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Marketing Secrets

Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: Category: marketing in your car
Aug 29, 2014

How I can make as much front end revenue giving my product away for free, as I can selling it for full price.

On today’s episode Russell talks about something so easy that everyone should be doing it, but nobody is.

Here are some cool things you will hear in this episode:

  • The secret that has transformed Russell’s business.
  • And How Russell can get three times as many customers and make the exact same amount of front end cash, before up-sells.

So listen below to find out how Russell was able to transform the way he does business.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to another “Marketing in Your Car.”

Hey, everyone. It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these. I’ve been super busy, and was actually out until about three o’clock last night recording the coolest promo video ever. I’m excited to launch it. It’s a blend between the FourHourBody.com, if you watch Tim Ferriss’ promo video there – it’s a blend between that and “Prison Break” [laughs], and I think it’s going to be pretty cool. It took us six hours to film, literally, twelve seconds of footage, so we’ll see how it all turns out. In my head it’s amazing, so I’m hoping that it actually turns out that way. That’s pretty exciting.

What I want to talk to you guys about right now is something that I think is literally changing my business right now, and it’s so simple and so easy that everybody should be doing it – and I don’t see anybody doing it yet. Actually, one other dude, I do. One dude was smart enough to see what I did and copy me.

So this is the concept. Let’s say you wanted to sell a $47 product. You’ve got your $47 product, and you’ve got your up sells, and you’ve got your down sells. That’s just trying to sell. For a typical $47 product, you’ve got to write a really good VSL. It’s a lot of work to sell that, right? So you take that into consideration, and there’s your $47 product.

Or you create a free shipping product, and then afterwards you have the same up sell and the same down sell you do on the $47 one, but it’s free plus shipping. I want you to go head-to-head with those. I’m curious. If you send a thousand people to both of those, and on your free plus shipping offer, your copy’s not amazing, but it’s a good offer, so people want it. How many people would you think want both of them? I was thinking we’d be conservative. From $47 down to free, let’s say we get three times as many, so let’s say at $47, I get ten customers. At free, I get thirty customers.

Now I want to ask you – do you guys agree that that’s pretty realistic? If I had almost the identical product, if it was just as good of a product, with one I’d get three times as many customers by not charging them and by giving it away for free? They just cover five or six bucks for shipping and handling? I’d say that three times is pretty conservative. Let’s say three times four – this argument of what I’m trying to sell you guys on right now, okay? [laughs] So there’s that.

Now this is a little secret that we figured out about seven or eight months ago that is literally transforming all three of our core companies. On the page that we’re taking the product, we have the order form, and they put in their credit card information, and then right before they click “Submit”, there’s a little tiny block that has two sentences. The sentences just say, “Yes, I want this,” and “Hey, do you want me to throw in this extra thing that does this that’s really cool. It’s an extra $47. This is a one-time offer, and not available anywhere else.” It’s literally probably thirty or forty words. I’ll have to find out how many exactly, but that’s about it, and then we sell this $47 product. That’s called a bump, that’s like an order form bump.

Now, right now, we’re averaging almost forty percent, so I think it’s thirty-eight percent is what we’re averaging – people who buy our free plus shipping offers, who click on that little button. So let’s say we broke it down, and we only got 33.3 percent to do it. So now I want to come back. We’ve got two offers. The $47 product that we’re selling along with our up sells, and then we’ve got our free plus shipping product, but on the order form, we’ve got this little bump that says “Hey, only $47”, and right now, we’re getting a third of the people to take that. What just happened?

What just happened is, we get the exact same amount of front-end revenue. Ten customers at $47 or thirty customers at zero plus shipping and handling with a $47 bump, if one-third of those people are taking that bump, which they are in all three of our tests right now. Do you guys see what I’m saying? I can get three times as many customers and make the exact same amount of front-end cash before people see up sells by doing the free plus shipping on page order form bump as I can for a $47 straight sale, and the $47 straight sale – I’ve got to sell the crap out of it, whereas with the free plus shipping, I’ve just got to tell them that there’s a cool thing for free. They pay for shipping, and on the order form I need two sentences to sell them on my core $47 product.

It’s interesting. We were doing some consulting stuff, and these guys had a sales page, and then their up sell was their membership site. It was a $1 trial, and they’re getting fifteen to eighteen percent of the people to take that trial. They had some really good copy – a long form video and everything to sell people on that $1 trial. I said, “If you just got rid of that whole video, added that offer to your order page, and write two sentences, they said the lowest we’ve gotten is twenty-eight percent conversion. The highest is over fifty. They’re averaging fifty – pretty close. I think it’s thirty-eight percent or so, are taking that offer. It changes the dynamics of everything.

