Segment recorded from the “Drop The Mic Show” where Russell takes 10 questions from funnel hackers and answers them live.
On this bonus episode of Marketing Secrets Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:
After working with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, there is one common thing I’ve found that will instantly let me know if you’ll succeed or fail.
On today’s episode Russell talks about how he could tell with 100% certainty within seconds of meeting an entrepreneur if they would be successful. Here are some of the interesting things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to find out if you possess the quality that equals success or if you need to switch your focus in order to become successful.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Tonight I’m going to show you guys the one tell-tell sign to know if you’re going to be successful in business or not. And it works 100% of the time.
Hey everyone this is Russell. We’re on day 4 or 5 of binge all nighters while my wife and kids are away out of town. My wife doesn’t get back until a couple more days, but of my kids are coming back tomorrow, which I’m so excited. They were supposed to come back today, then they didn’t.
So now another day to pull an all-nighter. So it’s about 1:00 now. Today we have built and launched one, two, three, four funnels. And what’s funny is that none of them are new funnels, they’re all just re-builds of existing funnels. And this is hopefully a lesson for you all. Because I hate all my funnels. Even though they work pretty good, but they’re still not done. But guess what I did? I launched them and made a bunch of money with them and now I’m fixing them again. I’ll probably be fixing them again later, and they keep getting better and better, but they’re never done. So don’t be like, “My funnel’s not ready yet, I can’t make money.” Just do it. Just launch it and make money and then fix it along the way and keep fixing it. Ready, fire, aim. CLickfunnels gives you that ability to change things and make them better and better. That’s what I do, and you should too.
Alright, before I pass out, because I’m kind of getting a little loopy. It was fun, Steven and I spent like 30 minutes, I think we were getting tired and I gave him my internet marketing history lesson according to Russell Brunson. I showed him all my old sites on the way back machine. My first product, my first three software products, it was fun. We filmed most of it so hopefully it will show up on Funnel Hacker TV. Who knows, but we’ll see.
While we were talking, it was funny he was talking about how in the past he’s had a lot of business partners and things and how some people basically, all the business partners he’s had, none of them ever became successful and he was the only one that came out the end that was. He and his wife were discussing why did that happen and why didn’t it. As he’s saying that, I remembered something. I told him, and obviously nowadays it’s different, people come to our events now it’s different because we’ve raised the prices and we’ve attracted real entrepreneurs and things like that. But first 5 or 6 years of my company we were selling to beginners. And we were breaking my cardinal rule, which is don’t sell to broke people. But we were and we had these events and people would come and not that they were all broke or anything, there were some amazing people that came through, but it was definitely a different audience, different crowd.
I was telling myself, I would walk into our events, we had smaller events, about 40or 50 people, and I would welcome everybody and have them introduce themselves and within 5 seconds of them introducing themselves I knew with 100% certainty and accuracy who was going to succeed and who wasn’t. It was crazy. I always felt guilty. After they introduce themselves should I tell them, “Hey there’s no way you could ever be successful in this business. You should leave.” Or should I let them go through.
Part of its like, some people buy because success. Some people buy because they want entertainment, the excitement. They like chasing the dream, the idea of the dream. So I feel like that’s sometimes as valuable, if not more valuable, than what you give them, if that makes sense. I can’t remember where I learned this from or where I heard it. It was really good, but the concept was basically that, it was from a TV show, someone shared it. But basically, a lot of people don’t want to take the leap and actually do the work. Doesn’t make sense because those of you who are producers, that’s what you thrive off, producing, doing and moving forward.
But a lot of people don’t want to take that leap. Because they have this dream, vision of what’s going to happen and if they do take a leap and it fails, then they lose their dream. So for me, I know that this life is short and for a lot of us, there’s a lot of things that I do that I spend money on that are never going to be real, but I enjoy it and it gets me dreaming, it lets me dream and to think about something. It gets me excited. So that’s part of it.
So I never told those people when they introduced themselves, “There’s no way you’ll be successful, you should leave.” Because again, I feel like there were other things. I don’t try to impress……sometimes for us, and everyone here listening is different. Some of you guys, success is the reason you do this. And that’s your value, that’s what you’re looking for and sometimes we try to force our values on other people. I have my mastermind group, my inner circle that you guys know about. People pay 25 grand a year and some people come because they want to learn and execute. Other people come because they want to hang out. And if I try to push them to execute, it bothers them and they leave. They say they want success, but they don’t really want success. They want the networking, people, friendship, connection with other people like them. And I totally respect that now. I used to struggle with that when I was first getting started. But people give you money for different reasons, and most of the time it’s not for why you think. So don’t push your own beliefs on them because it’ll screw things up.
So anyway, people would come in and I would know that. I asked Steven, “Do you know how I could tell? I’m curious if you could know.” So my question for you is that. How did I know, what is the tell-tell sign with 100% certainty and accuracy, I knew within a second if people were going to be successful or not, in this business? Not in life, they can be successful in other things, but in this business. I’m curious of what your thoughts are, so think about it for a second. Because I’m going to tell you what the answer is and I’m a little nervous to tell you because some of you guys are going to be like, “Crap, does that mean I’m not going to be successful.” And I don’t think that that means you’re not going to be successful, but it does if you don’t shift what you’re chasing and what you’re thinking about. Because everyone I know who has been successful, it’s been the opposite side.
So again, we would come in and after the first session I would be like, “Okay, here’s the three people that are going to be successful.” and everyone else in the room would be like, “Yeah, I don’t know how but I feel that too.” And I kind of identified. This was the difference. Those who never had success, when they introduced themselves, or when they talked about it or thought about it, or presented anything, they were in the business because they wanted to make money. Those are the people that failed. You listen to that, what, Russell we all want to make money. That’s why we got in this business right. That’s why we’re here. That’s why I’m studying you, Russell. You teach people how to make money, and I want some of that.
Do you guys remember Wedding Singer, one of my favorite movies of all time? When Drew Barrymore goes to marry or whatever, he’s all mad so he goes to the bank and he’s trying to get a loan or trying to get a job at the bank to make money so she’ll like him. And Norm McDonald, not Norm McDonald…what’s his name? He’s the banker, and he’s like, he asks him his qualifications and Adam Sandler’s like, “Well, I like money. I’d like some more of it. You’ve got some money.” And it’s just this funny thing. I totally slaughtered it, but it’s really funny. Go watch Wedding Singer.
It’s really late. Alright, so where did I leave off. The people that were not successful were the people that wanted to make money. The people that were successful are people that were passionate and excited about the marketing. That’s the key. Isn’t that weird? Those who are excited by the marketing are the ones who were successful. It was weird.
I remember hanging out with Daegan Smith one time and he told me when he shifted from not being successful to being successful was when he got excited and passionate about the marketing. He became obsessed with it. It’s interesting because the business owners that I like to work with, the entrepreneurs, are the entrepreneurs running the business. Why? Because they become passionate about the marketing of the thing. Whereas bigger businesses that think they’re in the business of selling the thing. Apple you are not in the business of selling iPhones. You are in the business of ….. Excuse me, you’re not in the iPhone business, you’re in the business of selling iPhones. That’s what Steve Jobs understood. That’s why he was a big deal. That’s why he gave key note speeches. That’s why all those things happened. Because he knew he was in the business of selling the thing. Not of the thing.
That’s what I’ve found. When people introduced themselves, “I’ve been studying Russell. I’ve been geeking out, reading books. I love the market, I’m so excited. I’ve got this passion and I want to sell it.” I’m like boom, that guy’s goingto be successful. Or that girl’s going to be successful. If they come in like, “Hey yeah, I have a job, I really want to make some extra money.” And whatever or “Hey, I’m just not happy with where I’m at, I want to make extra money.” Every time it was money focused they failed. Every time it was “I’ve been reading this stuff and I’m excited.”
Hopefully, because unfortunately most educators make things really boring. I feel bad. Through my college and high school careers, most teachers were really boring. I tried my best to make marketing exciting. Because it is exciting. It’s exciting for me. I actually started, on Sunday I recorded, I decided I wanted to start a religious podcast and I recorded the first two episodes. It’s hard because I listen to other religious podcasts and they bore me and I’m like, “How are you guys boring? Do you not understand? What is happening? I love religion because the greatest act in the history of the world happened. There was this guy in Jerusalem, it wasn’t just a guy….This thing happened and it is so exciting when you understand it, what it means.” So I’m trying to make my podcast exciting. Because I’m as excited about that as I am about marketing.
My goal is to try to make the marketing exciting for you because I know that that’s what gets people into it. It’s not the thing, it’s being excited about the marketing thing. And that’s the moral of today’s lesson. So for you, if you’re struggling, I think better than…..the best advice I can give you is become obsessed with the marketing. Become obsessed from reading the books and understanding the stuff and how it works. You become obsessed with the marketing, that’s how you’ll be successful.
So don’t dabble, go deep. Get excited, get obsessed. Hopefully my books do that, hopefully my podcast, Funnel Hacker TV….that’s why we’re putting out so much content because I want you guys to see how fun this can be. It’s exciting. It’s the most exciting thing in the world. The most exciting business in the world, the most exciting time. You literally could have your own TV channel on a phone. That’s insane. We’re in such an exciting time, and I want all of you to be excited. Hopefully I’m exciting enough.
With that said, I really need to go to bed. Steven needs to go to bed, it’s 1:08. And being 1:08 is not that big of deal except for the fact that it’s like 5 nights in a row, or more. Anyway, I’m going to go. But I appreciate you guys. Get excited by the marketing. And if you do that, it’ll all work out. It always does. But you gotta be passionate about the marketing. It’s true of anything in life. If you read Expert Secrets, you know what we’re talking about, the external and internal journeys. Those who focus on the external journeys are the ones that typically fail. Seek an internal journey. Making money is external. Understanding marketing, changing people’s lives, serving, telling stories, that’s the internal. So those who have read the book, that’s the clue.
But it’s true with everything. Weight loss, losing weight, if you’re goal is to just lose weight you’re probably not going to do it, just so you know. It’s a hint. What’s the opposite? What’s the internal thing? If you become passionate about that, get excited about that then you’ll lose the weight. If your goal is to, pick any market. Whatever the external goal is, if that’s your real driving passion, you’re not going to succeed. Sorry. Sorry to break it to you. Because I wanted to lose weight for a long time and I didn’t, guess why? Because I was excited about losing weight. Anyway, there’s a hint. Hopefully that helps. No more hints, I gotta go to be. Appreciate you guys, talk to you soon. Bye.
How I got more done today then most people will get done in the next three months, and I did it by leveraging this one simple concept.
On today’s episode Russell is hanging out in a tent in the office because his family is out of town. He talks about how he gets stuff done quickly. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out how over the last 14 years Russell was able to build up a good enough team to get tasks completed in a day that might take another company an entire quarter to complete.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. If you’re watching this on marketingsecrets.com, watching the video, I’m actually right now inside of a tent in the office. The reason why is because my wife and kids are out of town and I told everyone I was going to camp out at the office. Everyone’s like, “Oh cool. Yeah.” But I was like, “I’m literally going to camp out at the office.” So I brought a tent in and I brought a cot that I almost broke and then Dave brought in a real cot and this is actually incredibly comfortable, so I’m probably going to sleep here tonight. People will show up in the morning and be like, you are so weird.
The reality is, my house right now is under construction and my entire kitchen is gutted, so I can’t even go to my house, I’m living in the pool house and it’s just like, I know it’s first world problems, but anyway. So now I want to talk to you about one thing before I crash because we got a lot of stuff done today. A lot. This is my to-do list and it’s crazy how many things we got done. And tomorrow is another big day as well. And two of my kids come home tomorrow, which I’m insanely excited for.
But what’s kind of cool, let me sit up a little bit, is people always ask me, “Russell how do you always get so much stuff done in the day?” And I really think it’s a couple of things. First off, I do to-do lists like this on pieces of paper with big old marker. Because something about markers, something about crossing things out that is so therapeutic. Because working today, it was like 2:35 or so in the afternoon and I had only crossed off two things so I was like, angry. So I called over my team and I’m like, “Okay, lets cross stuff out.” Everyone’s like, “How can I help? How can I help?” and I’m like, “Steven do this. Dave do this. Melanie do this.”
Everyone was kind of doing things to help us get stuff busted out. And then I’m looking at this and I’m like, what are the things I have to do? What are the, Dan Sullivan called them unique abilities? What are your unique abilities that you have to focus on? It’s funny because I was dinking around doing stuff that wasn’t necessarily my unique ability, I was doing stuff that was, I don’t know, just stuff. I was like okay, a lot of things I could get other people to do, but there are some things that I have to do. So I knew one of them was, we had this new, we’re going after Instagram so we’re starting this drop the mic show that’s going to be our Instagram play to kind of build up our audience there.
But I needed a cool intro video to pitch the concept and stuff like that. I had to write the script for that, so I did that. And I had to figure out a really cool way to demo this stuff on Instagram, on the computer, which was cool. So I went and recorded the voice over and Steven went and edited it and made it the coolest audio intro ever. So that was awesome.
And then we’re a couple of months away from doing our big re-launch of Clickfunnels, at about our 3 year mark. And I don’t know if you guys have seen our old explainer videos, but I needed to update these. So I had to re-write the copy for the first one and I wrote a new explainer video for the Etison editor, which is the web editor. It’s kind of fun, I’ve been like, how do you write an exciting explainer video for a website editor? It’s not, it wasn’t a funnel, just the editor alone.
I actually had somebody today message me on Facebook and ask me, “What’s the script you write for explainer videos?” and I’m like, “I don’t know what the script is. You just have to find the right hook.” So I was sitting there probably 30 minutes. What’s the hook? Why does somebody care about this? I was stuck at what’s the hook? What’s the hook? And then finally I got the hook and I was like, oh my gosh this is it. And then I started writing. As soon as I got the hook everything just started flowing. It was really, really cool. In fact, do you guys want to hear it? Would that be of value?
I’m going to jump off the cot, like I said I am literally camping in the office. So let me jump off the cot. I’m going to read you guys the script so you can see. So the hook that I came up with is I just remember back, what’s a good hook for the editor in Clickfunnels and things like that and I remember that somebody while I was at Joe Polish’s event, I remember we had to write these cards. Like what you do for a company and my card I wrote , we helped take the power back from the tech guys, because there was some InfusionSoft guys there and I wanted to talk about that.
So I remembered that and found the quote “Take the power back from the tech guys.” So I’m like, that’s the hook. Okay, now I know the hook. I was trying to remember a story that ties to that. So I’m like, okay, the hook is the tech guys having the control. So it’s almost like you’re handcuffed. So then I start typing and got into the flow state. So I’ll read this to you.
“Have you ever felt handcuffed as an entrepreneur? Tell me if this sounds like you. You’ve got an idea, it comes to you in the shower or when you’re trying to sleep or often times it’s in the middle of a boring conversation when someone is trying to talk to you about who knows what. When you’re trying to nod and act like you’re actually paying attention, what is really happening is you’re looking and searching for your next big idea. Then, boom, it hits you. You have the idea, you see the vision, you know what you need to do and you know how this thing will change the world.”
And then all the sudden it’ll zoom on the hands and they’ll be handcuffed and it’ll pan back and see a bunch of tech nerds sitting around in a room.
And it says, “And then they got you. You don’t know how to code, you don’t know how to design. You’re being held hostage by the tech nerds that you used to tease in school. Yet somehow things you think should be so simple, things that should only take a few minutes, somehow become hours and then days and then weeks. With each passing day the excitement for your big idea gets dimmer and dimmer and dimmer until one day it’s gone.”
And then we’ll show the idea in a graveyard, with an entrepreneur standing next to it having a funeral. “There’s money wasted, there’s time wasted with little or nothing to show for it.” They’re still handcuffed and the tech guys walk away with all the cash. “Then when all seems lost it hits you again. Yes! Another idea, another million dollar problem that you want to solve. But the problem is you know the pain that would go into getting the tech guys to actually build out what you know needs to be done. And this is where most entrepreneurial dreams die. Somewhere between the idea and your tech guys ability to create the pages you need to sell your big idea.”
Alright so that was this hook. It is that we’re handcuffed as entrepreneurs. So I start telling the story and thinking about that. That all just started flowing, it’s kind of cool. So I’m going to keep going.
“What happened to the good old days where the person who was excited to sell and able to sell, could just stand in front of people and actually sell? Well here I am telling you that those days are officially back. I want to introduce you to the Etison Editor inside of Clickfunnels to let you take the power back from the tech guys.” Then the guy will break the handcuffs and stand there like a free man.
“Yes, the Etison Editor was created so that entrepreneurs like you, who aren’t programmers, who don’t know how to design can easily build pages inside of a funnel that are proven to convert. Let me show you how it works. First pick the type of sales funnel that is scientifically pre-designed to sell your type of product, choose the style of page design that you like best. Click a button and the entire funnel is built in less than 10 seconds. Every page, every step, everything. You can change headlines and your images, add a video, countdown clocks and more. And if you really want to customize a page, we have dozens of amazing elements you can choose from. Just like a painter would pick a color from a pallet, and then drag and drop it onto the page. Move them around to your heart’s content and then send the funnel to go live. In less than 10 minutes you can create what would have taken those tech nerds weeks to do.”
I make fun of them over and over again. “And now the webpage inside your funnel sells as well as you do. Yes, the Etison Editor inside of Clickfunnels lets you take the power back from your tech guys. No longer be handcuffed and held hostage by tech people. You can take control of your marketing and start making sales today. With Clickfunnels we believe that that’s how it should be. So try the Etison Editor today and be free from your tech guys forever.”
So that was the script. That was something I had to write. I’m the one who’s in that pain, who had gone through that experience over and over again. I had to do that, I can’t be focusing on these other things. So that’s what I went and focused on and worked on. Was writing this script. And then I actually wrote another script for another thing. So I ended up writing four scripts today. And then went into our padded room back here and recorded the voice over’s and I got my brother doing the audio editing. Steven did some audio editing. It’s just all these other people.
