get a needle to numb, they probably shot him, I would say conservatively probably about 30 different shots, he’s just screaming, he was so tough. They stitched him all up and it was just forever. Brandii took the kids home, they went home and did homework, and got them all to bed, they did homework until almost 11 and went to bed. That’s been the last 24 hours of my life.
So it’s been crazy. I just wanted to tell you guys that, it was a fun story. Just some of the things, some of the lessons of today I learned. Number one, whenever you are moving towards things that are good, the adversary or whatever you want to call it, is going to fight against you. That’s okay, it’s normal, it’s going to happen. I know a lot of listeners are people who believe in God, who think about God and if you’re not, I just recommend remembering there’s a reason why these things happen. I believe it’s to get us to remember God. So first off, remember God.
Number two, there are evil people in this world, frivolous people who are just out there to steal money. And they’re there, and the bigger you get, the bigger of a target you’ll become. So just be aware of people and protect yourself in any ways you can. We’re trying to put up a whole new line of defenses for us, so know that.
Number three, know that sometimes, if you want to have mercy, if you want people to have mercy on you sometimes in life, don’t always fight for justice in every situation. Be okay letting somebody else, just be okay giving somebody else mercy sometimes. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Even if it’s not, even if it doesn’t give you justice. It may hurt, it may suck, but if you ever want to receive mercy in your life, it’s worth it to give to other people. It’s important.
The last one, I don’t know what the moral of the story of the last one is, other than it was just a lot of stuff. That’s about it. Anyway, I hope that helps you guys, I hope you learned something, I hope you got something. If not, don’t worry about it. If you did, though, please share this video or this podcast with somebody you love and care about. I appreciate you listening, it’s a huge honor to have you guys listening to this stuff that we share and I hope that it helps. That’s all I got for tonight. Thanks you guys, appreciate you all, have an amazing night, we’ll see you guys all again tomorrow. Bye.
A podcast from Russell and Todd in a private plane.
On this special private plane episode Russell and Clickfunnels co-founder, Todd Dickerson, rant about troubles they’ve had with different platforms, most recently iTunes. Here are some of the interesting things you will hear on this episode:
So listen here to find out why it’s important to have a back up plan when it comes to social media platforms, as well as merchant accounts.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we are taking, this whole thing is happening on a private plane with Todd Dickerson.
Todd: Well, it’s a little bumpy right now.
Russell: Alright, so right now we’re on a private plane and I want to show you guys the moon out here. Now we’re in the middle of a cloud. I don’t know if you can see this.
Todd: Busting through the clouds.
Russell: So those who are watching this, if you’re listening you can’t see it, but we’re on a private plane, we’re at, I don’t know how many feet in the air. We just left Atlanta, Georgia. Not Atlanta, we left Cherokee county, at the airport, which is kind of cool. We were supposed to be…we were really excited because this flight there was supposed to be a beautiful girl right there, and a beautiful girl right there and then Todd right there. But our beautiful ladies, aka our wives are not here. Todd’s daughter got sick the last two or three days so his wife’s like, “I can’t make it.” And then my wife’s like, “Well if she’s not going, I’m not going.” So now we’re on a romantic trip together without our wives because we already booked a plane.
Todd: So we’re going anyway, it’s going to be fun.
Russell: It’s going to be so awesome. Oh, check it out, here’s the moon. There’s the moon shot. Yeah, there’s the moon. So for those who are watching this, there’s a picture of the moon. It’s so cool. For those of you guys who are listening, you have no idea what we’re seeing, you are totally missing out. Go to marketingsecrets.com and you can watch the video version as well.
Anyway, man this plane is really bumpy. Bumpier than I thought. We’re above the clouds now, so we’re legit. Alright for those of you guys who don’t know Todd yet, you need to know him. He is the brains behind Clickfunnels. He’s the one who built it all initially and he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. We’ve been trying to get him to move to Boise now for like 6 years. But he told me no. So finally, I feel bad, he comes to Boise like every quarter.
Todd: Every few months.
Russell: This is the first time I’ve come to Atlanta to hang out with him and see his house. I had a chance to hang out with him in his home and his family is amazing. Tell them all about how cool you are.
Todd: Okay.
Russell: Anyway, right now we’re actually heading down to a conference, St Petersburg airport.
Todd: Clear water beach.