So I want you to think about that. It might be kind of hard to envision from me explaining it, so listen to this two or three times, and kind of map it out, but the concept is amazing. When we launched Click Funnels, we gave away a free trial, and then we had a $47 bump on the order form. That was the lowest one, I think. We had eighteen percent of the people take that. From the eighteen percent, it made something like $60,000 in sales from giving away free accounts. So pretty sexy, pretty exciting and definitely something you guys should look at and figure out how to try to implement in your business.

I’m at the office now. I have a fun day planned out, so I will talk to you guys all again later.

Aug 19, 2014

A cool strategy to redistribute your work day into other areas of your life.

On today’s episode Russell talks about receiving advice from his life coach about shaving a couple hours off his work schedule each day.

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

  • Why Russell thinks he should be able to get the same amount of work done in a 20 hour day as he would in a 24 hour day.
  • Why his life coach recommends cutting two work hours out of his schedule everyday.
  • And how Russell thinks these changes will go.

So listen below to hear Russell’s plan of getting the same amount of work done in less hours.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”

Hey everyone. It’s another early morning day for me today. I had my accountability call with me coach, Carl, today, which was kind of exciting. I learned some cool stuff. I’m heading in to the gym, and I wanted to jump on and do a quick podcast because I thought what I learned today was pretty profound. I hope it will help a lot of you guys, too.

All of us, as entrepreneurs, have this horrible, horrible problem of working too much. I’m not sure if you guys are the same way, but I’m guessing you probably are [laughs], and it’s interesting. Carl – one of the reasons why I wanted him to be my accountability coach is he used to work the 9-to-5, five days a week, like all of us, and then he started cutting out Fridays, and then he started cutting out every other week and literally, right now he works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, every other week, so he works eight days a month right now. He’s making more money than he ever was working the whole time, right? Today his big challenge to me was, “Hey, Russell, you need to start shifting your work habits and what you’re doing.” It was interesting.

He said that, “Do you think that if God took the day, and instead of making it twenty-four hours, he made it thirty hours, would you get more stuff done?” I was like, “Probably not. Maybe a little bit, but not a ton more.” He said, “Okay, well what if we went the other direction. Instead of having twenty-four hours in a day, he cut it down to twenty hours a day? Do you think you would get less stuff done?” and I was like, “No, I think we’d still be able to get everything done in the same amount of hours. We’d be able to jam it in. A lot of times, when you have less time, you get more stuff done.”

He was like, “Well what if we did that to your work day? Right now, what time do you usually leave the office?” I said, “Oh, about six.” He said, “Let’s shave it off so that every day, you start leaving the office at four? Do you think that you could do that?” I’m like, “I guess I could.” He said, “What do you do from four to six, anyway?” I’m like, “I don’t know – just stuff?” He said, “I bet if you cut those things out, all of the stuff you could get done prior to four. At four o’clock, you have to turn your computer off, and you had to leave the office.” We went through the whole process, and he committed me to doing that, which is kind of fun, so I’m excited to start trying that out today.

The next thing was he was like, “What about Fridays, man? What do you do on Fridays?” I was explaining. I explained what I do, and he said, “Friday’s kind of dead day, then, right?” I’m like, “Well I get stuff done, but, yeah, it’s not as productive usually,” and he’s like, “What if you just jammed all of your Friday stuff in to Friday morning, and then every Friday at noon you left and took that last half of the day off? What do you think would happen?” I said, “Probably not a lot. I don’t think I’d lose out on too much stuff.” So he kind of committed me to that. So I am shaving two hours a day off of my work day, and then I’m going to shave half a day off of my Fridays, and just see what happens, and my guess is that the world’s not going to come to an end. I’m excited to find out [laughs].

I want you guys to think about that as well for your life. All of us don’t have enough time – enough time for your family, enough time for your church, enough time for all of the different pieces you’re having, but we spend so much time at the office working. So I’m going to try to shave off those two hours and put it into use in other things in my life that are out of balance and see what happens. I’m guessing, I’m not sure yet, but I’m guessing that everything else will just fall in to the right spots. So I’m going to try it. I want to encourage you guys to try it as well.