So the way I’m able to get so much stuff done is, it doesn’t come overnight, so don’t think it’s going to or it has to, but over the last 14 years of me doing this, I’ve built up my team of people who can do all the pieces. And everyone on the team has a unique ability that they’re good at that I’m not. So I know when I have a project, okay there’s people on my team and they each have their unique abilities and I have mine and to get this thing done it takes all of them. So instead of me trying to do Steven’s job or Jake’s job, or Dave’s or Scott’s or any of these other people’s jobs, I just gotta focus on mine. And then everyone do their kind of thing.
Because any one of these projects, I didn’t do all the pieces of it, I did just my piece of it. And because we have a team, it’s able to go fast. So I recommend for you, start building your team. For some reason as entrepreneurs, we think that we have, I don’t know why these, most entrepreneurs don’t think this, but for some reason internet entrepreneurs do, we think we have to do everything. We have to be good at copy and design and pages and everything. But you don’t. You just have to find people and build a team.
I think that for all of us, think about where you’re at right now and look at where you’re weak and where you’re strong. It’s funny because for a long time I always fought, I wanted to be in control and owner, that was my thing. I always wanted to be in control of the business. And now, looking back, it’s the stupidest thing ever. When I gave up control I found good partners and people and connected them and built a team. That’s when things took off.
So for you, I want you guys, the moral of today’s story I guess if you want to call it, is, obviously I’ve been listening to Dan Sullivan, so those of you who have listened to Dan Sullivan recently, he talks a lot about unique abilities. So my moral of the story for you guys is to really identify what’s your unique ability that nobody else can bring to the table. Figure out that thing and look at what are the unique abilities you need to get this thing off the ground. Or get this thing into orbit, or wherever it’s at to get it where you want it to be. If you’re happy with things, then don’t stress about it. You’re good. Just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to grow or change or whatever that shift is that you want to make, then look and say what unique abilities do I need on my team to make this happen. And then go start finding those people, start looking for them. Start going out there.
I guess that’s the message for today. Using your unique abilities and others to get crap done fast. Maybe that’s the title. Because that’s the secret. We got a lot done today, its insane. Honestly, almost any one of these little check marks on this list, is something that a normal company does in, I don’t know, a quarter. We did a lot of it today. And tomorrow we’re going to finish these things up. And tomorrow we’re re-launching one, two, three, four, five funnels. That’s awesome. They’re all mostly done, so it’s just going to be busting them out. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Get them all live.
And then what’s going to be cool, if I have time at the end of the day I’m going to be working on a Funnel Hacker App, which is insane. We have this new app coming out, which is going to be cool. Then if I get all that stuff done, then by the time my kids get here it’ll be nice. Then the next set of fun projects happen. I’ll be pretty proud of us if we get these things done. Hopefully that helps you guys.
Identify your unique ability and bring others to your team that have other unique abilities that complement yours. That’s how you’re going to take over the world the fastest. With that said, have fun. I’m going to go to bed in my tent here in the office. And they say it’s not good for man to be alone and I agree, that’s why I’m literally sleeping at the office tonight inside of a tent on a cot. Such a nerd. I love it. Anyway, thanks everybody. We’ll see you guys soon. Bye.
People who read blogs… read blogs, people who watch videos… watch videos, etc…
On today’s episode Russell talks about figuring out a new formula for conversation domination on every platform. He also mentions the cool new way he’s doing coaching. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to find out why its important to realize that podcast listeners listen to podcasts.
---Transcript---
Hey this is Russell, welcome to Marketing Secrets. Today’s show is about conversation domination.
Hey everyone this is Russell and I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I have a really cool thing I wanted to share with you guys, and if I’m being completely honest, I am completely fried right now. It’s Friday, my wife just left out of town with three of my kids and left me with two. So she was up packing until 3 in the morning, I fell asleep at 1 and at 3 she left, so I woke up to say goodbye to them and the kids. And then at the same time my little 2 year old, Norah woke up and so I brought her down in bed with me, but she went crazy for the next two hours. Screaming, jumping, and kicking. She knew mom wasn’t around, anyway it got kind of hard.
Finally at about 5 or 5:30 I put her back to bed and then I came down and fell asleep for 2 hours and woke up and so it was like a 2 or 3 hour night. Then I raced to the office because we had funnel Friday today, but luckily Jim forgot. I was like thank heavens, because it gave me a chance to get stuff done. Then I had what we call Decade in a Day. So those who are in my inner circle, we do this cool thing called Decade in a Day, which is a coaching program part. When the first come into the program they get to be part of Decade in a Day and then every time they renew they get Decade in a Day.
What it is, is me taking a decade of my experience and jamming it into one day for them. The way it works, we actually changed it, in the past we used to do it different but I figured out a new format and today was the first day and it’s so cool. If any of you guys are doing coaching programs, this is the way to do it. So we have 100 people in the inner circle at any given time. So what we did is we went and took each of their, basically each person got thirty minutes and instead of me just coaching them one on one, when they get the value and that’s kind of it. What it is we coach them and I use Zoom, which is a new webinar platform that is becoming the coolest thing ever. And then we Zoomed each person in the inner circle Facebook group.
So I had person number one, brought them on, to ask questions, then I click record and stream to Facebook and then it streamed the presentation. So for thirty minutes, I had them introduce themselves really quick. And then we talked about business and I coached them for thirty minutes. And while it’s happening its streaming live to the other 99 inner circle members. And everyone in there is giving feedback and dropping recourses and all these amazing things are happening in there. And the call ended, and I ended it and zoom lets you just end Facebook live. I started the next one and pulled the next person in and go. Boom. We do that for thirty minutes. And then it ends.
So everyone watches the new one starts and then it’s archived in the inner circle members area, that person’s story for thirty minutes with me coaching them. Everyone else starts dropping feedback and comments. We did that, I think 8 times today. So it was kind of crazy. But it was amazing because it was me coaching and then also 99 other fellow inner circle members all coaching as well, dropping resources, links, ideas, resources. It was amazing. So I’m really excited about the new addition to the inner circle, which is awesome.
And Steven who is behind me over here, he just got done with the Two Comma Club coaching, which is the tier before the inner circle, the Two Comma Club coaching and he spent 4 hours doing Q and A today. It’s insane, people. I’ve been doing this now for a long time and our coaching programs have become second to none. It’s exciting.
Steven: It’s a lot of fun. Changing the world, you know. It’s a cool feeling seeing people’s lives like, “I got it.” And then they go out and do it and get results and it’s just fun.
Russell: So fun. So that’s what we’ve been doing today. I[‘m about to take my kids to Studio C, which is really, really fun. Studio C is, if you haven’t, go to YouTube and search Studio C and you’ll see who they are, it’s amazing. Anyway, we’re taking Aiden, who is one of two kids left at home with me tonight to that. So we’re heading out here in a few minutes. But I was just having a conversation with some of the marketing team here and I wanted to share some of it as Iw as thinking about it Because I thought it was really interesting.
So the conversation we had comes back to there was a guy named Howie Schwartz when I first got started who was big online. He had a course called Conversation Domination and it was about getting in Google and as soon as you typed your name into Google all 10 spots would be you, you would dominate the conversation. Anyway, I don’t know what, I haven’t heard from Howie for forever, I don’t know what he’s up to nowadays.
Anyway, the concept of conversation domination I thought was awesome. You type in your key word and you’re all 10 spots and all the paid ads are all you. You dominate the conversation, you’re the only person there. So as I’ve been doing this whole new social media thing, which you guys are watching me do, and hopefully learning and following and modeling and funnel hacking. That’s my thoughts, conversation domination. I want when you open up any platform, that I’m dominating the conversation. I’m in your podcast feed. I’m in your YouTube feed. I’m in your blog RSS feed. I want to dominate the conversation on every single platform so everywhere you look, I am the only alternative. I think it’s important.
But what’s interesting, this is the, I think I know now why. I will always wonder why nobody else is doing this, outside of Gary Vaynerchuk in our market. In my entrepreneurial business market, there’s people probably in other markets, but in ours the only person is Gary V. I think I finally realized why. Because my business is built off email. So we built a big email list. We’ve had over a million entrepreneurs that have been on that list. Active, probably have a million or so. But what’s interesting is, I assumed okay I’m going to launch in Instagram. I’ll send an email and all the sudden I’ll have a million people on Instagram. Then I’ll go to my blog and push there and I’ll have a million people there.
But the reality of what I’ve found is that’s not true. Think about this for yourself. How do you like to consume content? What’s your platform? Because everyone’s got one or two that’s their favorites. Do you like reading blogs? Maybe you’re a blog reader. Or do you like listening to podcast? You’re a podcast person. Or do you like watching video, do you go to YouTube? Or do you check your email? DO you go to Instagram, Facebook? What’s your platform of choice?
And I thought that everyone was on every platform but that’s not the case. There’s a small percentage that are, but if we take our Facebook list and we run next to our email list, and look at those side by side, our Facebook and email list, the crossover in the middle is shockingly small. I assumed they were the same people, but they’re not. It’s just fascinating. When you understand that, a big shift that we’re having, I thought we’ll try Facebook ads to build Instagram, and that kind of works, but not really.
Because Facebook people are on Facebook because they like Facebook. Instagram people are on Instagram. So the more I started thinking about this, the conversation we just had with our team, we’re like, we have to realize that people that read blogs like to read blogs. People who listen to podcasts like to listen to podcasts. Does that make sense. People that watch YouTube videos like watching YouTube videos. People that are Instagram, are on Instagram. That seems stupid right?
Think about that. So what we’re talking about, and I’ve been talking a lot with you guys. Maybe not with you guys, but internally with our team, about the Dream 100. The Dream 100 for us has always been email focused, up until this point. Finding all the people on the list and Dream 100 the crap out of them and get them to promote our products and services. It’s worked, we’ve built a huge company off the back of that. Recently I did an episode a few weeks ago talking about how are you using Dream 100 for SEO? And by the way, we are executing it and it’s working awesome. So listen to that episode and do it.
But think about this, if I want people to read my blog I don’t need to go and become really good at Facebook ads to get people to read my blog. You can, there’s crossover, but what’s better, whoever are the people who read blogs, read blogs. So if I want to launch my blog and make it successful, who are the other people that have successful blogs that my people are already reading. My dream clients are already reading. Because people who read blogs, read blogs.
So I needed to find those people and Dream 100 them, and pay them or partner with them or whatever to get them to write a blog article about me because blog people like to read blogs. So if I’m reading a blog and I read a blog about someone and I go over to their blog, someone’s blog needs to promote my blog. Someone’s podcast needs to promote my podcast. Somebody’s YouTube channel needs to promote my YouTube channel because people who watch YouTube, watch YouTube.
So it’s kind of shift in my thinking. That’s how the Dream 100, as I’m getting more granular with it, it’s fascinating. If you hear me on podcasts, you will know to hear, normally I do podcasts peoplr are like, “Where can I get to know more about you Russell.” And I’m like, “go to Russellbrunson.com, there’s a bunch of stuff there.” But no! If I went on a podcast, be like, “hey, you like listening to podcasts, go to marketingsecrets.com, there’s my podcast, you can subscribe. It’s awesome.” Because podcast people listen to podcasts.
If I’m on a blog, I’m going to talk about my blog. If I’m on a YouTube channel I’m going to talk about my YouTube channel. If I’m on a Facebook feed, I’m going to talk about my Facebook feed. Understanding that, that’s number one. And again, there will be a little bit of crossover, but the majority of your blog readers will come from other blogs. Because blog readers read blogs. The majority of YouTube Subscribers will come from other YouTube channels because YouTube people watch YouTube.
I never watched YouTube videos until 3 months ago when we launched our YouTube channel. I didn’t care about it, I didn’t watch, I never went there. I didn’t understand, it was so foreign to me. Now I get there and I’m in this world and I’m like, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. And people that like YouTube, they’re on YouTube all day long, all the time. People who like Facebook are….
So you start understanding that as you’re doing your Dream 100. You become more granular with your focus and your traffic and all those kind of things. I want you to remember that. You wanna have conversation domination. The key to that is the Dream 100. Going back, Dream 100-ing people and getting people who are bloggers to read your blog. And people who are podcast listeners to listen to your podcast, so on and so forth across all the platforms. That’s awesome.
Do you think that’s awesome Steven?
Steven: It’s amazing.
Russell: For those of you guys who are not watching this on a YouTube, if you’re listening to the podcast, Steven is behind me and he’s screaming excited too. So I hope it makes sense to you guys. I’m dropping gold bombs. Some of you guys will not be prepared for it yet. If you’re not go search fro the Dream 100, I think I’ve done podcasts or videos. I’ve talked a lot about that.
So if you’r enot familiar with the Dream 100 yet, go and study it and then come back to this. There will be a point in your business when this concept will be the biggest way for you to scale from wherever you are to the next level. Its huge for us, what we’re focusing on while we’re trying to go from 8 to 9 figures a year. We got a good shot of maybe hitting it this year. It’s going to be a stretch this year. Next year it’s going to be easy. But this year we might make it. We got a couple of things happening that are going to give us the ability to potentially hit that. It’s going to be fun.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to mention to you guys. Hopefully you have enjoyed this podcast, please go to iTunes and rate, give me stars. Even one or two stars if you want, but if you really had a good time give me 5 and tell people what you think. Also, if you have your own podcast please tell your podcast listeners to listen to my podcast, I would really appreciate it. If you have a YouTube channel, please tell your people to listen to my YouTube videos. And if you’re a blogger, please blog about my blog, that would be very amazing. I hope that helps you guys. Appreciate you all. I’m going to go home and play with my son. We’re going to go to Studio C and have a blast. Peace, have a good night. See you all again soon. Bye everybody.
Why these things can and should move you forward as opposed to pulling you backwards.
On this episode Russell talks about having entrepreneurial scars and why you should embrace them rather than be embarrassed of them. Here are some of the insightful things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out why it’s okay to fail, as long as you are able to learn from your mistakes.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. Today’s episode is called entrepreneurial scars.
Hey everyone, so I wanted to, honestly, this podcast I just wanted to hang out with you guys and talk because it’s been interesting. I’ve been working with so many entrepreneurs and recently just as I’ve been working with some people and watching people who had insane amounts of success at one time and then who had something happen. A failure, a bankruptcy, whatever, just fill in the blank. The second time around, a lot of times, they really, really struggle.
I start looking and I’m like, why are they struggling? They had this huge success and it’s almost like they have fear and embarrassment like, “I failed in the past.” As I kept talking about this with some of the guys on our team it was like, it’s almost like they have entrepreneurial scars. It’s interesting, us as a person who went through the process, a failure, a lot of times there’s ups and the downs it hard. We have scars, emotional scars, but I think sometimes we feel like those scars are on our faces and other people can see them.
What’s interesting is that people don’t. Those are just things that are inside of yourself. But because they’re there and you feel like they’re there and other people can see it, it keeps you from having success the next time. Because there’s so much fear around these scars, these things. And as I was talking about this, this morning, I shared a story and this will hopefully kind of tie these things together a little bit better for you. I’m not going to name names or anything.
But there was a guy I know and he was a successful politician. At the top of his game, doing everything amazing and people loved him. And when you saw him in that spot, and it’s not like national politics, I don’t know anybody in national politics. I don’t follow politics at all. But it was a local person. And you saw him on the news and all this other stuff and he was dynamic, charismatic and everything was awesome. And then he got caught up in this political scandal or whatever and it’s funny because, again, I don’t follow politics, and I don’t care that much. But I was aware of the things that happened, and he’s no longer in there and there was someone else.
Then fast forward 3 or 4 years later, I met him. What’s funny, it was in a different situation, and he wanted to talk about business stuff. And I was really excited because I was like, “I know who this person is. How cool. I want to meet him and talk to him.” And as I talked to him, it was funny, not funny I shouldn’t say that, it was interesting to see the scars that he’d gotten from this thing were so deep, he was struggling to progress in other parts of his life. Business and all these other things because of the scars he got from this thing that didn’t work out right.
You look at the thing, it wasn’t good, but 3 years later, I’m almost surprised that I knew about it, but I did. But he was carrying those scars in his conversations with you. If he would have come in the way that I’d seen him before, confident and all sorts of things, I probably would have done the business deal with him, but because he had these scars and just the way he approached me, he didn’t have the certainty or all these things. They were gone and I could feel it. And that uncertainty kept me from doing the deal with him.
And I remember thinking after I finished, I could tell he was still carrying around the fear and embarrassment and shame of that thing. I don’t care about that thing. I couldn’t care less. Move on with your life and come back. That person I saw on TV, if you would have approached me that way, I would have done this deal.
The same thing is true with entrepreneurs, there’s someone I know who is super successful, knew how to funnel, blew up and made a ton of money and then it went away and now they’re kind of struggling. And what’s interesting is I know that back story because I know the person and things like that. Even with that, I look at the person like, this person is a rock star. They’re awesome. They’re amazing. But as I see them interact with other people, I see these scars that this person has are keeping them from taking over the next thing.
And it’s funny because I don’t think 99,9% of every single person in the world has any idea, their little scars are there for this person, but because he knows that they’re there, because he knows he failed. He knows that things disappear and didn’t work out the way he wanted. He has this fear and has these approaching the next situations, he’s struggling because of that. Because of these scars.
And I think it’s interesting that these entrepreneurial scars that we have, first off they’re invisible. Nobody sees them. Some people may be aware of them, but nobody sees them except for you. So because you are so aware of these things, it keeps you from having the confidence and success you need to move forward.
It’s funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur who was about to go through bankruptcy and they were freaking out and so scared. And I kind of asked them why and they didn’t say, “Because I don’t want those scars.” But what they said afterwards was, If I get out of bankruptcy, what’s my wife going to think and my in-laws and family?” all these things and I was like, “You have to understand, bankruptcy, think about this, failure for entrepreneurs, the founding fathers of this country gave us bankruptcy as a gift, so that entrepreneurs like us would risk and try and move forward and roll the dice and hope for something. And if it wasn’t for that gift, and you may think it’s a gift for the founding fathers, but I think it’s a gift from god. But if it wasn’t for that thing, America wouldn’t have succeeded as a nation. Everything that’s amazing wouldn’t have happened if entrepreneurs didn’t have that risk.
If it was like, if you go bankrupt you go to jail until you pay off all your debts. Not a lot of people would have taken the risk, I don’t know if I would have taken the risks. But because the worst case scenario is bankruptcy, you clear off your balance sheets and start over. That’s the worst case scenario and that’s the greatest gift we have.