Russell: An email marketing conference, a mastermind thing.
Todd: It’s top secret. We’re not allowed to say where it was.
Russell: We can’t talk about it. Well, by the time this comes out, you can’t yell at me anyway. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re putting this along so we can show you guys what’s happening. But it’s kind of fun. And check it out, oh it looks so cool.
Anyway, I don’t exactly what we’re going to talk about. There’s so many things we can talk about when we’re like, “We’re on the plane, let’s do a podcast.” I have one thing I want to rant about and while I’m ranting I’m going to let Todd rant about whatever he wants. Because I want you guys to get to know him better.
So my rant today, right now I’m recording my podcast. Some of you guys know I’ve been a podcast, Marketing In Your Car first, and…… I just popped my ears, that’s why I’m doing weird stuff….So we launched that podcast and ran it for almost 6 years, every single day in my car podcasting, podcasting. Putting in the time, the effort, the work. We built a big following, and then about a year ago we rebranded it as Marketing Secrets. And since we’ve rebranded we have 3.5 million downloads, we’ve been in the top ten business podcasts for the entire year, our video podcast is the number one, not only in the business category, our video podcast is the number one video podcast in all of iTunes. So you’d think that iTunes should like us.
Todd: Yeah, you’d think so.
Russell: But apparently, ten days ago they decided they didn’t like us. What they did is they shut down, basically, if you’re subscribed to our podcast you continue to get our stuff, but nobody new can subscribe. We’ve been appealing to them, writing to them and they’re like, “Sorry.” And we’re like, “Why are we kicked out?” they’re like, “You’re just kicked out.” Well, why? They won’t tell us why, they just said, “You’re out.” And it reminded me about something I wanted to talk to you guys about because it’s very, very important. And it’s never, never, never trust a platform. If you’re building your business on a platform, just prepare to lose it all very, very soon.
I’ve done this multiple times and now it’s happening with iTunes. I’ve lost, how many since we’ve known, how many email auto-responders?
Todd: Oh my gosh…
Russell: I’ve been kicked out of Aweber, almost a dozen times. iContact, at least 8 or 9. ActiveCampaign, Bellcheck multiple times, SendGrid multiple times and again just recently, they did it again. Facebook I’ve been kicked off at least 2 or 3 dozen times, we’ve been really good and consistent recently. Instagram kicked me off, I got back in luckily. Google kicked us off like a decade ago. We never really got back. YouTube I launched, I had one video that the headline was, “The Internet Marketing Illuminati” and they cancelled our account. It’s just crazy.
So all of us, we put all of our eggs in this basket, like Many Chat or Facebook Messenger, every time we put the eggs in, we gotta put all the eggs in this basket. The problem is if somebody doesn’t like you for whatever reason, or no reason at all, they don’t even have to tell you a reason, they can just turn you off. It is insane. You were telling me about the Amazon one today…
Todd: Oh yeah, the Amazon guy, so there was guy locally that was selling stuff online on Amazon, and he was killing it and doing great. He ordered a huge new pallet of stuff from China, had it all shipped over and got here. While it was on the way over, Amazon decided to D-List his product. They didn’t like the name of one of the products, they thought it was too close to another name of something else, D-Listed the product completely. His entire revenue stream disappeared overnight. Luckily, he had been talking to one of our other guys, support agents about funnels, so he started his funnels up, but he was completely dependent on Amazon. Lost a business, he had 5 employees, all of his employees are looking for what they’ll be doing next. He’s struggling to get things going and it’s all because he was 100% reliant on Amazon.
It doesn’t mean that it can’t be a side channel that’s awesome for sales, but you cannot have it be a primary thing. Not Amazon, not Google, not Facebook, nothing.
Russell: It’s crazy. So I just wanted to re-emphasize this to all of you guys. If you’re building your business 100% on Facebook, I got bad news for you, Zuckerberg doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t. “But Russell, I’m paying $1000 a day in Facebook ads.” He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care even a little bit. We’re spending insane amounts of money and they don’t care. They don’t care about you, about me, about any of us. All they care about is their customers, making sure the platform’s happy. And guess who their shareholders and platform doesn’t like? People like us. So guys, you just have to be aware of that.
iTunes apparently, now that I know, they don’t like people like me. I don’t know why, I just kind of, added a ton of publicity to their platform, added thousands of viewers, millions of downloads, and they just one day out of the blue, “Oh, bye.” With no rhyme or…it’s crazy to me.