I remember one time I was listening to this old cassette course I bought from Jay Conrad Levinson, Jay Abraham, Chet Holmes – I can’t remember who all. It was called “Guerilla versus Gorilla”, and it was awesome. One of the concepts I learned in there, Jay Conrad Levinson was saying that people have habits – a lot of us will kick our business and work eighty hours a week, and we’re going to work so that eventually we can launch whatever, and then we can cut down to twenty hours a week. He said that what he’s found is that whatever your habits are when you start will be your habits forever. If you want to live a lifestyle where you work twenty hours a week, you have to start working twenty hours a week from day one, otherwise you’ll just never get there. It will become a habit. I thought that was interesting as well.

Anywho, that is my game plan to start shaving off some time and redistribute that in other parts of my life that are a little out of balance right now and see what it’s going to do overall. I’m fired up. I’m excited. I recommend you guys test out the same thing. Right now I’m at the gym. I’m going to go get tough, and it’ll be fun [laughs]. I appreciate you guys, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Aug 11, 2014

One little secret I learned from the Clickfunnels launch.

On this episode Russell talks about the secret of the pre-indoctrination video and why it is so cool.

Here are some interesting to listen for in this episode:

  • Why having a perfect sales pitch is awesome, but you also need an indoctrination sequence.
  • And what an example of the process is.

So listen below to hear why pre-indoctrination videos will help tell your audience what to think, and therefore what to buy.

---Transcript---

Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”

Hey, guys and gals, and everyone who’s listening. I hope you’ve had an awesome day so far today. If you’re in the car right now, then you’re just like me, and you’re getting excited and pumped up for the day – trying to get in the state, right?

I just want to talk about what my mind’s been on all weekend, because it’s been kind of exciting. For the last however many years – seven or eight years, I’ve been watching everyone do their big product launches. They do the multi-video sequences and all of those kinds of things. I’ve done a lot of product launches in my day, but I never really did the whole multi-video thing. For whatever reason, I just never did it.

The first time I’ve really done it was with the Click Funnels launch to our own internal list, where basically – and partly it was because we had these really cool product launch funnels that I wanted to test out, where it lets you do four videos and all kinds of stuff, and so I got really excited to try it out. So we made these four videos and they were fun and they were entertaining and we got to use some good content. It was just kind of cool.

The coolest thing about it was that people loved the videos. Even those that didn’t buy it, they watched the videos. They loved them. They build a good relationship, and it was cool. I keep thinking more and more about that. I remember I was at a Mastermind meeting, and Frank Kern was there and he was talking what he calls “indoctrination pieces”. He says that before he sells anything, he sends out three or four e-mails of these different indoctrination pieces to pre-dispose people to actually buying. He was showing videos he’s send out. He was showing pdfs. He was showing all of this stuff to go out there and give cool stuff out before you ask for a sale.

The other day on Facebook, I was watching a copywriter [laughs]. He’s one of my friends. He was bragging about two or three letters he wrote for Frank Kern, and how awesome they were, and how they did, [imitates] “a million dollars in like twenty minutes,” and all of this garbage. I was like, “Yeah, but in twenty minutes, there’s no way everyone read the sales letter. They just bought because they wanted to buy.” It’s kind of like he had this feeling.

Frank came in and he was like, “Hey, so-and-so’s sales letters are awesome, but you have to understand that the sales letter’s just one piece of the sequence to this. The sequence is what sells people. It’s all of these indoctrination pieces. It’s all of these things that are happening ahead of time that pre-frame them and get them prepared and get them warmed up to actually buy, where at the last minute, a lot of people never even read the sales letter. They’re just going to buy it because they’re going to buy.

That was kind of a big “aha”, a big epiphany for me. Having the perfect, scripted sales pitch is awesome, and especially for cold trafficking. If they don’t know you, and you’re driving them in from Facebook or somewhere where you’ve got to click and you’ve got to convert them really, really quick. A good old-fashioned video sales letter or an actual sales letter is definitely the way you’ve got to go to convert them, but after they’re on your list, or you’ve got partners promoting it and things like that, I think the best way to do it is to take them through a gauntlet of pre-indoctrination videos and audios and cool things, just to build up that relationship, and do that first.

I got excited. I’m going to go back through all of them. We’re in this process now of re-launching our affiliate program and re-rolling out each of our products and a bunch of other cool things. We’re going to be doing that for each one. I’m excited.

For example, this week we’re rolling out a new project called “List Hacker”, and I’m really excited for it. With that, we basically used four different videos. The first video is this one that I recorded about a year ago with a guy named Jonathan [inaudible 2:25:14]. He came out and it was a video that I recorded at my old duplex, which is where I actually started my business. I told my list-building story, and how I’d gotten shut down for spamming, and all of these things I’d tried to do. I told that story, and it was fun.