So if we hit that and we go through it and all the sudden we have these scars, I went through bankruptcy and have all this fear. Then you go through the next thing, it’s like, no, that shouldn’t be a negative thing. That means you tried, you attempted. Even after you attempted and had success and it went away, you had success.
I remember I was doing a deal with this guy who was super successful. In fact, he did these consulting things where it was 500 grand a day with a minimum of ten sessions, so it’s like half a million bucks to get this guy to work with you. And I had a chance to hang out with him and I was talking to him and talking strategy and he was asking about my story. I tell him my story and I’m pretty open with things now. I have realized that my scars are what actually draws people to me. That’s why at Funnel Hacking Live I spend an hour and a half on stage talking about all my failures, it draws people toward me, which is kind of making the point at the end of this podcast.
But I’ve had my share of ups and downs. And as I told him the whole thing he’s like, “Oh good.” And I’m like, “What do you mean, good?’. And he’s like, “you cycled.” I’m like, “what do you mean cycled?” And he’s like, “Entrepreneurs who haven’t cycled at least once, I refuse to work with them.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” “Cycled means you build something up and then you crash. If you haven’t cycled yet, then guess what? You’re still drinking your own kool-aid. You still believe that you are the most amazing human being on Earth. You don’t realize until after you cycled, that it’s not just you. You aren’t the greatest thing to walk this planet. There’s market conditions, there’s people, opportunities, luck and all these amazing things that happen that make you possible. That make you as an entrepreneur successful.”
And as he said that, first off I was like, that feels better. Cycling sounds way better than failure, than bankruptcy. But I thought it was interesting that he wouldn’t work with entrepreneur unless they’d cycled once. And I was like, Man, how many people go out there and do their big risk and have some success which gives you all t his pride and confidence and stuff. And then you lose it and because of that failure you never try again. Or you try it but halfway because you feel like you have these scars and you feel like other people are judging you or you are judging yourself for all these kind of things. Where the reality is that we don’t se those things.
Nobody knows about the failures until you tell them about it. But if they do know about it, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, as I found as I share my scars, it’s draws people closer, like I mentioned earlier. I think the reason people will do business with me a lot of times is because I’m vulnerable, I share those things.
So for you guys, I wanted to talk about it today because first off, it’s okay to have those scars, but don’t hide them. Share those things. When my kids get injured and they’re super cute and do it all the time, I tell my boys, “Chicks dig scars. That’s a good thing. That’s awesome. Black eyes are awesome.” I remember one of my black eyes I got in wrestling; I don’t know if you guys are watching the video, you can still see the scars over both of my eyes. I had this one where I hit my buddies knee and my eye had swollen shut and I had 15 stitches and couldn’t see out of my eye for 4 or 5 days. I was at school and I was all embarrassed because of the scar and as I was walking around people were like, “Dude your eye looks awesome. You’re a wrestler.” People connected with that more than me looking good and my hair being, worrying about what I look like.
So I think the moral of this podcast and I want you guys to understand, is that we all have entrepreneurial scars. If you don’t have them yet, you’re going to have them. But don’t let those keep you from the next success. My friend who is a politician, I don’t care what happened. He could go and do and be successful, but because he’s carrying these scars, he’s not. You have to be willing to get rid of those, or not get rid of them, embrace them and share those things. Look, I screwed up, this is what happened. But this is what I’m doing now and this is what I learned from it, how I’m changing.
If I look back on my career, there’s a lot of things I’m embarrassed about. Things I messed up on big time. Maybe I should do a podcast someday about my biggest regrets. I have regrets in my business. There’s things I did that I’m embarrassed about, I wish I wouldn’t have done. Looking back now, I would have consulted myself, “Do not do that.” But I wouldn’t have known the path unless I’d gone down some of these paths and realized what things weren’t right.
I’ve always tried to be fair to my customers and my employees and stuff, but I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve sold things that I thought were really good and found out later they weren’t. There’s things I’m not proud of, but if I let those scars keep me, how many people’s lives that we’re touching and effecting now that wouldn’t have been touched had I not embraced those scars and told people, “Look I messed up in the past.” And I have, and we all do and it’s okay. But I don’t want you guys to not progress because of that.
Hopefully this gives you some comfort. Look, if you’ve gone through bankruptcy that’s okay. If you messed up and did something stupid, that’s okay. That’s what this life is about. About making those mistakes and owning it, and if you do it’s almost like plastic surgery. It makes these scars disappear. But they don’t need to disappear. Like I said, embrace it. Because that’s what’s going to draw people to you.
So I hope that helps. It was on my mind today, I though it just want to share it. I hope that that was good for you guys. Again, as entrepreneurs, we’re risking stuff every day. We’re risking our name, money, other people. I wake up in the morning scared with 119 employees as of today. If I screw up, how many people lives have I let down because of that. Those things are real to me and I understand that. But I’ve got to risk those things because how many people’s lives can we effect because of those things.
And if you’ve gone through bankruptcy, don’t let that stress you out. It’s a gift from the founding fathers, from God. It’s given us the ability so that we can risk and not lose everything. We can risk……..and if it wasn’t for that, again, progress would stop if entrepreneurs weren’t risking. So it’s not a bad thing. If you….
Anyway, I just wanted to give you guys that as a gift. And if you any of you guys are struggling, some of you probably are. Some of you guys are going through bankruptcy or gone through bankruptcy. Maybe it’s not bankruptcy but you failed. You launched something that didn’t work. You built a team of people and the product didn’t work and you had to fire people or let them go. All the ups and downs and disappointment. As entrepreneurs you have so many things on your shoulders and I get that.
I hope this message helps relieve some of that pressure for some of you guys. Because if you don’t keep risking, trying, keep getting those scars, where is the world going to be? Where are you going to be? Where’s your family going to be? Where are the people you’re serving going to be? They need you and it’s worth the risk, worth the sacrifice, worth the fears. Because if you’re going to affect those people, when you deliver on what you know you have and you change their lives, it makes it all worth it.
It’s interesting, just to kind of close this down. I looked at where our company has come to where we are today. And I looked back during my last cycle. 7 years ago when everything collapsed around me and I thought the world was coming to an end and I was depressed and sad and scared and all those kind of things happened. Looking at it now, if I didn’t go through that, Clickfunnels and this process never would have happened. I never would have met Todd, I never would have met who built Clickfunnels. I never would have built this team. I never would have had the opportunity. I wouldn’t have known the things I know to be able to execute on this. A lot of things we’re steering clear from today are because of the mistakes that happened back then. And if I would have made those mistakes today, some of them would have been catastrophic. Way more people’s lives would have been effected.
Whereas, I had a chance to suffer those things, get those scars on a smaller scale, so I don’t have to have those things now. Hopefully, if I learned my lesson which I’m trying to do. So look at those things as gifts, embrace them, share them, and don’t hide from them. Because those scars will draw people to you and we all have them. Don’t let that keep you from your mission.
Hope that helps. Appreciate you guys and see you guys all on the next episode of Funnel Hacker, no that’s wrong. What is this episode? Marketingsecrets.com. So sorry, I was recording Funnel Hacker TV earlier today. So marketingsecrets.com podcast. That’s what this is. By the way, if you want to go see our tv show, go to funnelhacker.tv, we have a whole bunch of behind the scenes episodes, a couple of new episodes as well of different stories. In fact, by the time this is live, the same day, we have our next show going live. So go to Funnel Hacker TV as well, check out the shows.
If you like the podcast, please share it. Please go to iTunes and leave me a review. I don’t care if you give me one stars, two stars. If you give me five that will be way cooler. Please do that. Thanks again for everything guys and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.
Who was J. Peterman and why should you care?
On this episode Russell talks about taking inspiration for writing good copy from the J. Peterman catalog (of Seinfeld fame). Here are some of the fascinating things you will hear in this episode:
So listen below to learn something new about Seinfeld that you can tell all your friends the next time you watch the show, while also being inspired by the amazing copy contained in the real catalog.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I just wanted to jump on real quick, spur of the moment. Because I wanted to share something with you that is important. It has to do with the show Seinfeld, but I knew as soon as I said Seinfeld some of you would be like, “I read your book, Russell. It’s the Seinfeld email sequences.” But it’s not, I got something completely different that you guys probably didn’t even know about yet.
I don’t know about a lot of you guys, a lot of you guys are into marketing now and you’re loving it because we’re talking about it and making it exciting and sexy, but I want you to understand. Marketing has been the old timers, most of them are dead now, they’re no longer alive. The legends, this is where the coolest stuff comes from. So people ask me what I do for fun. I spent $4000 buying these right here. These are a whole bunch of swipe files of ads from dead people, because they’re so amazing.
Anywhere, where do I get weird stuff like this? Someone’s already asking. I get stuff like this on eBay. I just recently got a purchase that showed up today that I wanted to show you guys. It’s marketing, for someone like me, it’s the greatest marketing thing on planet Earth. Here’s a snapshot of what it is. That’s all you get.
Based on that, who can tell me what this is? It has to do with Seinfeld, it’s a pop quiz. I want to know your answer down below. Anyone who gets the answer to this quiz, I will have so much respect for you as a marketing person. There’s something that has to do with this and Seinfeld. Anyone who knows what it is, post it down below. I want to see if any of you guys know. There’s hints, it’s an old catalog from 1994. What does that have to do with Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine, and the crew? Any one of you guys know.
I’ll give you guys another hint. I’ll give you the title of the top. It’s going to be backwards on Facebook live, but this is one of the official J. Peterman catalogs from 1994. Anyone getting close to knowing what I’m talking about. Okay. Alright, Kramer’s roommate?
Okay, for those that don’t know, I’m going to explain what’s happening. Most of you guys, hopefully everybody has watched the show Seinfeld. Do you guys remember that Elaine got a job at the J. Peterman Catalog. Do you remember J. Peterman was this eccentric person and he’d go on vacations and go buy hats and then he’d write all this amazing copy in these catalogs and Elaine became one of the copywriters and had all these people and it became this huge spoof on multiple different seasons. What most of you guys probably don’t know is that the J. Peterman catalog is a real thing. It was a real thing and any old school direct response copywriters know and you study stuff like this.
The other day I was doing an interview, a podcast interview with some Ecom sellers and they’re asking, “How does this funnel stuff work for ecommerce people?” I was like, “You guys! Do you not know who J. Peterman is?” and they’re like, “That guy from Seinfeld?” and I’m like, “No! Are you serious?” You need to understand your roots, where did you come from? You are marketing and selling and you need to understand your roots. Understanding these roots, there’s so much gold just waiting there for you to take it.”
So anyone selling ecommerce or anyone selling anything. You need to understand who J. Peterman was. J. Peterman was a visionary, a genius, an amazing copywriter who built a huge company based on these catalogs. I went to eBay and searched for J. Peterman catalogs after that interview because I wanted to get some to show all you guys the foundation and history where this whole thing is coming from. And if you have a ecommerce site, this is a hint.
So here’s 4 J. Peterman catalogs, I got Dave and Steven here geeking out on them.
Dave: Geeking out big time, awesome stories.
Russell: So he doesn’t just say, give us an example of one real quick. Hold on. “Here is a blue shirt to sell” or “Here is …..” This is the best one? Do you want to read it in your marketing voice? This is, what is it? Slinky cord….a lot of you guys will have this on your ecom story, ecom funnel, “it’s ugly green pants and a white shirt.” So listen to the copy. On every single page in the Peterman catalog, just see why this company grew so big and what you guys should be doing to the copy on your ecom and Amazon lists and all sorts of stuff. So ready to read our order?
Dave: Absolutely. “A bedouin horseman chased you half way across the desert. (A beautiful woman on a camel in the desert alone is too ripe a target to dismiss.)
Your heart leaps in your throat again and again, an exquisite torment the Arabs, katu’l-kalb, or “heart cutting.”
Delirious, half dead you reach the emir’s palace. A Galla slave rears his horse in your path….you notice he is speaking in Peter O’Toole’s voice. Just then you awaken in the Royal Suite of the Lanesborough in London, “Lawrence of Arabia” blaring from the television set.
You rush back to sleep, Slinky Silk Cord Tank Top. And Slinky Silk Cord Pants. Not harem pants, but close. 100% flowing, loose silk. More romantic, more interesting than you remembered.”
Russell: Now that is how you sell something. That’s called good copy. You don’t put like brown, orange or yellow, add to cart. You sell your stuff. Every page of this catalog, they’re selling…they don’t even have pictures. It’s like painting of the pictures because this is pre-pictures, apparently. But every single one has amazing cpy to sell it. It would behoove most of you to go to eBay, I don’t know how many are still available, or even Google it. I’m sure you can find it online as well. But search for the J. Peterman catalog, the original ones. These one’s I bought here on eBay are from 1994. The older the better because stuff like this gets better with time.
Steven: The whole thing is a story in one line of description. Look at this.
Russell: So this is….Steven’s going to order this one. This is the Famous Miss Blue. The famous Miss Blue Hat. So if this was on the Shopify site, this would be one button, add to cart and this would be all they would get.
Steven: Yeah, basically. And a picture of it.
Russell: So what would J. Peterman do?
Steven: J. Peterman would say something like this, “You know who I mean. It could have been you. One day you arrived by train, but from where? Nobody knew.
You carved a plantation out of 1,000 acres of dry land which the smart money called worthless.
You diverted a stream and proved them wrong. You wore a big Panama hat, big like a man’s. but you didn’t look like a man. Sometimes you wore it held on with a chin strap, sometimes you wore it down your back.
You became rich, I guess. Anyway, you had a piano, I heard it. I saw you and those……” Anyway, it’s really cool. And at the end it goes, “I remember all that.” And it all kind of rhymes as you go through it. And it’s literally one line…”Made in Ecuador. Leather chin strap. Approx. 4-inch brim. Memorable. $40”
What? I want this hat now. It’s for a woman.
Russell: Alright so, what the lesson and moral for today that I want you to understand, is that copy is the king. It’s the key to everything. I told this on the Marketing Secrets podcast, a lot of you may not have heard this. But copywriting is not sexy, it’s not exciting. So when I wanted to teach copy…..in fact, if I call it copywriting guess what all of us do? We all fall asleep, our eyes glaze over. But if you read the expert secrets book, guess what that book is? It’s my contribution to copywriting. Teaching you how to tell stories, how to do it the right way. How to do epiphany bridges, how to tell kind of like bridges, how to position the offer. All those kind of things. It’s copy, it’s copywriting.
So that is the study that you guys gotta understand. Understand, wherever you’re coming at, some of you guys have been doing this business for years. 6 months, 5 years, 10 years. But there is people that have gone before us that have mastered this stuff. So the reason why I do good today is because I study the old timers. The old timers are the key, you guys. There’s so much of this stuff. If you have an ecommerce site and you want to do well, master J. Peterman. Buy his catalogs, read the copy, understand that.
If you want to understand how to do newletters, go read Gary Halvert letter. Go read, you know go back to the foundation where this stuff all began because that’s the key.
So anyway, there you go you guys. There’s our sneak attack episode of the J. Peterman catalog. If you liked this please share as much as you can. I’d like for more people to hear about it. But now you guys are all in on the secret. So understand that you guys. Copy is the key,it’s the secret. Next time you watch Seinfeld working at the J. Peterman catalog, now you’ll know the joke behind the joke. What she’s talking about and why it’s cool. All sorts of stuff like that.
So that’s all I got you guys. And if for some reason you’ve been living under a rock and you don’t have the Expert Secrets book yet, just go to expertsecrets.com because it is my contribution to copywriting. You know I always said I would never write a copywriting course or product because it’s not sexy or exciting and just not that cool. So I called it something different, but it’s copywriting, that’s what that message, that book is all about. Helping you understand how to write good copy, tell good stories, all those things tied together. So that’s what I got you guys, have an amazing day. I hope you guys had a good job. We will talk soon. Bye everybody.
Here is a recap of a 7 day internal launch that made over a million dollars and what we learned along the way.
On today's episode Russell gives the details of the 7 day launch strategy and what worked and what didn't. Here are some insightful things you will here on this episode:
So listen below to get a cool step by step guide into the 7 day launch.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the 7 day launch.
Hey everyone, this is Russell and welcome back to Marketing Secrets podcast. So today I’m going to be talking to you guys about this launch right here and the reason why, is my inner circle members keep asking me, “Hey Russell, can you please show us what happened behind the scenes of the 7 day launch?” They want the stats, numbers and details. So I thought I’m going to kill two birds with one stone. Because I wanted to talk about this on the podcast anyway. So this is for the inner circle members and for those of you who listen to the podcast, I hope you love it.
I’m not going to go deep into the numbers, I will just tell you that this launch in 7 days did over a million dollars in coaching sales, which is exciting, so it worked. I initially learned about this concept from one of my friends, Brendon Burchard. If you watch Funnel Hacker TV, the behind the scenes show, you will see some of the behind the scenes of us kind of going through this. He was in Las Vegas and I flew out there and there’s a whole episode on funnelhacker.tv where you’ll see me flying to Vegas, hanging out with Brendon and getting ideas on how he did this.
So I’m not going to go too deep into all the strategies, just because I know he is launching a course later on this year. I’m going to buy it, you should all buy it, we should all buy it, it’s going to be amazing. Going deep into the deep in the details and giving the swipe files and stuff like that, but if you were watching you probably saw it, first off. Second off, you probably got the swipe files just by getting my emails and stuff. So you’ve got some feedback, if you’ve been funnel hacking and watching, you’ve had a chance to see it.
Basically the way it worked is we did the book launch for the first 30 days, which built up a lot of pressure and excitement and we made a lot of book sales and upsells and everything else. At the end of it I wanted to do something cool. I wanted to figure out how, those who wanted to go deeper, how do I offer a coaching program that’s not me being, I didn’t want to feel like I was selling again because it’s just…..You know how it is, after a while people don’t want to keep being sold. I’d say it’s not like I wanted to sell a coaching program, to help people want to go to the next level with it, which is exciting. But then second off, I wanted to give and serve.
So when Brendon gave me this idea I loved it. So basically how 7 day launch works is, and those who saw it, basically what happened is Monday I started promoting it, Tuesday I did this long training. So if you’re watching the video you can see day 1 I basically did an episode from 11 until noon-ish, I can’t remember exactly how it all went. And module one was you becoming an expert.