Todd: The top guy won’t even tell you why.
Russell: Yeah, the escalated it to the highest guy in support, he’s like, “Yep, we cancelled your account.” I’m like, “Why?” He’s like, “This ticket has now been closed.” You won’t even tell me why? I don’t know what to do.
So a couple of things. Same thing with merchant accounts. I almost went bankrupt before. I had 14 merchant accounts at one bank and all of them got shut down the same day. So 1 is a very, very scary number in business and in marketing. So always think about having multiple things, having multiple ways you are collecting money or are able to collect money. Making sure you have customers from different platforms, make sure the way you message your customers, there’s multiple platforms.
In fact, can we talk about this right now, or is this top secret?
Todd: It’s a little top secret still.
Russell: It’s still top secret.
Todd: We can’t talk about this part of it, but what he’s leaning towards is, what we already do in Actionetics on some levels, is being able to communicate on multiple channels, multiple modalities and stuff. But there’s definitely nice stuff that’s going to be coming in the near future.
Russell: I don’t want everyone, again, if you relying 100% on email, you could be in trouble. It’s hurt me multiple times. I think, I would say conservatively about 20 times I’ve lost my email service provider. And I’m not an aggressive marketer, maybe I’m aggressive. I may be aggressive but I’m not unethical. I follow the rules of everything. So it’s just kind of crazy.
So a lot of things we’ll do, if you were at last year’s Funnel Hacking Live we talked about the big benefit of using Actionetics, you can plug in your other SMTP and if SendGrid shuts you down, you plug in the new one, but you still keep your accounts. We’re trying to be a platform that’s not shutting our members down, so you have access, so if something bad happens you can plug in to other things.
Todd: it’s the new thing with custom domains, I’m not sure….now with Actionetics you’re able to have your own custom domain for everything. So link tracking goes through a custom domain, your unsubscribes go through a custom domain. Everything goes through a custom domain so you don’t have any relationship to any other people on the platform or to us. So if you get in trouble or someone else on the network gets in trouble it doesn’t affect anyone else. Which is, that’s not the case, and the reason why Aweber won’t let you import people into their platform, it’s because if you import people and spam them, then it hurts everyone on Aweber. That’s no longer going to be the case on the whole Actionetics platform. You are super isolated, so it’s only going to affect you if you cause a problem. And if another person on the network causes a problem it’s only going to affect them.
Same thing with image hosting and everything, it’s all going to be on your own custom domains now, which is actually already live. So if you haven’t set that up, go set up a custom domain, we’re giving everyone free custom domains.
Russell: It’s awesome. We’re trying to figure out ways to make it so that, we care about you guys as customers, we want to protect your businesses, so we’re trying to make Clickfunnels easier to use. So you can add in multiple SMP, multiple ways to collect money, multiple ways to message us. You’re not 100% relying on email. There’s just a lot of cool things that are coming. I can’t tell them about…..
I always tell people stuff before we’re ready and Todd yells at me, so I’m going to be careful. But that’s where we’re going and I just want to re-emphasize for you guys. If you are relying on one platform, if Zuckerberg is the way your entire business runs, now is the time to diversify. Don’t diversify in 6 months from now, or a year from now. My guess is that windows not going to be that long.
About a year and a half ago when Facebook started shutting our accounts down, I was like, “Lose Facebook, Facebooks over.” For some reason they loosened back up. They had a tight grip on people, but they loosened back up. But you know it’s going to come back again, you saw what Google did. I have friends who are making millions and millions of dollars a month, who when Google put the chokehold out, they never recovered. They’re doing, working at McDonalds, I don’t know where. But they’re not doing their business anymore.
So if you want to be around in the long term it’s very important to understand that. I still think you should start with a platform, start with Facebook or whatever that is and go there, but be very aware, as soon as that’s working, it’s like now you need to add a second source, so as soon as one disappears….or I need two merchant accounts, in two separate banks. I need to be able to collect money just in case one dries up or goes away. Make sure multiple auto-responders, SMTP, all those things are very, very important, just don’t rely on a platform. The platform will screw you over. They do not care about you or me, they only care about themselves and their customers. They think for any reason, because of something we produce it effects the experience of the customer, gone.