So that’s video number one in the sequence, and then number two is me sitting in my office with a whole bunch of junk mail, and I’m talking about junk mail and why it’s important. I tell that whole story, which is again, not really a sales piece. It’s just kind of getting people excited, and it’s something cool that they can watch and get away from their day. The third one is where I do a little more teaching and training how to map out what a list hacking funnel looks like, and in the fourth one I actually show us doing a trip to Kenya, because a percentage of all the money I make goes back to the kids in Kenya. Then from there, “Boom,” then we push the actual sell – push people to the actual sales video which then slam dunks and closes them.

It’s kind of fun. I look at all of my projects. What kind of cool videos can I do to illustrate the concept and get people excited and provide some value before I ever ask for the sale? That’s what we’re going to go back and do with all of our stuff. Just for you guys to think about that, even if it’s not awesome sales pieces, just think of three or four cool content videos around that you for each of my products, just to get my warm list internally to get excited and build a little hype, a little excitement, give some value away, and like Frank Kerns, some pre-indoctrination pieces. Get them re-indoctrinated to what you need them to think to be able to purchase your product or service.

That’s it for today. I’m going to go in today and bust out some pre-indoctrination videos. We should be rolling out the first video, “List Hacking” today, which I’m excited for, and then we’ll go from there. All right, everyone, have a great day.

Aug 8, 2014

The easy way to get to the top.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car.”

Hey everyone. I’m heading back from the gym right now, and I just had a quick thought. Because the drive from my gym to my house is even less than from the office, this one won’t probably be that long.

Last night, I had a really cool experience. I had a chance to talk to Dave Asprey from Bullet-Proof Executive. First off, it was really, really cool. I’ve been trying to do the Bulletproof Diet. I thought I was doing it well, but I’ve been gaining weight and gaining body fat. I was like [laughs], “I don’t think this Bulletproof thing is really working. I think there’re some issues here, and so two months ago, I was on his site, and he had a link. It was like, “Hey, five hundred bucks for a one-on-one consultation.” I was like, “All right. Sweet. I can do that,” and so I paid him five hundred bucks. Last night was my one-on-one consultation with him, and it was pretty cool, because literally, I sat down with him on Skype chat, and within about thirty seconds, he told me everything I was doing wrong, why I was screwing it up. I always thought I was doing it intelligently, and I was doing it totally backwards. We completely rebuilt the whole thing, and it was awesome. I gained more from that hour than I could have gotten in five years reading every one of his blog posts, listening to all of his podcasts, and going through all of that kind of stuff.

It made me start thinking about how when I first got started in this business, I met this guy. I can’t remember his name, but it was at one of Armand Morin’s events, and I may have even done a podcast about this before, because I think it’s a cool concept, but I started thinking about it again last night. It was a young kid, and he was at this event, and he had joined Armand’s Platinum Group, and I was talking to him, and he was in ten different Platinum groups, and all of these different Masterminds. I was like, “Dude, how in the world can you afford all of that? That stuff’s expensive.” He said, “Russell, I learned something early in my life. There’re two ways to get to the top. Number one, you can work your way in. Number two, you can buy your way in. I choose the second. I could spend three years trying to get to know Armand and become friends with him and do a deal with him and learn from him, and all kinds of stuff, or I can just pay him some money, and “Boom,” buy my way in. I buy into everyone’s programs,” and he just works. –“There’re two ways. You either work your way in or buy your way in. It’s faster to buy your way in.”

I was thinking about how with Dave Asprey, I paid him five hundred bucks. Not a lot of money, but I had a chance to spend an hour with him on Skype. We got to know each other. At the end of it, we talked about his book he’s launching. I talked to him about how to promote it, and “Boom.” We feel like we had a connection, and now moving forward, I feel like he will be a friend – someone who I’ll be able to help in the future. He’ll help me, and that kind of thing, whereas if it was someone who I had just contacted him normally, I probably could have gotten through to him. I probably could have met him, but not at the same level as when I was just able to come and just pay and get in that way.

It’s interesting. I’m looking at the people who are in my Inner Circle, people who are in my Knight program and in our coaching programs, and its fun, because literally, I have Voxer on my phone, and all of the people in my Inner Circle have Voxer with me. I know their businesses. They ask me questions all of the time. I know their ins and outs. I know their ups and their downs. They get so much more access to me, and I feel like they’re my friends now. Again, I never would have met these people if they’d had to work their way in, but they bought their way in, and now “Boom,” I’m here. I’m on their team. I’m helping them out in their businesses, and it’s a ton of fun.