What’s interesting is the book promo is all about Expert Secrets, but there was stuff like as soon as you read the book there’s this weird finality where it’s written and done and you can’t edit it or touch it again. And there were things as we’re selling it that I was like, “Oh…” during my interviews all these things kept coming up. There was stuff I wished I could share and there was pieces I wanted to just do.
So what’s cool, is giving the ability, because I don’t have to re-teach the book, because people have the book, but here’s a master class of what’s next. If you read the book and you’re like, “What’s the next piece? What is it?” So this one here I went really deep with you becoming an expert and finding your voice and it was just training and it was awesome.
So what we did is we emailed, so on Expertsecretsmasterclass.com, by the time there was a video, they embedded the live video from YouTube, people could watch and promote that through email. But then we also setup Facebook Live, I think there’s just those two platforms. So when we started this and clicked record, I came on and said, “Hey guys, we’re recording a course, it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to jump up here and start recording, be back in a minute.” Then we clicked go and it was like life. So I taught this entire thing, training. It was awesome.
Then during the breaks we had testimonial videos streaming of our coaching program of the FHAT event, The Funnel Hack A Thon event so people could keep seeing success stories. I took a break so I could go to the bathroom and reset. We came back and taught number two, which is creating an irresistible offer. And that was it for day. I think I was up there for 3 hours, it was awesome. When all was said and done, I think we had 20 or 30 thousand people watch it between YouTube and Facebook. Gave tons of good will and it was really, really cool.
A lot of people who, they’ve been stuck on these two pieces, I had a chance to go deeper on that and give them everything. So that was day number one. And then this is where it replayed for 24 hours and then it disappeared. People had the chance to watch it for 24 hours, and some did, and then it disappeared.
Then day two started. Day two I wanted to do the big domino, it went really deep to help people understand that. Then we had a break again, and then what I did at the latest session, actually did a webinar. Now, it’s a little different from Brendon, when he did his, basically at the end of day two is when he pushed people to a video sales letter, which sold a product. Me, I just did a webinar. One of the big things that was kind of interesting. When we created this offer, part of this training is really cool and desirable. A lot of people aren’t going to be able to watch it live, and you pull it down and you stage, because people actually want the content and the training.
At the end of this I’m not selling this as a course because it’d be hard to sell because people are like, “I missed part of it, I should have watched it!” and all these kind of things. So instead it’s like, if you join the coaching program you get all this course for free, and notice I didn’t say the recordings of this product. Because recordings seem really cheap. Getting this course, the Expert Secrets Master Class, the perceived value is way higher, it’s the course not the recordings.
If you watch the videos back I tried to say that, I think a couple of times I messed up and said recordings. I was trying to get it perfect. So that was here, and then what’s cool is that happened and sales started coming in for the coaching program. Because there was a webinar and they got to watch me do the webinar but then I was actually selling the coaching program on the webinar.
Now what’s happening, as soon as it was done, it’s funny because it’s the first time I’d ever done this webinar. We created it the night before, it was perfect webinar, hacked style. So it was one headline, three secrets, a board with things. I pitched two offers, which is usually a wrong thing to do and it was in this case too. We had 2,000 or 15,000, it was just complicated when you get to the stack. So sales did okay, but I was kind of honestly, when the camera shut off, I was sitting there kind of depressed. Dang, that did not feel right. They didn’t convert right. Some people bought but it wasn’t right. I was just like, dangit.
I was frustrated and that night I was kind of stressing out about it and realizing that. So then we made some tweaks and changes. And the cool thing is day three, I came back and broke down the campaign and showed them and went through the webinar again. And what’s cool about the second webinar, or the second training is because I was going through what I did and what worked and what didn’t work. I knew what hadn’t worked the first time. So I had this really cool opportunity to weave in different close, different stack, different things, to close the deal from the day before.
I’m going to talk about why this is so key here. Because I think I figured out something amazing. But after that section, sales started coming in like crazy. The second webinar where I broke down what I did here, but then use that, and hopefully you guys watched that, if not you missed it. But I was weaving in all these closes throughout it, it was kind of a cool thing. But I was just breaking down what we were actually doing.
Then we had a break and at the end I did a virtual book tour, which is kind of a bonus training of how we got traffic and then that was it. When that one ended, sales were coming in better than the day before. I was able to fix some of the things I had done wrong back here, which was good. But there was something wrong with the, there was something….it still wasn’t quite big so I was sitting there and I was kind of… I don’t know about you guys, but when you nail it I have all this energy afterwards. When I don’t I just feel this lack of energy. When we got done afterwards I was like, it was good but I still felt this lack of energy.
I felt this weirdness around this pricing strategy and if you look at pricing it was $2000 to do the online version, or $15000 to do the online plus come to Boise, plus get Fill Your Funnel and a bunch of other really cool things. And it was kind of, there was complexity in it. So we were talking about it, “Maybe we’ll open up a payment plan.” I hate payment plans and all those other sorts of stuff. Then I had this idea and I was like, “Wait a minute, what if instead of a payment plan, what if…” So this is the pricing strategy that turned this campaign from….at the end of day two we probably had $150,000 in sales to two days later we did over a million dollars in sales. What was the difference? This was the piece that was key, it was pricing.
So we shifted this, if you guys watched it, I came out and said, “Hey a lot of people are asking for a payment plan, unfortunately we don’t have a payment plan. But I did decide to turn this coaching program into a $300 a month one. So you come here, it’s $297 a month, or you can get lifetime access for $2000 or you can upgrade to the $15000 and com to Boise and get all this other stuff as well.
So what’s interesting, I know some of the guys on my team were nervous, “Oh no. If it goes $300 a month, everyone’s going to take that and it’s going to draw whatever…” What’s interesting is that we had people take that, but what it did was become almost like a decoy offer where it made everybody buy the $2000 offer, it’s crazy.
Tons of people bought, suddenly $2000 seemed cheap versus $300 a month and it was cool for 2 reasons. One, it got people to buy that. Number two it was cool because it got a whole bunch of people on a $300 a month coaching program as well, which is one of my goals this year. How do I create a $300 a month? To be honest Frank Kern has a $300 a month thing. Ryan STewman has a $300 a month thing. I was like, “I want a $300 a month training program.” So it kind of forced us to do that, but the cool side effect, it created this really cool thing where now $300 a month or lifetime access for $2000. So it was a huge discount there, which pushed everyone to the $2 grand.
When we had Neurocell, our supplement, it was kind of similar the way pricing was. We had one bottle, three bottles or four bottles. We had a pricing strategy where basically you had to be a moron to buy one bottle. Where if you had any brains at all you’d buy the four bottles. It was $80 a bottle, or it was $40 a bottle if you get three. It was crazy and it pushed everybody to where we actually wanted them. And by doing this it did that as well. It helped me do two goals.
One was to help me build up a $300 a month coaching program, number two it pushed people to what I actually wanted them to do, which was the $2000, which was really cool.
Now it’s been fun because people are going through there and the training for those who are going through it, it’s super in depth and intense and crazy and amazing. It’s getting me excited to watch what people are doing. So that was some of the break down. Basically the last 3 days were urgency and scarcity and that’s what pushed it over the million dollar mark.
That’s, by the way, a million dollars collected. A lot of people use, can I say this publicly? The company basically went bankrupt, so I can. There’s a thing we in the industry call stomper math. In stomper math, there’s a company called stomper net and they used to do launched and they’d be like, “We did 18 million dollars.” But it was not collected, it was if all the payment plans go through for the next 5 years then they would have made 18 million or something like that. I hate that. Stomper math, this was like a 10 million dollar launch. But in real math, not common core, but real math, we collected a million dollars. So after we rebuild stuff we’ll be higher. Anyway, I thought it was cool.
Urgency and scarcity from this point forward, and again, the offer was basically the thing that I wanted to sell wrapped in with the recordings of this, excuse me not the recordings. I said a curse word. You get the Expert Secrets Master Class course for free as well.
So that’s kind of it. So those who were in the Two Comma Club coaching program, all the recordings of this are in the members area. So you can go back and watch them. I highly recommend at least watching these first three. These first three were probably some of the best presentations I’ve ever given, ever. I’m really proud of them and it will help you implement. The first three for those of you who are listening are The You in Expert, Create Your Digital Offer, and The Big Domino. There was something about the training, the way it worked. This training is just, I’m really proud of them, they turned out amazing.
Anyway, we probably will be trying to evergreen this funnel in the near future, I’m not sure exactly how to do it yet. But in the future if you go to expertsecretsmasterclass.com, it may be there, the evergreen version where basically you opt in and we have a 24 hour countdown and it disappears after 24 hours. I don’t know, I haven’t figured that part out yet. We may or may not try that in the future. But yeah, that was kind of a breakdown of how the campaign worked and it was a lot of fun.
Tons of reciprocity, tons of goodwill, a lot of people weren’t able to buy, they still got tons of stuff from that. And what’s been interesting in my business, as I’ve been watching this, the more I give away, it’s people have success with the free stuff, in fact Dan Henry is one person who said this specifically. A bunch of other people said, I feel like I owe you because I’ve made so much money from all the free stuff. Dan, I remember when he joined the inner circle, he’s like, “I feel like I owe you $25 grand for all you already gave me. So I’m just going to give it to you so I can be in your inner circle, but I feel like I owe it to you anyway.”
And that’s what I want to do. I want to give people such good stuff, they can run with it and have success. So much so that in the future they’re like, “Man, I need to buy all Russell’s stuff, because I feel like I owe it to him.” So it’s kind of a good spot to be in. That’s what I’m trying to focus a lot more on.
That’s kind of how the whole thing worked, it was really fun and enjoyable. The big key takeaways are number one, just giving and building this huge reciprocity streaming this huge, live streaming to YouTube and to Facebook. I think when all was said and done it was like a quarter of a million people that had seen parts of this training. It might have been more than that. It was amazing.
Having an offer, a really good offer with a really good pricing strategy behind it, when Brendon comes out with his course later this year, hopefully he’ll….he’ll probably use this process to launch it. But watch how he structures his offers. I think that’s the key of it. What he does, he’ll do this whole training and be like, “Hey expert academy, my $1000 course, I’ll give you a 50% discount, so you get $500, plus you get this for free.” It’s all about creating an irresistible, amazing offer. It took us a couple of tries and while this thing was happening, tweaking our offer before it got right.
That’s another thing you’ve got to understand is that we’re tweaking offers in the, as they’re happening. In the middle we’ll be like, “Ah, it’s not working. It’s not converting. Change it, tweak it.” If your thing’s not converting, change the offer, don’t like, “Ah it didn’t work.” If you would have seen the behind the scenes, and I think we probably filmed some behind the scenes of that from the behind the scenes Funnel Hacker TV show.
But we’re shifting and changing and modifying things on the fly because it’s happening in real time and it’s kind of crazy. Anyway, this was a really cool thing to kind of end the launch with. You know it added an extra million dollars to the bottom line, which was cool. It helped us figure out the pricing strategy for long term when we do evergreen-ness. How to actually sell the coaching, what the right messaging…Forcing myself to do a webinar live, helped me figure out what was wrong with my webinar hook. Then having me do a webinar where I recap the whole thing gave me another deep ability to fix the things and know what to do when I make this thing an auto webinar and sell it as a coaching program in the future.
And this is the other thing I learned that was awesome. When you do a webinar, and maybe this only works in my market, I’m not sure. Or like a business market. But doing a webinar and then the next day showing them what you did. The second webinar made us more money than the first. So one cool thing I’m going to start doing is, I think with some of my webinars is if somebody registers be like, “Hey, if you watch to the end, what I’m going to do is send an email with a break down where I’m going to show you behind the scenes. I’m going to show you the webinar funnel, what we did. I’m going to let you funnel hack what I just did. I’ll give you the share funnels, the emails. But you have to watch the webinar to be able to get access to that.” And it should force people to consume the webinar, which will create sales and things like that.
That was a cool thing, doing a double webinar. We did that back in the day. 8 or 9 years ago we used to double things like that. We’d do one and one right after. I forgot about them and it was, I think there’s a correlation here, doing a double webinar and the second webinar is showing something, but just keeps closing sales. But it’s a different presentation. I’ll test with that and let you guys know what we figure out.
Figuring out your pricing strategy was big. There’s so many cool lessons from it. Hopefully you guys watched it and experienced it. You had a chance to see behind the scenes of the numbers and metrics, the big takeaways and aha’s we learned along the way. Anyway, it was pretty awesome.
Hopefully I’ll see you guys. Thank you again for listening to Marketing Secrets podcast. If you are not on iTunes, please search on iTunes, leave me some feedback and listen to it there. Because on iTunes, it’s cool because it’s not just, I think this is episode 5 or 6 or whatever we’re on Marketing Secrets, but on iTunes you get access to all of the back episodes, like 350 episodes from when I was running the Marketing Secrets show under a different name. It was called Marketing In Your Car. I highly, highly recommend you guys going back and binge listening to all of those because they are good and they are worth it.
A lot of our biggest success stories people have a chance to binge through everything. Watch the video here if you’re watching on YouTube, but go to iTunes and subscribe go binge listen to everything. Catch up with us. You can be hanging out with all these things and all this stuff will make a lot more sense to you. Anyway, that was it for the 7 day launch. I hope you guys enjoyed that and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.
The dream 100 isn’t just for JV partners… it’s the key to ALL traffic.
On this episode of Marketing Secrets Russell talks about immersing himself in SEO stuff over the weekend and how that has got him thinking about getting creative about getting traffic. Here are some of the cool things he mentions in this episode:
So listen below to hear how to do SEO the right way using the Dream 100.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. I’m here in my house today about to head out to my son’s kindergarten graduation which is pretty excited. It was cute, we were talking about it last night and he was like, “What’s graduation mean?” so we had to kind of explain that.
But I’m super excited. We’re heading out and so many cool things, but the one downside to doing a podcast where it’s also a video, so those who are listening on iTunes, you go to marketingsecrets.com there’s also a video version of these. I used to do them on my phone all the time, which is a lot easier and I could do it more often. So I had a bunch of things on my mind that I wanted to share with you guys, that I have had a chance to til right now. So I had a few minutes and wanted to kind of just hang out with all my marketing secrets people.
So a couple things, one is if you listened to last week’s episode, or the last episode I did, it talked about faith. You have to have faith first in a mentor, business, products, all those kind of things. Because otherwise everyone would do it, it takes away all the joy and excitement and the fun and all those things disappear. There’s a book, a lot of my Mormon friends know. It’s called Faith Proceeds a Miracle. Without getting into the content of the book, just the title was right. Think about that. Faith proceeds a miracle, you want a miracle, launch a business, change the world, whatever. It starts with faith. Faith in yourself, the process, in it all. I’ll leave that there.
So today what I want to talk about, if you listened to me talk recently I’ve been talking about how transitions going from zero to a million dollars a year, a million to ten, and ten to a hundred and it’s interesting, the different mindset tweaks and the creativity switch. To go from zero to a million is all about figuring out your what and how. What is it you’re selling and how are you going to sell it. Once you figure that out it’s easy to get to a million bucks.
Then a million to ten is all about figuring out acquisition funnels to get people in, ascension funnels to ascend people up and monetization funnels, and that’s the next phase in the process. The third phase is traffic, like how to convert cold traffic and more traffic, things like that. And our job as entrepreneurs is to shift our creativity from figuring out the what and how, as soon as you figure that out it’s transitioning our creativity to the front end and back in ascension funnels. After you figure that out and get those in place, it’s transitioning to our creativity in traffic and lead generation.
So what’s cool is that in our company, the first two phases are done, and it’s fun because the Two Comma Club coaching, which we launched a couple of months ago, is all about focus and getting people from zero to a million, the what and the how. And then the inner circle is about the second phase, which is going from 7 to 8 figures, which is all about figuring out the acquisition, ascension and monetization funnels.
And the next phase is where my next group of people, I’m thinking about opening another group, called the inner, inner circle. I don’t know what it is. It will be really, really, obviously a lot more expensive, but the goal of that one is going to be traffic, and creativity in traffic, because that’s what we’re doing right now, it’s my focus. Thinking about this. All weekend long, I started geeking out on SEO again, which I swore I would never do, I hated SEO. But as I started thinking about this, SEO, I’ve had times in our company where we were ranked number one for work at home, and internet marketing, internet marketing strategy and all these other cool key words.
But we did it the gray hat way, shades of gray…I don’t know. There’s black hat stuff that we didn’t really do, there’s gray hat that we definitely did, and then there’s white hat that’s too annoying and takes too long. But this weekend I started re geeking out on it and thinking about it. And looking at the white hat strategies, I always hate them because they seem so slow and organic, like SEO is supposed to be. But then I realized that it doesn’t have to be slow and organic, it just has to, you get the right things to the right people.
And it’s funny because I was geeking out and studying and learning and all this stuff, and I had this weird impression that I was just, the way to rank in SEO, it’s the same principle. We talk about this inside the Fill Your Funnel Course, I talk about it in Expert Secrets. I talk about it over and over again, it’s the concept of the Dream 100. The Dream 100 is key. Chet Holmes, who I learned it for, used that to sell advertizing in magazines. And also he used it to get his screen play written and published by Hollywood.
I’ve used it to generate affiliates. But the Dream 100 is also the key to SEO ranking, it’s also the key to Instagram influencers and it’s the key to YouTube, all these traffic strategies in Dream 100 are the key. Some of you guys are like, “Russell, no it’s not. It’s all about whatever….back linking, keywords.” But think about it. We hired Neil Patel to come do a training with us. We paid him $20 grand to come hang out for the day and kind of just look at our stuff and give us feedback on the SEO side. He said basically, “Blog every single day, you need to get links from the best sites, like Forbes and Ink and things like that.”
And the data service was $20-30 grand a month, but they get you some links from these high quality sites. And at first it was magic to me. I don’t know how to get a link from Forbes, that doesn’t make sense. Then we started working with Andrew O’Brien, who does our PR stuff, and that’s what he was doing. Getting links from all these sites. We’ve been written in Forbes a couple times now, and Entrepreneur and Ink and we’re getting these links back and we’re seeing rankings.