Todd: Or the shareholder.
Russell: Or the shareholder.
Todd: That’s the reason why we’re not VC by the way. Same type of thing.
Russell: The reason why we love you guys, we’re not taking VC money because we want to be able to protect you guys. But it’s crazy, I have no idea. I talked about God in my last podcast, maybe that was why. I don’t know. It’s crazy.
In YouTube, we were talking about….who’s that famous dude who lost his YouTube again?
Todd: Oh, there’s PewdiePie or whatever, there was 50 million followers. I mean to be fair, there were some things that he shouldn’t have said, but instantly they shut down his business, he had dozens of employees, everyone out of work, completely shut down this entire media empire more or less, with the flip of a switch.
Russell: Cutie Pie?
Todd: PewdiePie
Russell: PewdiePie! So if you guys know PewdiePie, he got screwed by this as well, it’s crazy. And if you look at it there’s stuff on YouTube that’s so super offensive. I don’t even know what he said, but he said something.
Todd: He said something offensive, it was probably really bad.
Russell: It was probably really bad, yeah. But nevertheless they just crushed him like a grape, and they don’t care. You’re like, “But dude. I put in 5 million dollars a year in your platform.” But “We don’t care about you.” That’s what happened with Google. I remember when Google slapped everybody, everyone’s so shocked like, “I spend a hundred grand a month on Google ads.” They’re like, “You are one of our smallest clients.”
Todd: It’s a blib. They won’t even talk to you if you’re spending that.
Russell: It’s a lot of money to us, but to them, they don’t even care. They’re just angry that you interrupted the customer experience. So it’s just something to be very, very, very aware of.
Todd: Yeah, if you’re selling on Amazon, if you’re building your business on any of these platforms, that’s fine, but you need to also be expanding out. Building your customer list, building your email list, building your different chat lists, building your different communication channels with this. Building an actual business where you’re able to keep things going if Amazon decides to shut you off tomorrow. Because it will happen, it has happened to plenty of people.
Russell: So there is your warning. Ye have been warned. Thus sayeth Clickfunnels. Be careful because they will screw you over.
Okay, one last thing for this podcast. Todd’s working on tons of new stuff, we can’t talk about it, but what are you most excited about with the new stuff in Clickfunnels coming out?
Todd: I’m most excited about this thing that I can’t tell you about yet.
Russell: Sorry! It’s so awesome though. He showed me all the screenshots today.
Todd: So yeah, there’s the potential to basically 2x probably the results that you’re getting from different leads that are coming in on the front door from a communication perspective. Double open rates, double click rates, that kind of thing on what you’re currently seeing on your primary channel of communication.
Russell: That’s like being super, low balling. Double is….
Todd: Super generic low balling but it’s way more than that.
Russell: Yeah, it really is probably.
Todd: Yeah, it really is probably way more than that. And there’s also some cool things with payment processing that we’re beta testing right now that should literally instantly double mobile conversions.
Russell: That one we can talk about?
Todd: Yeah, I mean we can talk about that.
Russell: You can be in on this one.
Todd: So ApplePay, AndroidPay and Paypal all on one push to order. So the results we’re seeing preliminary at least, on the apple based stuff is literally, you go online, you click add apple pay to your thing, you press your thumb on it, and it’s instant. Everything works with upsells, with OTO’s, down sells, one click ad sales.
Russell: So imagine on your mobile, you’re on your phone and someone comes with a free plus shipping offer and they buy, does ApplePay pop up on their phone?
Todd: They only literally have to order once. They order on your primary order form, one time. Just like you, instead of typing in an order number, we have their thumbprint. Boom, it’s ordered. And then on an upsell they can just click one button, just like you would if they had to put in a credit card number. We can charge them, do the whole process, do everything we need to do. Same thing for Android. That’s the other sexy part that just recently came out. Brand new Android, they’re calling it like Google Pay or something like that, but we’ll be also supporting that as well. So you’ll be able to have Apple and Android, which for the longest time, most of the other platforms out there, they still have, if they do support it, it’s only Apple.
Russell: So that’s crazy. For those who are selling stuff mobile-y, it’s going to make your mobile experience so insanely good. People, I don’t know about you, I never buy things on my phone because I hate trying to type my credit card with my thumb. So what I do, I always email myself the link and then sometimes I buy stuff and sometimes I don’t because at that point I forget about it, whereas this is now like, oh…and they click their little thumbprint and it dings their card and then upsell, upsell, upsell, boom, fulfillment.