There was a guy the other day who – now, I charge a lot more for an hour-long consult than Dave does, but he bought an hour-long consult with me. It was really cool. I went through the consult, and I gave him my all in an hour. We built out an entirely new business model for him online, mapped out the whole thing for him, and it turned out pretty awesome. At the end of it, he was like, “Hey, Russell, by the way, I’ve got this new thing,” that he was doing, and he explained it to me, and it was awesome, and now I am giving him money back in exchange for his thing. But he bought his way in, and that conversation probably never would have happened. It cost him money, but again, in return, I ended up investing in something he had, and he made his money back immediately. It was pretty cool.

That’s my thought for today. There’re two ways to get in, again, you guys. You can work your way in, or you can buy your way in, but it’s always better and faster to buy your way in. That’s my thoughts. If you don’t have the money, then go fricking earn it. Go get a job. Go rake some leaves.

I literally, when I bought my first thing, I had to go rake leaves. I bought a $12 rake and a tarp at Home Depot, and I raked leaves for four or five weekends in a row to be able to invest in Mark Joyner’s “Farewell Package”. That’s what you’ve got to do sometimes – buy your way in.

That’s my message for today. I hope that helps some of you guys. Check out Dave Asprey’s stuff. Super cool guy. I’m excited for his book to come out. We’ll talk to you guys all again really, really soon. Thanks.

Aug 4, 2014

The secret of being present all the time.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I’m here in the car today with Dallin, who is my little entrepreneur, and we’re here for another exciting episode of “Marketing in Your Car”.

So today, its summertime still, and Dallin wanted to come to work with me today. He’s got his little packet of stuff to work on his projects. It’s going to be exciting. What are you planning on doing today?

Dallin: Find out how to build a robot.

Russell: He’s going to find out how to build a robot, which is a very important task. Do you think we’re going to sell that if we figure it out?

Dallin:    Maybe.

Russell: Maybe. That’s a good idea. So that’s his plan today [laughs].

I wanted to tell you guys about a thought I had over the last week. It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Marketing in Your Car”, and one of the main reasons was I in Maui with my beautiful wife. She had a birthday, and I surprised her, and had her family come and watch the kids while we were gone, and took her to Maui.

We had a lot of fun, but one of the things I learned on this trip – I re-realized, and I wanted to give it to you. I want to share with you guys. One of the last nights we were there, we went to this luau. Everything out there – you know how tourist traps are – they’re super expensive, right? I think it was a hundred and fifty bucks a person, so it cost us three hundred bucks to go there and have this luau, and we were sitting there and we ate dinner, and we enjoyed the conversation with some people we met, and it was really fun. Then they do an actual luau dance, with the hula dances and all of this stuff. It was really neat. We were watching it, and right in front of us to the right, there was this lady who got out her video camera. She opened it up, and she clicked “Record”, and she was looking through this little tiny screen at the hula dance, which, it’s nighttime. Her little hand-held $200 camera from K-Mart barely picked up any light. You could barely see anything, right? [laughs] She sat there for the entire ninety minutes or so recording it, looking through this little tiny screen, barely seeing it, so she could record it so she would watch it again later, I guess?

I remember I was sitting there with my wife, and we were watching and enjoying this thing, and seeing some amazing things – people doing some cool choreographic things. I don’t know – I love watching them perform, just doing their talents, and I looked over at this lady. She was looking through the screen, and she’s missing the entire thing so that she can record it, so that she can watch it later.

I thought it was ironic. How many times in life we’re missing the most important stuff that’s happening around us, because we’re looking at our computer screen or we’re looking at our phone, or we’re recording something and missing the entire thing. I was reading somewhere on Facebook the other day. I don’t even know whose concert it was. It was some concert. I think it was Jack White or something. I have no idea who that is, but I remember I was thinking Jack Black and he was a white guy, and his last name was White, so I think it was Jack White. Some of you guys probably know who he is. I think it was him. He was doing a concert. I think he was on some TV show – Jay Leno or, I guess Jay Leno’s not on anymore [laughs]. That shows you how up I am with my pop culture, right? But anyway, he was on this show, and he was talking about how they don’t let cell phones into their concert. He said, “We don’t want people watching it, experiencing it through this tiny little screen. We want them actually experiencing it. That’s why we do live concerts. They can go and watch the YouTube clips if they want to watch YouTube clips, but if they want to actually experience it, they have to be there and be present and experience it.”