And what’s interesting though, I’ve been interviewed by all these different writers and sites, and I realized, they’re just people, just like all of us. And the Dream 100 works on people. So let’s just say I wanted to get ranked for whatever, instead of me going back and doing it all black hat link building and all that crap we used to back in the day that was really fun and automated, it was really fun. Not going to lie. But instead of that, what if you just build. Here’s the Dream 100 list on people’s site, that I want to write an article about me or let’s say you go to Huffington Post, here’s the Dream 100.
Because Huffington Post, Fox news, all these have tons of writers, so make your Dream 100 list of the writers who write those sites, and we focus on the Dream 100 towards them. To get them to write about us. Let’s say there’s a hundred writers, I do the Dream 100 strategy to the top 10, or 20. Doesn’t have to be 100 people. But the top 20 writers on Huffington Post or Forbes or whatever and we market to those people and those relationships with those people and all the stuff we talk about in the Dream 100 and I get those people to write articles. Now let’s say I get 10, 20, 30 articles written from Forbes, Ink, Entrepreneur, that will rank me for most major keywords. Who are the sites that are already ranking for our key words. Dream 100 those people and figure out how to get on those pages.
I don’t know what It’s called, but let’s say you type in internet marketing, I might not be able to get ranked number one in internet marketing, but who are those top 10 people, but let’s Dream 100 those people and become friends with them and maybe I can get a banner up on their site or a pop up, or email number one in their email sequence. You know a million other things. There’s so many ways to do it. The dream 100 is the key. It’s interesting.
It’s key there, in YouTube, let’s say you want to dominate YouTube. Okay, who’s my dream 100 there that already have visitors and eyeballs and what can I do to get to them. A good example, JP Sears, who I love his videos. He’s one of our Dream 100. We met him and paid him a little money to come to our event, made a video with him, and he shared that video we made of him telling his thing on his page and got a half a million views. Half a million people from one person on my Dream 100. On a Facebook and YouTube channel, that’s it.
It makes you think, it works everywhere. Instagram, I want to dominate Istagram, Twitter, wherever you’re at, who are the people that are already dominating? Dream 100 them, build relationships, rapport, buy ads, all those things. So we have a traffic meeting a little later on today and this is the topic of the traffic meeting, within my internal team, Dream 100. And we’re going to be doing SEO and YouTube are our two biggest. And basically YouTube is because we’re trying to….SEO started because we were trying to do better on SEO on our videos and then I kind of geeked out all weekend on it.
I don’t know about you but I’m a big fan of immersion. This is kind of my learning style. I’ll get excited about learning something and I’ll go deep really fast and don’t sleep for 3 or 4 days, which is what I did this week on SEO. I studied all the best people, going deep and trying to figure out what’s relevant, what’s not, how it changed, what’s the game, what are the tools, trying to get really cool pitch. That’s number one, immersion, number two for me is finding a mentor, so I found 2 or 3 people that are really good at SEO that are going to be mentoring me. That’s the game. Immersion, mentorship, domination, Dream 100.
So for you guys, some of you guys aren’t going to care about SEO or Instagram or whatever it is, but think about the channel you want to dominate and that’s the plan. Build a Dream 100 list, immerse yourself for a weekend and just geek out and figure out the strategy, get the lay of the land, find a mentor or two, and go deep.
So those who are in our Fill Your Funnel course, by the way, this is what you’re getting access to. This first month, we already know Facebook, I think as good if not better than anybody, so John who is my partner on, he’s going to be, he’s doing all the Facebook training, so that’s this first module. Then module two we’re going deep into YouTube, which will be next month. We’ll go and geek out on it. Then the next, my guess the month after, will be SEO because I’m kind of geeking out on it. Whatever I’m geeking out on at the time is what we’ll be bringing all the Fill Your Funnel people in on too. So it’s exciting.
So those that got on Fill Your Funnel at the Funnel Hacking Live event, you’re welcome. It’s going to be so much fun. Those who aren’t, we’ll probably open that up in the next month or two for those who haven’t. I want you guys all thinking about this. Get your creativity, how can we get creative to get traffic? What are the different ways? You will notice over the next three months, three months there’s two big focuses that I have in my company. Number one is acquisition and number two is retention. So we have a really cool retention strategy we’re building out that has to do with nude squirrels. That’s all you get right now, it’s awesome.
And then acquisition, you’re going to see a whole bunch of stuff from infomercials to viral websites, to viral videos, to social. I hope you guys are watching what I’m doing, because there’s a lot of cool stuff happening. It’s interesting, I was telling my team this yesterday, a lot of the strategy we’re doing now are things we did ten years ago that nobody does anymore. Since I’ve been around that long, I remember it. I remember we had success with it. These viral sites we used to do back in the day. I could get 100 thousand, 200 thousand members in 2 or 3 weeks and they’re amazing. And we’re going to do it again. You guys are going to love. So you will see it, but watch it, model it. Because this is Russell focusing my creativity on traffic and what’s going to happen.
So if you’re watching close and taking notes you’ll see what’s happening. Because right now Clickfunnels is 750th most business website in the world, and it’s actually way more than that, but if you’re using custom domains then obviously it doesn’t count towards traffic. That’s just people, it’s us driving traffic with Clickfunnels and people using Clickfunnels in their sub domain. I would say if we were to take all traffic coming through Clickfunnels, we’re probably in the top 300 most business websites in the world.
We’re about to turn up the heat a lot. It’s exciting. That’s all I got for you guys today. I just want you guys thinking about this traffic creativity. How do you focus your creativity on traffic. If you don’t know how to do that, just watch me and model what I’m doing over the next few months. You’ll see a lot of it hitting hard in the next three months, that’s my next phase. Anyway, that’s what I got you guys, appreciate you all. If you are listening on iTunes, please leave me a review, I would appreciate it. Even if your review is Russell talks too fast, that’s cool. But please leave a review. If you are on marketingsecrets.com watching this video anywhere else, please share the video it helps me to keep wanting to do these and spending time with you guys. Appreciate you all, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.
Without this, what's the point of even trying?
On today's episode Russell talks about why you have to have faith in yourself first in order to be a true entrepreneur because nothing is guaranteed. Here are some of the interesting things in this episode:
So listen below to find out why it's so important to take a leap of faith.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. If you are watching this at marketingsecrets.com, you can go watch the video of me showing you something cool, if you’re just listening on iTunes, that’s cool too. But if you go to marketingsecrets.com you can actually see what I’m going to show you guys.
Last week I did a podcast, or a couple of days ago, about planting seeds of doubt. I got all these people messaging me, “Russell, you’re so mean.” I was like I’m not trying to be mean with this. I’m trying to explain a really important marketing principle. So I want to show you guys something to prove this whole thing works. A lot of you guys know Steve Larsen, he sits next to me everyday building funnels. When he first started working for me, at the time I had a water filter machine, it was an Athena that we paid $3 grand for. I always loved it because it was this really cool thing, it filtered our water and did all this cool stuff.
Then he told me, “Well, if you’re using that brand, it actually doesn’t work, there’s only one brand that is any good.” And it’s the company he used to work for called Echo. I was like, “Really, why?” and he’s like, “They have this patent. Most water machines, the way they filter, after 5 or 6 filters it builds up all this residue and it starts working. This company has a patent where what they do, every time you turn it on, it pushes through and breaks off the stuff, so it keeps working.
Now I have no idea if that’s true. He may have made it up for all I know. But he planted a seed of doubt, and that seed of doubt became so big that my Athena water machine that I loved, in fact my kids called it magic water. Every single day we used to go and make magic water out of it. It is now sitting, as you see here, in my garage, in this big pile of water. We ripped it out of the wall, I actually cut the plug because it was hard to get to. It’s just sitting there now, I don’t know if it works. I have a seed of doubt.
Then I was going to get a Kong and he’s like, “And he’s like Kong can’t do it either. These guys are the only ones in the world that have a patent.” So because of that, guess what I have right over here. You’ll never guess. Yes, it is one of the Echo machines. Sorry it’s kind of a mess here in the laundry where we have it. Because my wife doesn’t think these look very good, and they are kind of ugly. But now, I come here and this is where I get all my water from, it’s the Echo machine.
Now again, I have no idea if it actually is better, could be worse for all I know. But he placed a seed of doubt that caused me to rip my old machine out and put a new one in and not go with other competitors. So the marketing principle is true, whether you’re doing that yourself or through other people. How can you place a seed of doubt. So there’s a follow up for yesterday for those who think I was mean. I’m not being mean guys, I’m just teaching good marketing principles. So that’s what I got.
Now I got one more thing I want to share with you guys. Because this is important and I think a lot of people struggle with this. It’s having faith before you take action. Entrepreneurs, for you to be successful, you have to have faith first. You don’t know that your product or service is going to work. If you had that guarantee, then everybody would do it. It’d be like, I’m guaranteed, in fact that’s why people go to school because they’re like, “I’m guaranteed to get a job.” Turns out you’re not, at least not a good job. But people, because they guarantee it, they do it.
Entrepreneurs should be about not guaranteeing. You have to have an idea and then you have to have faith in yourself. If you don’t have faith in yourself, then you’re not going to do it, and then you’re not going to have success, and then it all disappears. It all hinges on faith. It’s weird, I don’t know if you guys are religious or not, it doesn’t really matter to me for this thing, but religion’s the same way. We get the, we have to have faith first and we take that step forward and then the truth is manifested back to us. Like, “Oh, that thing you did was actually right.” But if you knew ahead of time, what’s the point? There’s no challenge, this whole life becomes really boring if there’s no faith. If you knew the answer to everything before you went into it, why would it seem to be fun, it wouldn’t. We’d be bored out of our minds.
I’m telling you this because I had a funny experience today that I wanted to illustrate becusae it kind of illustrates this, why a lot of people struggle because they don’t have faith first. They’re waiting for the perfect answer before they move. So there’s this guy, I’m not going to mention his name, he’s a cool. But three or four times over the last two years, he’s messaged me asking about my inner circle and he’s always like, “I’m going to join man.” And I’m like, “Cool, here’s where you apply.” And he’s like, “I have some questions first.” And he always asks a bunch of questions, he never applies. And this happened I think at least 3 maybe even 4 times in the last 2 years. I’m always like, “hey man, go to inner circle where I can work with you. I do my best coaching almost a million entrepreneurs, but I can’t talk to every person individually. I wish I could but I can’t.” I have a hundred people in inner circle that I’m voxing every single day on my phone, trying to keep up with them as well as running my own company and my family and my church and the scout group and everything else I’m doing. It’s insane.
I can’t help everybody, I wish I could. But the people I can help, they’re in the inner circle, that’s just how it works. So get in the inner circle and I can work deeper in your stuff. So he messaged me today, it’s kind of funny. He said, “Whatcha think?” and he showed me his funnel, “compliments of Clickfunnels.” And I was like, “Cool man, you got it done. It looks great.” And he said, “The problem is,” this is the best, “The problem is I can’t get it to sell for the life of me, when people try it, they’re hooked. But getting people to buy it out of the gate, no bueno.”
So I went back and decided to look a little closer. I kind of smiled, and I sent it to Steven Larsen as well, “Hey, what do you think about this funnel? I want to know in 3 seconds.” And in 3 seconds he was like boom, boom, boom. I was like, “Exactly, the very same one’s I saw as well.” And I was like, I could just tell him, but then he didn’t, he missed the whole point. So I came back and I said, I was trying to help him out. I was like, “I won’t give you the answer, because you didn’t join the Inner Circle the 3 times you asked me about it. Ha ha! But here’s a hint.” Then I gave him a link to a certain funnel and said, “The answer’s in this funnel.” And it is, everything he’s looking for is in that funnel. I mean it was a huge heads up, hopefully. We’ll see if he runs with it or not.
But I sent that and just kind of said it that way and he said, “Was my video wrong?” asked me if it was the video, “It’s not the video.” Although his video could use some help. He said, “The reason I didn’t join was because I didn’t think the Inner Circle could help me with my specific problem with …” and he named his product, “I didn’t want to just throw $25K at the wall, not knowing.” So I got that and started laughing. I laughed out loud and I read it to Steven and he laughed because first off, the inner circle is all about personalizing your problem. What is your problem? And you message me and I tell you the answer. So it’s the most personalized coaching program on planet earth for our industry.
So I don’t think it would help my specific problem, and I didn’t want to throw $25k at the wall, not knowing. So I didn’t want to have faith and just assume that you know what you’re talking about, seeing as you’ve helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, and you have all these people that pay you $25k a year and they renew every single year, because you keep helping them. 10 or so are all supplement companies, I didn’t know, I’m not going to pay you.
And then he said this, “After looking at “blank” if you have some big ideas on how to blow it up, you know the $25k would be chump change for investing in your help, then obviously that’s a no brainer.” So if I can come to him and say, “Hey man, I know exactly what it is. Give me $25k and I’ll tell you these things and I guarantee you’ll make more than that. Then he will do it. Then he will take a leap of faith when there’s no leap of faith to be made.
I’m just like, my goal was not to sell you on inner circle, my goal is not to tell you I know the secret, give me $25k and I’ll tell you. You missed the whole point. The goal, the point is that you have to have faith first. You have to….the mentors I have hired in my life, I didn’t know if they were going to be good. I looked at them, tried to do my research, saw other people they worked with and was just like, “Okay, I don’t know but I’m going to have faith and I’m going to take this step forward.” And then when you do it, you get rewarded for it.
Then I wrote back, “Sorry man, the inner circle is closed for now anyway, but the answer is in that funnel.” So hopefully he finds it. It’s there for him and again I don’t want to be a jerk. But I get so many people hitting me up, I can’t. If I could help them for free, I would because it’s so much fun. But it’s just interesting how people don’t want to take that faith. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to understand that’s the game, the whole entire thing. You have to have faith first, faith in your idea, the product, the process, the coaches, the mentors, all these different things. And you’re not going to know ahead of time. If you did, it’s not entrepreneurship, if you did, it’s no fun.
If somebody came to you and said, “This is the exact product and sales message.” Everything like that, and you did it and it worked, it’s like gambling. It’s cheating. It doesn’t count. It’s not real. It comes from the excitement and thrill, fun, and satisfaction. Everything comes from the success of it.
I remember when I started wrestling, another friend that wrestled, we both started at the same time. It was interesting because after a year he quit, I didn’t. Within three years I won the state title. I remember after I won the state title, he told me, “Oh man, I could have won the state title too, but I just didn’t want to put in the effort.” And I was like, “Are you kidding me? You don’t know what I went through the last three years to get that, to earn that.” If I would have known up front, I was guaranteed to get the state title, it would not have been any fun. I would have been like, “Oh, what’s the point then? If I’m guaranteed to get a state title if I do it, then why would I even do it?” You know what I mean?
The not knowing is what makes it great. The fear of failure is what makes the success so great. If you don’t have that, can you imagine what life would be like? Can you imagine how boring it would be? Every single day you wake and know there’s no chance of failure, so you just….I can’t even imagine. I would……
So my message for you guys today, as entrepreneurs, is that you have to understand that it takes the faith first. You have the faith to take the step and then you’re rewarded. Sometimes we put our faith in the wrong things, which is understandable, and we fall off something and it doesn’t work, or we hire someone and they don’t work out. But you shouldn’t lose faith in all things. You may have got the wrong mentor, the wrong person. But keep putting faith in, people, ideas, products because one of them will work. They don’t all work, and that’s okay. But they will if you do that first.
Anyway, you gotta have faith, as George Michael would say. That’s all I got you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and we’ll see you guys tomorrow. Bye everybody.
A cool underground way to overcome your competitors.
On today's episode Russell talks about planting seeds of doubt about his competitors in the minds of potential customers.He explains how he does it, and why it makes it not a matter of if they become Clickfunnels customers, but when. Here are some interesting things in this episode:
So listen below to learn how to plant seeds of doubt about your competitors so you can eventually win over the customer.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell, welcome to Marketing Secrets. Today, I got a really cool episode for you guys, I think, hopefully. It’s something that, there’s a lot of things that we’re doing that people can see and they’re aware of. And there’s things happening that people aren’t aware of. So I just to lift the curtain a little bit, so you guys can see my ideas.
Part of the time you’re selling to try to sell your products and services. You’re selling why it’s good and why it’s amazing and stuff like that. It’s funny, on Facebook I saw an interesting thread the other day of someone being like, “Should I attack my competitors, or should I not talk about them at all?” And it’s one of those things that it’s interesting watching the whole conversation because some people are like, “Don’t address your customers. If you’ve got the best product don’t talk about them.” And all these different things and strategies and obviously you guys know that I talk about my competitors and we tease and poke at them and have fun with it.
In fact, earlier today Steven may or may not have launched a new video game where you can actually compete against, you have to defeat Confusion Soft to be able to fight against Low Key Pages and the Drip Armies. It’s pretty awesome. Why would we do something like that?
It’s interesting, first off it’s funny and that helps me get through the day because there’s a lot of stuff we’ve got to do, so you might as well make the day fun. Second off, if you look at marketing as a whole, marketing strategy, because this is a big deal. But if you think about it, and there’s been a bunch of books written on this, so if you want to study deeper, you should because it’s interesting. But I think Differentiate or Die is one of the books that talked about this, I believe. But what they talk about is in your marketplace, that number two always needs to attack number one.
So Pepsi always attacks Coke. But number one cannot acknowledge number two or else it jacks up the whole thing. So Coke never talks about how to beat Pepsi. Have you ever noticed that? But Pepsi is always talking about Coke. Mac versus PC, when they first came out. Mac was number two and they were attacking PC, all the funny commercials we all remember. As soon as they surpassed, notice those commercials disappeared and they stopped talking about it.
So there’s something about that, and maybe it’s the athlete in me, I’m a big believer in if I’m going to beat somebody I need to find that person, identify them, and let the world know this is who we’re going after and this is who we’re going to beat. And then after we pass them and then we stop talking about it. That’s why we don’t talk about Low Key pages very often anymore, because we passed them, as you guys know. But Infusion Soft is obviously the next target that we’re trying to get bigger than.