I’m also going to prophecy, I don’t know if I should prophecy, it’s kind of sacreligious. I don’t want to get shot down in this plane. I’m going to forecast, is that a better word? I’m going to forecast the future of where things are going. I was telling Steven this the other day. You know how we always design websites for desktops, usually wide, using multiple columns and stuff like that, mark my word, the future of where website design is going, is in single column, narrow width pages. If you look at Dollar Shave Club’s order form, this is the best example. You go to the page and the order form is like this wide going down the middle, and the fields are all centered and very, very clear, and it works really good mobile-y.
But I think that’s going to be the future of where even desktop is all designed. That’s my forecast, I’m guessing. So you’ll start seeing, you’ll notice Clickfunnels, one of our order pages right now is a lot more simple. That, I think that’s where future things are going to be.
Todd: It needs to be sized down properly, to do that. And you can easily, in the Clickfunnels editor, you can easily do that. Just jump into mobile mode, build it first in mobile mode, click desktop and you’ll see it in both modes. That’s the great thing about it. You literally only have to design it once. You might change some font sizes or show some images on desktop that you don’t show on mobile, stuff like that, that you can customize. But in reality you can do it first on mobile very easily.
Russell: I think people read more on mobile than videos, don’t you?
Todd: Yeah.
Russell: When I’m looking, I never push play on a video on mobile, like a sales video, I’d rather always read. Which is why I also think like a blend of video plus text is going to be more and more important. I look at a lot of our stuff now and it’s like here’s the video of me pitching it and then below there’s the copy of me pitching it. Because a lot of video I’ll see the play button, but I’ll, typically you’re in the bathroom or something and it’s awkward. This is my phone hand….Just kidding.
Anyway, there’s some forecasts and some ideas. But that’s what we got for you guys. So I hope you guys have enjoyed the flight. We’re probably half way to our destination. All you need to remember is, first off, don’t rely on one platform for anything. Your advertizing, your messaging to your customers, your merchanting, the only one platform you should be relying on 100% is Clickfunnels because we love you guys.
Todd: We’re flexible with everything too. We allow you plug in other platforms. We allow you to plug in every other platform out there. That’s why we built a way for you to….
Russell: We’re the only ones that love you enough that you should just focus on us. But then like I said, our focus, one big thing that we’re moving forward, is building in all the back ends, so you can plug in backups for stuff, you have multiple ways to message people outside of just email, in case email gets shutdown. Multiple merchant accounts in case your merchant accounts get shut down. All those kind of things. But don’t forget on your ad side, on your podcast side, all those things. My podcast downloads have dropped because I’m no longer listed, which drives me nuts. And nobody can subscribe to my podcast now. So now I gotta do work, anyway it’s just a new annoyance happening.
And there’s always a work-around. If you get your Facebook account shut down, don’t just walk away and be like, “Apparently I broke their terms…” This is the other thing that drives me crazy. I remember, you’ve probably heard us talk about SEO days, people were like, who were anti-SEO were like, “Well, we don’t want to do this because it’s against Google’s terms of service.” And it’s like, “Their terms of service…they’re coming to your website and spidering you. You can do whatever you want on your website.” It’s this weird thing.
So same thing, people getting their Facebook account shutdown are like, “It’s over. I’m done. This is not fair.” No, you don’t understand. This is your business, this is war. If they’re coming in and shutting you down, you need to fight back and get back in and keep coming back and coming back. Don’t just get knocked down and be like, “Ugh, I’m dead.” If that had happened to us, we would have lost our business decades ago. But we’re fighters so we get back up and keep going.
So you’ll see my podcast back, very, very soon. It’s annoying because I will lose all of my pre….anyway, we’ll leave it at that. It’s all fun games. When all is said and done, it doesn’t really matter. We’re trying to change the world and these guys get in our way. The platform will get in your way, and try to keep you from that. So just ignore them and keep moving forward. They shut you down, come back, make some tweaks, changes and keep going on and keep serving your people because they’re there, it matters, it’s worth it. Anything else? Any final words?
Todd: See you on the ground.
Russell: See you guys. Bye everybody.