That’s my big take-away, was that most of us aren’t present enough. I know I’m guilty of this in a lot of things – in my kids’ lives, sometimes, huh, Dallin?

Dallin:    Yes.

Russell: [laughs] That’s not a good thing to admit to. No, but even one day in Muai, we were sitting there, and my wife and I were in bed and we were texting on the phone, on Facebook, and stuff like that, and I texted her in the middle, and I said, “Hey, how are you doing?” It was just kind of funny.

We need to be more present in where we’re at, and we need to put away our phones. When you’re at something amazing, don’t worry about capturing it on video so you can watch it later. Watch it right now, and enjoy it, and be there for the moment, otherwise you’re going to miss it. It happens way too often. The more connected we become, the more its happening. It’s happening to everyone, around the world.

So I just want to encourage you guys. Don’t be the person who’s at the luau watching this amazing thing and trying to capture it on video so that you can watch it later. Be present, enjoy it now, and don’t miss the moment, because they go way too fast.

So that’s about it, you guys. We are almost to the office. Dallin and I will have a fun-filled day. We’re going to be launching a new project called “List Hacking” this week, which I’m super excited about. We’ve got a video guy coming over to film us and to film some stuff. We’re going to roll it out, and what’s exciting is we haven’t started building it yet. We’re going to build the entire membership site, sales process, everything inside of Click Funnels, and I will be able to get done in a day or so what used to take me two weeks, and so anyway, just kind of fun. We’ve finished the beta for Click Funnels, now we’re going to just be rolling out a bunch of projects just to prove how awesome it is. People can see the power of Click Funnels. It should be exciting.

We’re at the office, you guys. Have an awesome day, and we will talk to you soon.

Jul 21, 2014

Lessons in success from my 8 year old son.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a late night “Marketing in Your Car.”

I’m actually headed back home. Todd is in town. We launched Click Funnels last week. It’s been a smashing success, and now we’re doing the other side of the software business, which is keeping up with customer support [laughs], and features, and bugs, and all of that fun kind of stuff. It’s been a lot of fun. He flew in today, and we’re going to be hanging out this week, cleaning it up, and making it perfect so that we can do our big, big launch here. Hopefully within the next twenty or thirty days or so – we’ll plan that out tomorrow, but I’m super excited for that.

I wanted to do a podcast today, because I wanted to share a story that happened this afternoon with my son, Dallin. Dallin is the little entrepreneur in our family, for sure, and he’s always trying to figure out how to make more money. He’s doing yard sales and lemonade stands and all sorts of stuff.

Yesterday, he told my wife, Collette, that he wanted to open up a bank account. He has a couple of dollars, and she’s like, “Well you have to have more money to open a bank account.” So he’s like, “Well I need to make more money so I can open a bank account,” so that’s his mindset. We were driving home from church today, and he had this idea. He said, “Hey, mom and dad, if I lose a tooth today, then the tooth fairy can give me some money, and I can use that money to open a bank account.” I said, “Yeah, but how are you going to lose a tooth?” He said, “What I’m going to do is I’m going to get a string, and I’m going to tie it around my tooth, and I’ll tie it to a door handle, and I’ll slam the door, and my tooth will get pulled out.”

We kind of laughed and giggled, and that’s where I thought it was going to end. Fast forward thirty minutes later, we’re in the house, and my wife and I are making lunch for the kids and getting everything ready for that, and I keep hearing the door slam upstairs. I totally forgot about what’s happening, and so I’m yelling upstairs, “Quit slamming the door,” and then Bowen yells down, “It’s Ellie slamming it. She’s trying to pull out Dallin’s tooth.” [laughs] I was like, “Oh man, hold on,” and so like any good dad would do, I went and grabbed my phone, because I wanted to get this on tape [laughs], so I grabbed my phone, and I ran upstairs. He’d gotten the ribbon from wrapping paper on a Christmas box, and he’d tied a little knot around his tooth, and then he’d tied it to the door. All of the kids were up there trying to figure out how to make Dallin some money, and Dallin was literally trying to pull his tooth out so he could make money so that he could open up a savings account.

What was so funny was he was standing on the wrong side of the door, so when he would slam it, the string would actually get shorter instead of pulling it, and two of the times they were doing it, they were perplexed. They were like, “Why is this not working? Why is it not working?” Then they were both like, “Dallin, you’ve got to be on this side of the door.” I’m filming this whole thing on my phone, so Dallin goes on the inside, and they start slamming the door from the inside trying to pull his tooth out [laughs]. They would slam it, and sometimes the ribbon on his tooth would pop off, and other times it would start sliding through his teeth and not pull all of the way out. Anyway, I got, probably five or six times, them slamming the door and trying to lose his tooth. I thought it was really funny. Then I had them stop so that we could come down and have lunch.