We have more customers right now, but I think their revenue is higher right now. Because they charge more for their confusing software. But that’s another story so that’s the thing. So for me, I don’t mind acknowledging number one, because we are gaining on them, that’s the plan, that’s how it works. So I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t think its…..it’s just how business is done, it’s how sports are done, it’s how athletics are done. In fact, if you guys want something fun, scroll down the feed, back before we changed the name of this to Marketing Secrets. When it was Marketing In Your Car, I did a whole episode on athletes and competition. It was pretty funny, I thought. So you guys should go listen to that.
But I talk about the fact that in this business world, who are you competing against? People that you’re competing against? I talk about, I was a wrestler growing up, so my whole life was competition. Who’s the person ahead of me. Literally, my junior year, my first match I lost to a kid that was returning state champ. So I knew that’s who he is, so I studied everything he did for the entire season. We practiced against him, we got better and better and I actually made it to state finals and I beat him.
And that’s the athletic mentality. We’re all about competition. And then in the business world, half the people getting into business don’t have athletic background. They were in Band or choir, things like that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you’re in the choir there’s no competition. You’re just hanging out and singing with each other. Maybe there’s competition like first seat or second seat, a little bit but it’s different. A lot of times, we get in this playground and we’re now competing in business and you’ve got people that were in band and choir and all sorts of things and then you’ve got someone like me who’s entire life was about finding your competitor and destroying him publically in front of everybody so you can get your hand raised and everybody cheers for you. You have to be aware, that’s who you’re competing against. So you can’t be mad, “Oh they’re calling me out by name. They’re competing with me.”
It’s like, “Dude, you’re competing against a wrestler who’s whole entire life, that’s all he cared about. Of course that’s going to be my goal, that’s how I’m going to go.
Anyway, there’s a whole podcast about it. There’s some background about what we’re talking about. But what I wanted to talk to you guys about, is this concept that we call seeds of doubt. What are seeds of doubt? These are things that if you watch what I do you’ll see me placing all the time, these little seeds of doubt in the competitors. Because I know a lot of times I’m going to talk about something and I know that somebody is using confusion soft, or their using Lead pages or whatever the thing is and they’re using something else and I’m coming in and they’re looking at me like, “We have all our stuff over here, I can’t shift over.”
So I understand that, so instead of me just trying to convince them, hard sell them, I’m just going to place a whole bunch of seeds of doubt. From that moment forward for the rest of their waking hours, and hopefully their sleeping hours too, if I did it right. They’re going to be thinking about that thing, that seed of doubt, about the thing that they’re using. And it’s always kind of running in their head like, “What if, what if, what if.”
If you were at Funnel Hacking Live, I did a whole presentation. In fact, if you go to followupfunnels.com you can see that presentation. But I talked about Actionetics and where we’re going, and stuff like that. And throughout that presentation, I’m placing a whole bunch of seeds of doubt of our competitors. I talk about if you’re using email marketing, I talk about how many times I got shut down by Awebber, Icontent, Mailchimp, InfusionSoft, all those things. And even if you love those systems, all the sudden now you’re like, “Wow, Russell has been shut down 9 times by Awebber.” All these things I got shut down by. All those seeds of doubt, like, “Everything is good, but what if they did shut me down.” Now that seed of doubt is there and now you’re paranoid. Now the whole time you’re using your thing, You’re wondering, “What if I get shut down? What if I get shut down?” Most of you guys probably will at some point, it’s not like I’m doing this maliciously, it’s the truth.
It happened to me over and over again, but I’m placing that seed of doubt so people are aware of it. I just purchased a product from somebody who was using an Infusion Soft order form, and I filled out my whole credit card information and it took me 7 steps. 7 steps after the credit card was in, 7 clicks, sorry, 7 clicks to give them the money. I wanted them to take my money, but it took 7 more clicks to actually give them money. I was annoyed by that, but instead of being annoyed by it, I talked about it. I’m talking about it right now, by the way. I’m talking about it in different platforms I’m on. I’ve just mentioned, “I tried to buy this thing from somebody who used an Infusion Soft order form. 7 clicks, most people would have left. If I didn’t want the product so bad, I would have left.”
Every click in your sales process, you lose a percentage of people. So my whole mindset is how do we shorten the distance. I want to make sure there’s as few clicks as possible to get someone from where they’re starting to where I want them to end. Because every click you lose somebody. Just after, between me getting the credit card, typing it in and submitting, there were 7 clicks. So that’s what you’re getting when you’re using Infusion Soft.
So I just placed a seed of doubt because you’re like, “How many clicks are in my order form? Crap. Well, that’s the standard. You have to when I’m using that system.” And then you start wondering, “This whole time, what if I’m losing sales and money?” and that thought will keep pecking away at your mind. Keep thinking and keep sitting there and the seed of doubt, eventually will sprout to the point where you’re like, “I’m losing a lot of money. It’s time to make the shift, to do the right thing.”
That’s my whole goal. Because I know not everyone’s going to sign up today, but they’re going to sign up eventually. I always tell everybody, it’s not a matter of if you’re going to become a member of Clickfunnels, it’s when. My goal is like, it’s not right now, I need to place the seeds of doubt so that throughout your system, you’re always thinking about me coming and doing that thing, and when is it going to happen and how is it going to happen and things like that?
That’s kind of the concept of seeds of doubt. So as you’re doing your marketing, again it’s not just like, I know some of you guys will be like, “Russell, where do I pace my seed of doubt.” No, it’s not like…..it’s like you’re sprinkling that in as you’re doing stuff, Snap Chat, Instagram, your podcast or videos. Whatever it is, wherever you’re at, you’re just sprinkling your seeds of doubt against your competitors and making those things known. So people aware, like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that was a thing.” I want to make sure those things are out there and people are aware of them.
So that’s the concept and it’s a really good thing. In fact, in wrestling we would do the same kind of things with our opponents. We’d go to a tournament and during weigh ins you’d see who were in your weight class and stuff and it’s always kind of a mental game because you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, that guy looks bigger than me.” All those kind of things, so it’s like, how do you place seeds of doubt? A lot of times it has to do with your confidence, like how you shake the person’s hand. All those kind of things because in sports, and business and most things, honestly, it’s a lot less of the physical, and a lot more of the mental.
It’s funny, when I started doing Jui Jitsu, I’m not a Jui Jitsu guy, I’m a wrestler, and I started doing Jui Jitsu. And it’s funny because I think it was my 2nd or 3rd tournament I went to, I went out and I’m up a weight class, because I was kind of overweight at the time, so I’m up at almost heavy weights, so these are big dudes that I’m going against. Most of them did Jui Jitsu for a couple of years and their blue belts and I think it’s brown after that, whatever. I’m just, I just came in, didn’t have any belt at all, no gi, you don’t actually have to have a belt.
So I came out there, so when I went out there I was like, these guys are going to kill me. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I was like, because of that, I have to place seeds of doubt in their mind that they’re going to be able to beat me fast, otherwise I’m going to be choked out and tapped out really quick. So what I did, is my very first match, because everyone’s, your weight class, everyone is sitting close to each other on the mat. So I came out and I’m like, I’m a jui Jitsu guy, but I’m a wrestler, I gotta scare this first guys.
So I came out, and instead of coming out and doing the Jui Jitsu thing, I came out like a wrestler and started running and pounding on his head, boom, boom. Pushing and pushing and knocked the dude over and he falls out of bounds and he gets up and you see, I placed the seed the doubt and his eyes were just like “Oh crap” and he walks back in the circle. And from that point, it was like everything shifted. His whole countenance, he was nervous and awkward and after that he was easy. It was wrestling a little soft puppy. It was so easy after that.
What was cool is that all the other guys sitting on the mat, they saw that as well and they were looking in and they were like, “Oh my gosh.” I rolled him, that’s what they call it in Jui Jitsu, I rolled the other guys. I came out there, and it was funny because as soon as I came out there I could see it in their eyes. All of them started backing up because they didn’t want me to rush, they didn’t want that pressure that I was bringing and you could see it in their eyes and that just spurred me more. But that seed of doubt was set. All these guys who were bigger, stronger, faster and better at Jui Jitsu and probably should have beat me if they would have had the mental belief that they could, they didn’t because they had the seed of doubt and they were like, “I don’t know what to do.” And that’s all it takes.
I hope that helps you guys. It’s kind of fun. Think about how you can do that in communication with your audience. I hope that helps and that’s all I got for you guys today. Thanks so much for everything you guys. Tonight we’re actually launching Funnel Hacker TV the tv show. So if you go to funnelhacker.tv you can see behind the scenes show, I think I got 8 episodes of that right now, and tonight we’re having the first full, I’m not sure what we’re going to call it yet, full documentary or whatever. And then some other cool things when you go to that. Go to funnelhacker.tv and check that out. You’ll notice at the top there’s some cool tabs. One takes you to Marketing Secrets, which is this podcast. One takes you to the blog. I’ll share with you guys the strategy behind that in the near future, but I think it’s pretty cool.
That’s all I got you guys, thanks so much for everything and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.
The secret from going from zero to a million dollars is all about identifying what it is you’re selling and how you’re selling it.
On this episode Russell talks about being able to have the “What” you’re selling and “How” you’re selling it, to be able to go from $0 to $1 million. Here are some of the awesome things Russell talks about in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out why figuring out the “what” to sell and “how” to sell it can take you from 1 to 7 figures a year.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you guys to Marketing Secrets. I hope you guys are having an amazing day today. It’s beautiful out here. I came out this morning and I hear the birds chirping, I was chasing ducks around and having a good time. I think I’m getting a little bit of a cold too, so I apologize. My nose sounds a little funny.
Today’s an exciting day because we have a FHAT event, which means I think we have 40 people coming to this event. So probably 2/3rds are my Inner Circle members, which is always fun for me. And 1/3rd of them are people who are coming, who decided at the Funnel Hacking Event…..all of our events are called the same thing, Funnel Hacking Live. Anyway, so Funnel Hacking Live.
It’ s going to be a fun 3 days. The first FHAT event, I did the whole thing myself, this time we’ll be transitioning. I’ll be doing about a third of it, a little more than a third of it. Steven is going to be doing the rest, it’s going to be fun to start seeing him take over the reins on this thing and start running with it as I’m working on some other cool things. I’m excited for this week, it’s going to be a fun one.
Also we’re making, a couple of other things, Funnel Hacker TV is going live this week. We’ve been doing a behind the scenes show for 6 episodes, so today 7 will come out. Wednesday episode number 8 will come out. Thursday we’re going to do a grand big opening for the big show, which is kind of cool.
Kevin who has been doing the behind the scenes show is actually going to be in Boise today, he’s coming to the FHAT event, so I had a chance to meet him which is really cool. Then Brandon Fischer, who’s done Funnel Hacker TV, he’s finishing up a bunch of episodes, so we’re going to start to launch that this week. Which will be cool because we just got done with book launch which means the pro’s and the cons, it’s been fun because we’re selling a lot of books and doing stuff, but it’s also kind of annoying because you’re always selling stuff. So the next few months I’m just going to give back and just be giving cool content.
We also figured out last week, this really cool way to put together the Dotcom, or the Russell Brunson Blog, plus the Marketing Secrets podcast that you’re hanging out with me right now. As well as what’s the 3rd piece of this, oh Funnel Hacker TV. So probably in a day or so, if you go to any of those domains, russellbrunson.com, funnelhacker.tv or marketingsecrets.com, you’ll get to see all 3 blogs can hook together, all in their own different journeys. It’s going to be cool that way, it’ll be faster. After you discover me and find stuff to come back be able to start diving deep into all the different things we’re publishing, so really excited for that.
I don’t even know what the best thing to share with you guys is this morning. So many cool things that we could talk about. This last week has been so cool. We’re getting pulled into some really cool things and I’m grateful for it, and I’m sure I’ll be sharing and documenting a lot of the process with you guys here, over the next few weeks, which is pretty cool.
I think the coolest thing to talk about today is, I talked about this last week during, there’s a big product launch. We spent the first 3, or 4 weeks launching the book, sold I think we’re at 56,000 copies of the book now. 54,000, something like that, which is insanely cool. And at the end of it we did this cool 7 day launch, where I basically got up on stage and I taught for 3 hours a day for 3 days, so 9 hours and it was kind of cool. Because it was….as soon as you finish a book and send it to the publisher, it’s done and out of your hands. You can jack with it or mess with it anymore. And there’s other things I wanted to add to it, looking back now.
I’m like, “Dangit, I wish I would have done this…” You know how it is. But I wasn’t allowed or able to. So it was kind of cool because those three days I got a chance to teach stuff that I wish was….that was in the book but I wanted to go deeper on. You know, stuff like that. The master Class was cool but we kind of modeled Brendon Burchard’s 7 day launch. So basically each day we show it, it would be up for 24 hours then pull it down. Show the next one and then pull it down. Show the next one and pull it down. And in the middle we made an offer, so we launched our 2 comma club coaching, which is really cool. We sold a lot of those, and then we closed it down last night at midnight. Actually I passed out, so I woke up this morning and shut it down.
I’m kind of glad I passed out because we made an extra…a lot, from the time I passed out until, we were supposed to shut it down to the time I shut it down early this morning. It was pretty cool. I hope you guys watched that process.
One of the things I talked about in there, and I’ve shared with a lot of the Inner Circle members as well. What’s the process, what are the phases in business? It’s interesting, I read books before that talk about this, but more from a business standpoint. So how to go from 1 to a million, a million to ten, ten to fifty, and fifty to a hundred. They always talk about management teams and who do you hire and all that kind of stuff, which is all good. But I’m more interested from a marketing standpoint because it changes as well. What are those different phases, how do they go?
It was kind of cool, I taught that. So I showed to go from 1 to 7 figures a year is all about figuring out what it is you’re selling and how you’re selling it. Which is funny because most businesses never make it past a million bucks a year. It’s because they don’t know what they’re selling or how to sell it. They know what they’re selling, but they don’t know what customers want. So I call this the what and how phase. What is it you’re selling and how are you selling it?
During this time for you, as an entrepreneur, is essentially being creative. Making different things, ideas, products, businesses, offers. You’re doing a lot of stuff until you figure it out. Until you figure it out, I’m honestly like, one the things, the products, business or offer, one of them will hit and you’ll be like, “ah, this is what people want. Sweet. I got the what now. I know exactly what they want, I know how to sell it.” And then from there, that’s what I always tell our people. Focus on, create a webinar, just sell your product and then you just keep doing it week in and week out and in that time, you’re shifting the product, shifting the services, making changes. Whatever it is.
As soon as you figure that out, then boom you can start scaling it. You transition to phase number two which is going from a million to ten million. And during this time, it’s funny because I was always, I think I always fought this phase, because my fear of, I had so much fun in the creative part, of creating businesses and offers and things like that. I was afraid I was going to lose that if I started focusing on one business. It’s funny. Which I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. They fear subconsciously or consciously.. I know I feared that, and as soon as I realized it’s a creativity switch, I’m switching my creativity from launching new businesses and offers to this is my business now. I figured out the what and how, now I’m going to be focusing on how I’m going to use my creativity to make new offers and bring people in. Or how can I sell people on the back. If you’re really focused on the 3 phases to grow a business. Acquisition funnels, ascension funnels and monetization funnels. And that’s kind of the next phase.
And the 3rd phase, after you get that figured out, is you switch your creativity from new offers to….actually switch your creativity to traffic. It’s been fun because that’s kind of where I’m at. In fact, last week we had a meeting with our traffic team and I told them all, “This is now my focus, here.” We had enough offers, all the pieces are in place now for our company and we’re racing to 7, 8, 9….9 figures a year. The sprinklers are coming on. I hope I don’t get soaked. I’m outside. For those who are listening, I’m outside in my backyard, that’s why you can hear all the birds chirping.
Anyway, so I’m transitioning my focus to the traffic side. And the coolest thing about the traffic side, it doesn’t take you the entrepreneur as much. The creativity in businesses and offers is entrepreneur driven. The creativity in front end offers and back end offers is usually entrepreneur driven. The creativity in traffic a lot of times can be driven by other people, which is kind of cool. So for me, just because I’m excited I’m transitioning this phase where hopefully I’ll be able to take the foot off the creative gas and focus on the traffic stuff.
Anyway, I guess what I really wanted to share with you guys today is because I went through this again last week. We launched the 2 comma club coaching which we shut down this morning. And we shut it down, just the coaching piece of it, did just shy of 1 million, but with the rebuild we’ll pass a million. It’s cool because I figured out the what and how but I did it over a 4 day period of time. A lot of people will spend years, 2 years, 3 years.
So we started doing it and part of it, you feel. So I do the 7 day launch and I’m doing the training and it’s working, I could feel it. Okay, it’s good. Number two I did the training, but I actually did a webinar and as I did a webinar, because it’s kind of a cool thing, a teach webinar, so I showed the webinar. And the webinar happened to be pitching the thing that I was going to be selling at the end of this thing. So people had to watch me pitching them. As I was doing it, instantly I could feel, I don’t know about you, but you can feel like, “Ahhh, I did this wrong. There’s parts I did wrong.”
So I’m super aware of that so the next day I came back and I had this cool opportunity to kind of re-teach, or to show what I did in the webinar and because I was aware of it, I was like, “These are the parts that I messed up on. This is what I should have done different. When I do it in the future this is how I’ll tweak things.” And I kind of walked the audience through that, and then I was able to go back through my close again as I’m showing, teaching how to do closes and kind of re-close people.
And that day, sales started going crazy so I was like, “Cool, I figured out the how.” I’ve been kind of figuring out the what and then the how. And then that day, after we got done I was like, “Wait a minute, I think my pricing is wrong on this.” There was something weird in my gut. I just….it was the weirdest thing because I got done with the presentation and I wasn’t tired, but I felt bummed out because I didn’t quite do it right. So the third day after the whole thing was done, we sat there for like an hour talking about pricing and things like that. All the sudden I shifted and I was like, “Yes, this is the right pricing strategy.”
So we shifted it and it doesn’t really matter for you, because going through the details of the pricing strategy because that’s less important…..as much as important as, as I was doing this offer live in front of everybody for 4 or 5 or 6…when we add urgency and scarcity, it’s about 6 days from beginning to end. The whole time on the fly I was shifting things. I shifted the presentation. I shifted the offer, the price point, shift, shift, shift and all the sudden we found the sweet spot. “Yes, this is it.” And it started just going crazy.