I started thinking about it. I started thinking about this little kid, right? My little Dallin – he’s eight years old, and he’s got in his mind, he needs money.—““I need to figure out how to make some money.” There’re a lot of things he can do. He can do chores. He knows he can make some money doing that, but thought, “A quick way I can make money is to rip one of my teeth out.” Instead of thinking about it and how it’s going to hurt and all of these things, he just went and did it – just got out there and tied a string to his tooth, tied it to a doorknob, and started slamming the door trying to rip his tooth out.

I was proud of him, not because I thought it was the smartest idea to do, but I just look at how many entrepreneurs I have a chance to work with and how many people I work with. Most of them want something, and they want money. They want whatever, but then when you lay out, “Here’s the steps you need to do to accomplish that goal and get that thing you want,” they don’t do it. They’ll buy course after course after course, and they’ll learn, and they’ll hear, and they’ll have ideas and all of these things in their head, but they’re not willing to step up and fricking tie a string to their tooth and slam the door.

I think that that’s one of the biggest problems with people today. I’m so proud of Dallin for doing that – for getting off his butt, tying a string to his tooth, and slamming the door trying to make some money. I think that for any of you guys that are listening to this who are on that fence right now, and you’ve been in this learning cycle, and you’re learning, and you’re learning, and you’re enjoying this learning cycle, it’s time to get off your butt, tie a string to your tooth, and slam the door. I really think that mindset, that attitude, that thing that Dallin has, whatever that is, and I’m proud of him as my son for doing that, but it’s what all of us need.

I look at the things in my life that have been successful, and a lot of it is because of that – because I’ve just gone out there and tried to do that thing. If you’re struggling, this is your call to action. This is your time to get off your butt, tie a string to your tooth, and slam the door, and go out there and find these things. Just do it. Do what it takes to make money. It’s going to be painful. It might cost you some money. You have to get out of your comfort zone. You’re going to have to stretch probably further than you’ve ever stretched before in your life. You’re going to have to have some sleepless nights. You’re going to have to risk some of your own hard-earned money, and you’re going to have to be able to do a lot of work to reach your dream and to have what you want, but it’s worth it, I promise you guys. It is so worth it.

Anyway, that’s my message for you guys today. I thought it was kind of a fun story. If my eight-year-old son, to earn fifty cents or a dollar, whatever the tooth fairy would bring him [laughs], he would have done it, is willing to tie a string on his tooth – on a tooth that’s not even loose [laughs], and try to rip it out to make a buck, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to do to change your life? If you’re not willing to do something, then you’re probably going to keep being it at the spot you’re at right now, so figure out what you’re willing to do, get off of your butt, and go do it. That’s my message for tonight.

Thanks, you guys. I’m sure you’re going to be hearing more from me this week. I’m back from vacation now, and we’re having some fun rolling out the new company. I’m excited to be sharing all of the little behind-the-scenes things that are happening with you guys. Thanks, again, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Jul 7, 2014

How to trick your mind to get crap done.

---Transcript---

Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hi, everyone. Today is an exciting day. It’s a Monday, and we are about to launch Click Funnels. This week is our execution week, which is kind of fun. Now, luckily for me, my wife and kids went out of town this week. They’ve gone camping for the next three days, which basically means I get to pull all-nighters for three nights in a row, launch this thing, and then pass out for two weeks straight, unless there’re issues. Then it means I’ve got to not pass out for a week straight [laughs], but I’m fired up and excited.

I wanted this podcast just to talk about the process of actually getting a project or a product, whatever you want to call it, out of the door. I know that it’s something that all of us go through, and it’s funny. Todd and I were talking about this as we’ve been getting all of this stuff done. It’s kind of like, I think it’s Pareto’s Law, where no matter how much time you have left before the launch date, things will always fill up all of the available time to get things done. That’s what I’m feeling like right now. Literally, the launch date was two months ago, and then one month ago, and then this week, it’s happening, win, lose, or draw, and we still have so much stuff that’s got to be done [laughs], but it’s at the point now where we’re going to make it happen, and we’re put it out there. We’ll do whatever it takes and kill ourselves and get it done, and then we’ll back fill it, and fix any issues we see along the way.