So I’m telling everybody, what I’m telling you guys, do a webinar a week, every single week. And every single week you’re making shifts and changes. Just because, it’s not saying do the exact same webinar every single week without changing it. No, do it and then you’re like, “Okay, what was wrong? My pricing?” and you’re shifting over and over and over again and what will happen, typically for most people, the first time it’s taking them 3 or 4 weeks, maybe a month or two months of shifting and changing, shifting and changing until boom, you hit it. You figure out, this is the what and how. As soon as you figure out the what and how, boom it blows up.
But we’re able to do that live in a 6 to 8 period of time because we’re getting traffic, we’re doing stuff’s happening. We’re able to shift things fast. The better you get, the faster you get at identifying and figuring out the what and how. What you’re selling and how you’re selling it.
Because I honestly think as soon as you figure out those two things, what you are selling and how you are selling it, the what and how, I think a million dollars is fast and easy and simple. But most people never get past that. So it comes out into you throwing an offer out there, trying it and it fails. Trying it and it fails. Trying it and it fails. It’s a little better and you do it and do it and do it until all the sudden, boom, boom it hits. And you hit the right what and how and when you got that, then it just takes off.
Anyway, I hope that helps you guys, because it happened to me this weekend and we did it and shifted things in the middle of creation and that’s we’re able to close out the week so strong. Anyway, there you go you guys. The what and the how, figure that out. What are you selling and how are you selling it. You focus on that.
You know when you hit it because you’ll be able to almost instantly scale to a million bucks. Honestly. That’s how you know when you hit. Then as soon as you figure that, you hit a million, then you transition to the next phase. But for a lot of you guys, that’s the phase you’re in right now, so think about that. What are you selling, how are you selling it? Because let’s say you figure out the right product, but you don’t have the right selling mechanism, then you’re screwed right. It comes down to really identifying what are you selling. Sometimes you have really good selling mechanisms, I have a webinar, it converts, but my product sucks and it’s not growing.
You’re confused, you’re like, “It’s not growing. Why can’t I scale this thing?” It’s because you got the wrong product. You got the right selling system but the wrong product, so you gotta fix those things.
Anyway, that’s all I got you guys. With that said, I’m going to go in and get ready for the day, FHAT event’s starting. I’m going to wake up my kids, I’m excited. Appreciate you all and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.
I had a huge shift in my thinking about email marketing this weekend… let me show you how it works.
On today's episode Russell talks about how he plans to use email as an amplifier in the future for Facebook Live videos in order to get more clicks. Here are some of the awesome things he talks about in this episode:
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What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing Secrets, episode number 2. It’s going to take me a while to get used to saying Marketing Secrets as opposed to Marketing In Your Car. But I’m glad you’re here, glad we’re hanging out. I hope you guys enjoyed episode number 1 yesterday.
A lot of crazy stuff has been happening over here. As you know we finished, well we’re still in the last week of our book launch, but I’ve kind of moved on to the next funnel in the process, which is fun. But we just passed 50,000 books officially sold or 51,000 actually this morning, which is cool. Or this evening, it’s night time here, I’m actually in the office and not in the car like normal.
It has been really cool. This week we’re doing what we call a 7 day launch. It’s a new process I learned from Brendon Burchard. I’m trying it out, it’s the first time we’ve done it and it’s fun. I’ve been funnel hacking him, he did this 3 or 4 times. Funnel hacked him and got the swipe files and a whole bunch of things and we’re testing it out. So day number one happened today, some of you guys saw that. We basically sent out promotions for it and basically I sat in the conference room and taught and trained for 3 hours live. And for 3 hours for the next 2 more days, so 3 days in a row. And then tomorrow, I’m actually going to be doing a presentation where I’m going to be selling our Two Comma Club coaching. If I execute right hopefully this whole thing will go well and people will….good stuff will happen. We’ll see what all the details all pan out. But it’s a really cool way.
It’s a cool way to sell something but also give it insane amounts of value along the way, build tons of reciprocity and people will love you more, which is what marketing is all about. So it’s fun, I’m excited for it and if you guys are not watching it, go to expertsecretsmasterclass.com, you can see the process in action.
Anyway, what I want to talk to you right now is, I’ve been totally geeking out on Gary Vaynerchuk the last few days. A couple reasons why, I think the biggest reason why is I’m noticing that, especially as we did, when we launched the book we did a virtual book tour and I started doing Facebook Live’s to all the different people’s audiences. It’s interesting because some people’s audiences were really bad. A lot more than I thought. And some audiences were insanely good. And I started watching who are the people that are doing this game right.
And I started looking at that and just trying to get a really clear picture, and it’s interesting because I’ve seen, there’s people that are good at different channels. Some people are good at Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, just different channels. And the only person I see who’s good at all of them consistently across the board is Gary Vaynerchuk, so I’ve been watching him. And not just from a learning, but from a watching standpoint, what he’s doing on every single platform. Gall, he’s the only person I know that I can see, find that’s just really dialed in on all of them.
I know it’s happening in other markets, I just don’t follow the other markets, where he’s got it working in all cylinders in all these different spaces. Again, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Podcasts. Anyway, across the core channels, he’s there. I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago about this. About how he kind of mentioned one of the things I listened to, your phone right here is the equivalent of the TV in the 1950’s. There were only 3 or 4 channels back then and the people who were on those channels dominated. And today it’s kind of the same thing, right now your phone has got 3 or 4 apps that people use to get all their social communication.
That’s the majority, 90% of everything happening on their cell phone, outside of games, is happening there. It’s interesting, as I’ve been learning about it, I’ve been watching him as he’s been dominating each of these channels. How can I do that. It’s funny, I’ve had a lot of people like, “Russell, I cannot keep up with your content. I don’t know how you’re doing it. You’re doing podcasts and YouTube, and Facebook Live’s and this and that. All these different things.” And it’s because I’m trying to do the same thing, I want to be so in every single channel that wherever you go you’re seeing it. I want to be relevant because it’s been interesting, the last year and a half, 2 years or so, so many of my friends who focused on the market we’ve been doing for the last 10 years have become irrelevant.
As I tried to do Facebook Lives with their audience I was like, “Dang, they’re not relevant.” And it’s interesting. If you asked me my opinion before this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and this is a big mind shift, and I hope that this gives you a mind shift. It totally gave me one. I don’t want, as I tell you this, I don’t want anyone to discount and be like, “Oh Marketing is dead.” Because that’s not what I’m saying by any stretch of the imagination. Email is still hyper important and will continue to be important because it’s…..a lot of reasons.
When I got started my first mentor Mark Joyner was like, “Build a list, build a list, build a list.” And it saved me. I built a list of over a million entrepreneurs and it’s been the good times and bad times. During the good times, it helps amplify things. In the bad times it helps save your butt. It saved me from bankruptcy twice that I can remember, there’s probably more. But it’s like, that was the key, giving you your own distribution channel where you can get messages out to people.
And I would say for the last, I don’t know when email was invented, but from then until probably the last year or so it was king. It was the most important thing. And again, I’m nervous to get into this podcast, because I want no one to be like, “cool, I don’t have to write emails anymore.” No, you have to focus on email. If you read the, I don’t have any here in front of me, the Dotcom Secrets book, I had it in the conference room today. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book I talked about three types of traffic. Traffic that you control, traffic you don’t control, and traffic that you own.
So traffic you control, Zuckerberg owns Facebook, he owns Facebook traffic. He owns it, but I can go and buy an ad, I can control and send it somewhere. Same thing with YouTube, it’s owned by someone. People own these channels, so I don’t own that traffic, but I can control it, I can buy it and push it somewhere. When I push an ad somewhere I want to push it somewhere where the traffic transitions from traffic that I’m controlling into traffic that I own.
So for me, for the last 10 years it was 100% like, send all that traffic to an email list because then they join your email list and they’re on your list now and you’ve got them. I still believe that. Again, don’t think I’m taking away email, I’m not. It’s still the key, it’s still the best way I think, to transition from traffic you own from traffic you don’t own. Then there’s traffic you don’t control. That’s like SEO,PR and all this stuff is happening. We had a blog, or an article today actually posted, if you guys are reading Forbes. I wonder if I can find the headline really quick. It made me feel really good, in fact I sent it to my parents and they are all excited, which made me even more happy. So the title of the headline was, “This entrepreneur built a $360 million SAAS business that was entirely self funded.” There you go, there’s the headline for those who are watching the video feed over on YouTube.
So it was awesome. But the article happened and I can’t control that stuff. Traffic is coming in from different places and I can’t control. So I need to somehow catch it. Hopefully I’m capturing it and putting it in places where I can get their email and control that traffic and I can send it places.
So there’s my beliefs. The core foundation has not changed. It’s still traffic you control, traffic you don’t control, all siphoning into some type of traffic you do control. Control doesn’t only mean an email list though. I still think email is one of the best, and the reason is because if you have email, I can send an email and it directly goes to people. But here’s the negative side to email. You send an email, it goes to somebody and then it dies. Send the email, it goes to someone, it dies.
So the channel is powerful, but that’s the downside. Then you’ve got all these filters and promotion tabs, all this crap that you’re just always fighting against as well. So it becomes less and less effective. But I still, let’s say I send an email out to my list, I have over a million entrepreneurs that come through our list, I don’t know the exact number as of today, how many are active. It’s not a million, but it’s close to that. If you look at when I send the email out, I might get I don’t know, 30-40,000 people to open the email and from that I might get 10,000 clicks, which is a good email.
In fact, I should probably look at exact numbers, it’s been a while. But something like that. If I get 10,000 clicks in an email, that’s awesome. I remember back in the day my goal, if I could get between 3-5,000 clicks per email I was celebrating, which is awesome. Now I want to put some things in perspective, because that’s still good. But understanding the power of emails. I click a button and it goes to someone’s inbox and I can get clicks fast. The downside is it’s there and it disappears. And the life span of that is very, very short. It’s finite, it will last a few hours and then it’s buried and gone.
Now I want to put this into perspective, if you go back and look at the book launch for Expert Secrets that we just finished. I did a whole bunch of Facebook Lives and from that, I wonder if I have the stats here in front of me, for those who are not watching, I’m at the office. I don’t have my….let’s see if I can find…..alright it says here on Skype, so I will pull this up. This is as of a week and a half ago, so it’s even more now. But it’s kind of cool.
So from the Facebook Lives that we did, our reach was 5,679,718 people. So that’s the equivalent of an open rate in email. So that means that they saw me and they opened up the email and saw me. It’s not as good as an email open, for a grand I’ll take that, but 5.6 million people saw my face in the newsfeed being interviewed by someone about the book. Crazy. I don’t know how much, I’d have to be on CNN 5or 6 times is my guess, to get that many people to see it as they’re flipping channels.
From that 3.15 million people actually clicked play or sat there and watched some of the video. Over 3 million people watched it. From that we got 40,000 reactions, people clicking on a like or dislike, or a thumb or whatever. And 3,696 shared it. It’s interesting, I was looking at that and the cool thing is all those assets we created are there forever. We’re running ads to all of them that are so profitable consistently and they’re running and running and the lifespan of these is a long time. 6 months, a year, they can go on forever.
I’m putting videos on YouTube now, if you’ve been watching funnelhacker.tv I’m posting these videos and what’s cool is the video gets put there and it has this long tail. Episode one of Funnel Hacker TV is up to like 14 or 15,000 views. Number two is at 13,000. And it’s like they’re all getting the things like, they’re there and they keep growing and growing. Episode one of Funnel Hacker TV, my guess in the next year or two years that thing is going to have a million, a million and a half, two million views on it.
I’ve done videos on Facebook that have multiple millions of views. For me to get a million clicks on email, that’s going to take me an entire year to get a million clicks. So I started thinking, and then again, they’re all different. Every channel is different. You got email, Facebook Live, YouTube, Instagram, I’m learning all these platforms and trying to really understand them. What I’m seeing is if I use my email a little differently than I have been using it. I’ve been using my email in the past to sell. And I still think you should use it to sell, but differently. I’m not sure exactly, I can’t even give you some of my brainstorms off the top of my head, I don’t know how it’s going to all pan out.
But I feel like, in the past what we would do is have long email sessions pushing people through a funnel and all sorts of things, but I feel like I want to shorten that. And we were talking about here internally in the office calling it 48 hour funnels. Someone comes in and we have urgency and scarcity quick. There’s 48 hours from the time they opt in til the time that offer expires. We can use deadline funnels with Clickfunnels at the beginning and done. And then it’s over and from there you push them back into our, and if you read the Dotcom Secrets book, I have my soap opera sequences and my Seinfeld.
So my soap operas in the past were long sequences pushing them throughout a funnel, now I’m just going to compress that to a weekend marathon, a 48 hour marathon, instead of a soap opera sequence. Still kind of two or three emails really quick when they opt in, specific to that thing. Then we dump them back to my Sienfeld list, and my Seinfeld list, the goal of that in my mind right now, and I havne’t quite perfected this or figured it out, but what’s going on is the goal of email now for me, outside of the 48 hours to convert and cause urgency and scarcity and open and close an offer, is to promote content.
It’s interesting, If I post a video on YouTube, and I post there nothing, it kind of sits there. I can buy some ads, it’s slow. But if I start it, and I start it with a big momentum it’ll grow quickly. Like today when we did the three hour training, we were on Facebook and we were on YouTube, so I promoted it on Facebook messenger, I promoted people to the live Facebook. Email I promoted people to the Google version and we had over 3,000 people watching live for the entire 3 hours.
That was people that actually watched it the full time and there were all these people, up and down. But I would say, when all was said and from that we had 5 or 600 shares, thousands and thousands of clicks. And I’m looking, if I use my email as a tool to amplify video and when the video is done, when the video comes and there’s 3,000, 4,000 views and there’s 200 comments then Google or YouTube, or whoever is like, “holy crap, this video is awesome.” Or Facebook says, “This video is awesome.” And they’re going to rank it higher and then more views happen. And the thing, if I were to send an email, it would hit there and then it would disappear within 2 or 3 hours, it’s gone.
The clicks and stuff are gone from that email. But if I push it to content to boost it to my most hyper active people on my list, who love me, we push them there, and then they start watching, viewing and sharing and then it boosts everything else and I can get all this organic traffic. It changes that 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 clicks, max to hundreds of thousands to millions of views. And it’s like, now I’m looking at email as an amplification thing. It’s like amplifying these presale ads.
If you look at, I keep going back to the Dotcom Secrets book, if yu haven’t read it yet, go read it. But in the Dotcom Secrets book I talk all about the phases of the funnel. The pre-frame before they hit the funnel is the most important part. All these videos are a pre-frame. I’m taking the pre-frame and amplifying it, ramping it up and then its going viral, or semi-viral or we call it paid viral or forced viral, it makes it so we can pay for ads. We put ads behind it and it can grow that way.
But it’s taking that email that would have been 3 or 4,000 clicks and turning it into 300,000 clicks and it’s really fascinating. Same thing with Medichat, which is the new Facebook Messenger. When we first got it, I struggled with how do I use it and push people to different offers and it’s kind of confusing, and what I found out is working so good. It’s like I’m building this little stuff, I think we have 15 or 16,000 people on our Medichat list, it’s like an email list but it’s through Facebook Messenger, and what we’re doing is every time we do a Facebook Live we push it. And then that fast we get 500 – 1000 people to show up to every Facebook Live it’s insane.
I log into the box and say start Facebook Live, go, they all come and within, like I said, within minutes we have 500 or 1000 people who are live, and then people see a Facebook Live with 500 or 1000 people on it, they start watching and it starts growing and it snowballs into everything. So I’m looking at this whole thing differently now where it’s like email and messenger are tools to amplify the content where I’m going to take this asset, this pre-frame video that I’m creating and I’m putting out there and changing it from 3 or 400 views I would have gotten, or 3 or 4000 clicks I would have gotten, into 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 or more. And it’s getting me excited.
Again, I’m experimenting with this, but I think….it’s funny because this is the first time I think in my entire career now of 14+ years that I’ve had a directional shift. I view email different. And I think it’s better. It’s interesting. Anyway, I just encourage, I just wanted to open this thought process for you guys as well to think about. Because I’m thinking about it and I think we should all be thinking about it because I think there’s something interesting there that’s going to be big.
So watch what I’m doing, again, I always say this. Listen to what I’m saying because I’m never going to hold anything back from you guys, because I wouldn’t do that. But watch what I’m doing because I’m doing it consistently and I’m trying it and if I keep doing it, it means it’s working. If I stop it’s like I guess it didn’t work. But I think that’s the key.
So understand, start studying each of the different platforms and understanding it. Instagram is the same way, I’m looking at Instagram and I still haven’t quite figured it out. In fact, I got my account canceled yesterday and I got it back last night. So I’m a little paranoid about it. But at the same time, there’s a really cool thing on Instagram, you have the ability to build the relationship and build rapport with the attractive character. It’s kind of like Snapchat only easier to build. I can post videos and now they have this really cool thing coming out called Swipe Up, and I don’t have it yet in my account, but I’ve seen a lot of people having it and we’re trying to get it in our Instagram account.
What happens, I could be doing these things, I still call them snap chats, because I’ve been doing Snapchat for a year, but whatever they call them in Instagram where I can go and make these videos. In the videos I’m telling a story throughout the day. “Okay, I’m here, I’m doing this.” Kind of like a mini version of what we do on Funnel Hacker TV. I’m telling the story, and as I’m telling the story I’ll be like, “Hey I just recorded a podcast, if you want to hear it swipe up.” And they swipe up and it immediately takes them to whatever URL you want. That is magic.
So I think Instagram is similar in my mind to Facebook Messenger and email. And I don’t have a name for it yet, I haven’t figured out a system, but the goal of those platforms are to build rapport with the attractive character and amplify the content. The content are pre-frame bridges that push people into funnels. And if you start looking at it that way, I think there’s something new and exciting. So there you go guys.
We’re what, almost 17 minutes. They get longer now that I’m not in my car. Sorry about that, I hope you don’t mind. Hopefully it gets the wheels in your head spinning. Because that’s the direction I’m thinking and focusing on and I think it’s going to be where things are starting to transition to.
Hope that helps. Thanks so much you guys, for hanging out. If you’re not subscribed yet, go to marketingsecrets.com and subscribe on iTunes and leave your feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if you are new to this and you want to catch up on the last 5 years of this podcast, it used to be called Marketing In Your Car. Go to marketinginyourcar.com and the first 250 episodes you can get on a free MP3 player, just to get you caught up on all the cool stuff we’ve been talking about behind your back. Now you’re part of this and I can let you in on the big secrets. With that said, thanks you guys, appreciate you and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye.
Marketing Secret #1 will explain the concept of “whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins” and how you can do it quickly without raising money.
On the first episode of Marketing Secrets Podcast, Russell talks about the first secret of marketing, which is Don't Cheat! Here are some of the awesome things you will get to hear in today's episode:
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, I want to welcome you to today, the very first day of the official Marketing Secrets podcast. I am so insanely excited. This is something I’ve honestly wanted to change this for a long time. So for those who are just tuning in for the first time ever, for the last I don’t even know now, 4 or 5 years, my podcast has been called Marketing In Your Car which I record while I’m in my car. And it’s been really, really nice and I’ve always kind of liked it. I had the idea almost 15 years ago probably, when I bought the domain. Maybe less, maybe 12 I don’t know.
And then that’s when podcasts first came out, and then I didn’t launch the podcast and then a few years later, I finally did launch the podcast and I was like alright. Oh, and I had a friend Paul Callagan, who’s like one of the podcast dudes. He had this guy write a jingle for me, it was kind of a cheesy jingle, if you listen to episodes one through a hundred or so, you heard it over and over again.
But I was launching it so I was like, I’m just going to do it and we’re going to use that because, why not. I got nothing else. So that’s how the whole thing began and the first hundred episodes had that cheesy song. And it was while I was in my car driving to the office every single day. And then in that time, a lot of stuff happened. We had this idea for Clickfunnels, we launched it, and I documented a lot of that story behind the scenes, which is kind of fun. How we basically went from zero to ten million to 30 million to, I don’t even know what we’re up to now, but it’s a lot. I think this year we’ll pass 100 million dollars collected through Clickfunnels, since it began 2 ½ years ago. Which is pretty exciting for me and for everybody.
And you guys have been, had a chance to kind of see that whole progression and documentation of that, which is cool. And then, again after that episode 100 everyone kept telling me how much they hated the theme song. But I didn’t have another one, so I really quickly changed it, just by myself, which was kind of annoying. I changed it just to make it better, but it was still kind of, I didn’t really love it. So episode 100 to maybe 250 was another one. And then, by that time we were launching Funnel Hacker TV, which is our online reality, which if you’re not listening go to funnelhacker.tv and you can watch all the episodes. It’s something I’m really proud of.
Anyway, so I tried to match the theme song to that one, and it kind of was okay, but wasn’t as good. Anyway, I’ve had a long time desire to change it. Even though, right now we’re in the top ten podcast in business all the time, and it’s called Marketing In Your Car, I still have people that are like, “oh You’re that marketing in your car thing.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s bigger than that. It’s awesome.”
So anyway, a little while ago, John Reese, I saw on Facebook he was selling Marketingsecrets.com, and I was like, oh that is it. That is the name of the podcast. I can’t rebrand it to something stupid. If I’m going to rebrand it it’s got to be something amazing and when I saw that I was like that’s it. We were able to get the domain name, and now we’re branding it.
Last week I wrote a pitch for the intro and then I loved and then Steven, and then we recorded it in our sound booth, and Steven went and did all this audio editing. And I had Brandon make some video trailers and bumpers for it. And now it’s all done and they turned out really, really cool. In fact, you guys probably heard it today, if you’re listening. If you’re on YouTube, we’re also posting these on YouTube, and in fact, I’m videotaping this right. I’ve actually on my rear view mirror, I’ve hooked my camera. It’s kind of Jimmy rigged, hooked on there. So now I’m going to have a video and audio version of each one, just because I thought it would be kind of cool. So that’s what we’re doing.
Anyway, it’s turned out really good and I’m proud of it. Now a couple of things as you listen to the intro, you’ll notice one thing, I kind of made fun of, as I often do, people that take on money in their business. That’s what I actually wanted to talk about on today’s secret number one.
So I’ve been listening to a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk lately and it’s interesting because he’s always talking about all these businesses and entrepreneurs and taking capital. What to do and what not to do. And then last night it was funny because he actually even said himself, “I never took on money in my businesses, I made money.” And it’s funny. I’ve had other people who tried to convince me to take on money and then as I talked to them later they are like, “Well I would never do it for my own company.” I’m like, “Exactly.”
The interesting thing is that I feel like people that take on money are cheating. I potentially am going to be doing a keynote at a big famous university later on this year. I’m not sure yet, it hasn’t been finalized. I’m going to kind of hold off the details until it is. But I already started writing the presentation because I got so excited. In fact, if I write a book number 4, which I think I might, this will be the topic of the book, probably. Unless I change it, I don’t know. Some of you guys might be thinking, “Book number 4 Russell? You only have two books right now.” So we’ve got Dotcom Secrets, book number one. Expert Secrets, which the launch ended last night, we are almost 50,000 books sold, we’ll probably pass that today, which is insane.
Especially when you put it in perspective, like New York Times, most people sell about 10,000 copies to get on the New York Times Bestsellers list. We’ve sold about 50,000 but we’re not on the New York Times list, why? Because they’re punks, to be completely honest. Their reporting stuff is all jacked up. I tried to get on the list with Dotcom Secrets, and we sold 3 more times than we needed to and we still couldn’t get on the list. So they’re against people like me, people who like to sell books. Weird. New York Times Bestsellers. Whatever.
In fact, if you go to russellbrunson.com, the first post I’m kind of documenting my journey from zero to a million books there. And I tell the story about New York Times there. I digress, so book number three, if I decide to write a third book, which I will. I think this will be a trilogy and then the series will be done. But we have obviously, Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and then I recently bought traffic secrets.com from John Reese, and that will probably be the third book in the trilogy and then it will be done.
And then from a separate standpoint, I want to write a book about this. Again, this will be the keynote speech I give at this famous university if I am able to. The title is going to be Stop Cheating. Stop Cheating! And it’s going to be like how we went from zero to 100 million dollars in 2….again, I don’t know exactly what the date is going to be because we haven’t crossed it yet. 2 years, 200 days and 9 hours, whatever it is. To 100 million dollars without taking on venture capitalist, or venture cash.
Because I think that taking on cash is cheating. Think about this, if you were in a body building competition and everyone was competing, working their butts off, and you came in and shot up steroids into your arms and veins and everything and went out there, they would disqualify you for cheating. If you were in the Olympics and everyone is competing as athletes, they’re all working hard, lifting weights, training, and you come in and you’re built up on steroids and you’re doing blood doping and all these other things, guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to kick you out for cheating.
So that is the equivalent of what I feel taking venture capitalists. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re out there trying to build a company and if you go and you just get a bunch of cash, then guess what you didn’t do, you didn’t freaking build a company. You cheated. Somebody gave you steroids. That’s not real, it’s not legitimate, it’s all fake. And I want you guys to understand that. It’s a big deal. It’s like, I have friends who play the lotto, for some reason here in Idaho they have the lottery, and I have friends who play the lottery. They think it’s the cool thing. They’re like, “Someday I’ll win the lotto and then I’ll be rich and famous like you.” I’m like, “You will never be rich and famous. Do you want to know why? Because if you win the lottery, you cheated. No one cares, that story’s not interesting. You didn’t earn it, you didn’t deserve it. Just because you got it, does not mean it’s actually yours. You cheated.”
So that’s like, that’s cheating. So the same way you don’t win the lotto, the same way you don’t do steroids, the same way you don’t do all these kind of things, is the same way you shouldn’t be taking on venture capital cash for your company. You should build a freaking company. You should bootstrap, do it the right way. There’s my rant for the day. And anyone who is trying to think otherwise is just stupid. A couple reasons why.
Number one, you’re taking on money, so that means you’re cheating. So anything you actually accomplish doesn’t really count. Number two, if you decide to take on money, it’s not real. I look at some of my competitors, one of them took on 43 million bucks in funding, the other took on 100 million in funding or something like that. If you look at both of them right now. The people who took on 43 million, the venture capitalists, what do they want? They’re not just giving you money because they think it’s a cool thing to do, they want their money back and a bunch more. We had a bunch of VC’s try to give us money and they all want like a 10x turn if 5 to 8 years. So if they gave you 43 million, they want 430 million dollars back. That’s insane. That is insane.
I don’t even know what to do. So as soon as they write you that check, it’s sitting in your pocket and you have to stress about that, knowing you owe someone 430 million dollars, until you pay that back. Anyway, it’s ridiculous. It’s the stupidest way I’ve ever heard to grow a business. The reaper always comes. Just like in, someday it’s going to catch up to you, it always does, it’s karma.
So if you’re trying to cheat to grow a company, that’s it. That’s why I talk about it in the intro of this podcast. I want people understanding, we build companies smart, intelligently. That’s the whole reason we have funnels. The first venture capitalists, who tried to give us money, they must not listen to the podcast because I tease them a lot. But anyway, we have I think 5 or 6 now that have come and tried to give money for Clickfunnels, that are, all of them say the same things, “You guys are like a unicorn. We don’t understand it. We just want to give you guys, and be a piece of that.” And I keep trying to get, I keep trying to understand. “If you give me 50 million bucks, what do I have to give back?” and they’re like, “Oh well, you know. We’re going to do this…” and I’m like, “I know what you’re going to give me, what do I have to give back. This is a debt. You’re not giving me 50 million bucks to be nice.” And they’re like, “Well, we expect 10x on our money on the next 8 to 10 years, whatever that is.” I’m like, “Okay, so I now owe you 500 million dollars. The second I cash that check, every night I’m stressing and thinking about how much money I owe you. I don’t know about you ,but that’s not a game I want to play.”
So anyway, I’m sitting at lunch with these guys, trying to figure things out and one of the questions was, “How much money does it cost for you to acquire a customer?” which is a very good question. That’s what they all want to know, it’s a good question for all of us. If you watch Shark Tank they always ask what’s your cost to acquire a customer. So I kind of smile as I’m explaining because they’re not going to get it. In fact, I did an episode on marketing in your car a while ago called how to confuse the VC’s and that’s what the episode is all about. I was like, “Okay, well. We’re spending about 120 dollars to get a free trial in Clickfunnels.” And they’re like, “That’s a number we can work with. It falls in the acceptable whatever. If we give you 50 million dollars, then you can acquire blah customers.” Whatever it is. I was like, “Okay, well, that’s cool and all, but we actually turned off those ads.” And they’re like, “Why did you turn it off?” and I was like, “Let me explain how funnels work.” Which is our world. We understand, they don’t.
I showed them. I said, “Look, right now we create front end funnels, things that get somebody into our world. It indoctrinates them into the things they need to understand to be able to actually use our tool and then we offer them the tool. And we’re actually profitable acquiring that customer upfront.” For example, the Expert Secrets book launch. We just sold almost 50,000 copies of the book in the last 30 days. From those 50,000 copies, we ended up…I don’t know the exact numbers, but it was 1.4 almost 1.05 million dollars collected, cash into our pocket. You get 50,000 new buyers and like 120,000 opt ins.
I got all those leads, we got cash into our pocket, and now this week we’re doing training and stuff to introduce them into Clickfunnels, so these 50,000 new buyers, we’ll be like, “Here’s this new thing called Clickfunnels.” But I already got 1.5 million dollars in cash to collect those customers. I didn’t pay 1.5 million to get them. If I was going to spend, or if I was going to try to acquire 50,000 customers at let’s just say $10 a piece, is that right? Yeah, it costs me half a million dollars, but instead we got paid 1.5 million dollars to collect those customers. Now we have them, and that’s just the customers, that’s not counting the opt ins, 120,000 new opt ins came in. Those are people that we can also sell them Clickfunnels. Just because they didn’t buy the book doesn’t mean they’re not going to buy Clickfunnels or other products and services.
So we got paid up front, and I tried to explain, “The way it works in our business is we have these front end offers, somebody comes through and they buy the thing and we’re profitable. So it costs us 10-12 dollars to acquire a book customer, but on average we make, I think the average cart value, before affiliates went crazy and jacked up our average cart value, but when it was stable, we averaged about $34 per book. So $12 in, $34 out. So we were making $22 cash on every single customer that we brought into our world. That cash went into our pocket and we’ve got a customer to introduce to Clickfunnels.”
And I explained that to them 4 or 5 times and the guys like, “I don’t get it.” And after 4 or 5 times, I think the light bulb went off in his head and he said, “If that’s true, if that really happens, that would change business today as we know it.” I kind of smiled, I said, “I know, that’s what we’re doing. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s why we’re a unicorn. Not because I’m smarter than anyone else, but because I understand front end funnels.” If you read the first Dotcom Secrets book, that’s all I talked about. The person who can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. Done, that’s it.
I can spend more money than Lead Pages to acquire a customer. I can spend more money than Infusion Soft, I can spend more money than all my competitors. Any money you make, look at as a competitor, I can out spend every single one of them. Every one of them. There’s not one person in my market that can outspend me. That’s why we’re destroying everybody else right now. Do you understand that? That is the key.
So understanding front end funnels is the key to mastering this. So read the Dotcom Secrets book, it will help you to understand this whole concept of whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. If you know that, then you gotta know a couple of things. How does a funnel work? How does a value ladder work? How do all these pieces tie in together? After you understand those pieces you’re like, “Okay, cool. So I have a front end funnel that brings in customers profitably. Then I’ve got a value ladder that sends them u p through the different things I’m trying to do, ultimately to whatever my main goal is. After I have ascended people up to my main goal, then the second book, which is almost a prequel, but the Expert Secrets book is how you communicate with that audience?
How do you tell stories? How do you sell? How do you convert? How do you do all those pieces? How do you make it so all of these pages in the funnel actually work? Because there’s a whole bunch of people with crappy funnels out there that aren’t profitable. There are so many people who are like, kind of understanding our world a little bit. I’m seeing some of these companies trying things out, putting up opt in funnels and things and some of them are so painful.
I just saw one from one of our confusing competitors and it was like “Download our free white paper about blah, blah.” And then the opt in form had like 30 fields. I’m just like, you guys are so stupid. Nobody wants a white paper. That’s not sexy. Guess what’s sexy? Free book, free script. You’ve got to find something and crank up the sexy on it if you want people to give you money for it. It’s not……
That’s what Expert Secrets is about. How do you position yourself in the right way? How do you make things desirable? How do you create desire and belief in somebody’s mind? Those are all the pieces you have to understand. So it’s funny, while they call Clickfunnels a unicorn, it’s nothing magic you guys. It’s the stuff we talk about in the book. You have the books, they’re there. Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, that’s the stuff. If you’ve been listening to this podcast over the last couple of years, or if you got in just today, that’s fine. Go back and listen. All these things are foundational principles we’re tying in there. But it’s all stuff you can do.
So if I can say anything else, it’s this. Don’t cheat. You don’t need to cheat. You can be successful without taking on venture capitalists, without taking on money, without taking on funding, without needing any of that crap. You don’t need to have a 100,000 dollars to start your company, all you have to have is a brain between your ears, the ability to read two books, read them both, and understand some core principles and create a good offer. That’s it.
It’s really not that hard. And I don’t know what else I can do. I’ve been trying for years to make this simpler and simpler and simpler. Between the Dotcom Secrets and the Expert Secrets books it’s simple. I want you guys to understand that. And hopefully this gives you guys some ideas and tools to be able to use.
Alright, with that said, I’m at the office now. This podcast is probably a little longer than normal, usually they are like 5 – 10 minutes long. I have no idea how long I’ve done this one. The plan moving forward with Marketing Secrets podcast is this, each day I’m going to give you guys a secret. One marketing secret that you can use and if you understand though, it all ways lays down on the same foundation of episode number one here. The foundation is simple. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.
That is how you beat your competitors. That is how you beat the venture capitalists. That’s how you can grow your company. That’s the foundation of everything. When you understand that, it becomes easy. And yeah, you can go out there and you can do social media and build a big following and all those things organically but it takes time, it takes effort, stamina, it takes a lot of those kind of things.
It’s funny, because I have been geeking out on Gary Vaynerchuk recently, I really enjoy him. I like him a lot. He’s got some really, really good things. I think that what he does in his business is probably than what he says. I think that right now he’s the best in the world at conversation domination. How you dominate all different platforms and be relevant in all of them. I love watching him and studying and doing that.
We’re modeling a lot of that from him, but he’s got this one, one of his books is Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook and it’s all about, you can be jabbing, jabbing, jabbing and eventually you’re going to do a big right hook. I kind of agree with that. I agree putting out content, I’m doing those things as well, but the same time for that to really work, you’ve got to be really, really good. It takes a long time and consistent effort, over and over again. For a lot of us, that’s hard to do.
Someone asked me about that, “Russell, you’re philosophy is so different from Gary’s. He’s talking about jab, jab, jab right hook.” And I said, “Well, the difference is that I’m a wrestler. Have you ever seen a wrestler and a boxer in a fight? I’ve never seen a boxer win, ever. The boxers always lose to the wrestlers and Jiu Jitsu guys. In wrestling and jiu jitsu what do we do different? We look at the guy and instead of jabbing, jabbing, jabbing and waiting for the hook and right hooking. We look at him and look for vulnerability boom, we power double, take them down and choke them out.” I’d much rather have power double, take him down and choke him out than jab, jab, jab, right hook. There’s times to jab and things like that, those things are good, but I want you to understand this concept of winning and scaling and growth quickly.
It is about the concept I mentioned ten times. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. How do you do that? You don’t do that by jabbing forever. For a lot of you guys who are going to try to build an Instagram following of 100,000 people, that’s going to take time and energy and money. In fact, my Instagram kind of got shut down this morning, so even after you do all the work, it can disappear anyway, which is insane.
So it comes down to focusing on creating a really good funnel you can drive paid money into, acquire a customer for free or profitably, or at least break even and then send them up the value ladder. That’s the game, you guys. That’s the game we’re playing. With that said, I’m at the office, I’m going to go get to work. I hope you guys enjoyed Marketing Secrets number one. If you liked this podcast, please go rate it in iTunes, please tell your friends, family members, everyone you know. Share it. Appreciate you guys and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Bye everybody.