I think one of the things that keeps most people from ever getting their projects out there, and I’m guessing most of you have got at least one, if not ten or twenty projects [laughs] that are mostly done, but they’re not finished yet. They’re not pushed out the door. People, a lot of times, ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done. How do you get so many things out the door?” I think part of it is because of the philosophy we started using five or six – I don’t know, maybe longer – seven or eight years ago.

It started when I heard a tape that was called “The Scuttlebutt Tape” from Gary Halbert and – it wasn’t John Carlton – Gary Halbert and Michael Fortin were talking about copywriting stuff, and one of the things that Halbert talked about was this concept called “Lead or Gold”. It was interesting to me because he talked about, and again, I don’t know if the story’s true or not, but the illustration of what he shared was powerful for me. He said that down in Mexico that when the mafia warlords wanted to change laws, they would go to the government and say, “Hey, you need to change this law.” The government would be like, “No. We’re not going to do that for you. That’s crazy.” [laughs] So what they would do then is the mafia would go and break in to people’s houses late at night – the government officials. They would wake them up out of their sleep, and they would come up to them, and they would have a gun and a bag of gold, and they would say, “We need you to change this law tonight, and you’ve got two options – lead or gold. Which one do you want? Do you want a bullet to the head, or would you like some cash?” Very quickly, somehow, laws were able to be changed. When the options are lead or gold, it’s pretty easy to get things done [laughs].

I started thinking of that in my business. How many times do we have projects where we’re like, “Oh, we’re going to launch this week. Oh, okay, next week,” and six years later, nothing’s ever happened. We started setting these deadlines, and we called them “lead or gold deadlines”, where it’s like, “We’re launching Tuesday at noon. Win, lose, or draw, it’s happening, and we’ve got two options – either lead or gold, and we’ve got to make this happen.”

When you give yourself those two options, and those two options only, it’s amazing what kind of stuff you can get done. It’s amazing how you can get people to stay late, and you can stay late, and you can work harder, and you can do whatever it takes. You’ll get that project done. So for us and all of our coaching groups who have been here for the last five or six years, I always talk about this, and I say, “Look, when you guys get home from this event, or home from whatever it is that you’ve learned about something, you have to go and set lead or gold deadlines for each step of the process.” You say, “Look, for me, first I’ve got to get the sales stuff done, okay? So my deadline is next Tuesday at three – lead or gold. There’s nothing that can move that date. I will die if it doesn’t happen,” and you just make sure it happens.

Then the next one – “We’re going to have this part done by this day, and you set that lead or gold deadline, and then you hit it, and you keep doing those things. For most of you guys who aren’t getting the things done that you want, it’s because you’re too soft on yourselves. You let yourselves off the hook, like, “Oh well, we ran out of time. We’ll do it tomorrow,” and when you do that, it keeps getting pushed forever, because of Pareto’s law where as much time as you give it, things will always fill up the expanse of that time, no matter what it is, and so I promise you guys, if you want your project tomorrow or a month from now, either way, you’re going to be up until three or four  or five o’clock in the morning the night before cramming to get it done, and so why not pick the date that’s earliest and get you more money?

That’s what we’re doing. I’m going in to the office now. We’ve got two and a half days away from launch time, and we picked our deadline, and we are going to hit it, and no matter what happens, we will make it work, and I’m excited. I’m fired up. It’s going to be an awesome day today. I hope you guys have a good day as well. Set some lead or gold deadlines, and we will see you guys again on the next episode. Thanks, everyone.

Jul 3, 2014

What really happened over the last three days…

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you once again to “Marketing in Your Car”.

So first off, I want to say that I think it’s about time we get a new theme song. What do you guys think? [laughs] The 1980s initial version is about ready to be retired, I think, so that’s going to be first on my list for this week.

Anywho, it’s been a little while since I’ve done a podcast. The reason why is that I’ve been neck deep in getting ready to launch Click Funnels, and I’m guessing from the outside, everything seems so calm and simple and easy for what we’re doing. We launched the first pre-launch video yesterday, but there’s always a story behind the story, and so I thought I would just share that to you guys while I’m heading in to the office, because I think it’s always fun.

First off, Click Funnels has been a big project [laughs]. We’ve been going crazy trying to get all of the templates done, working and testing them on every browser, and on and on and on, and it’s been a ton of work on that side, but it’s turning out amazingly. For the last three or four nights in a row, I’ve been pulling sixteen hour days. I work eight hours, go home and play with the kids, and then go back another eight hours, and then come home and sleep for a few hours, and then go back again. It’s been a lot of work on that side.

The last week we started planning out the pre-launch. What should we do? How should we do it? My team member, John Parkes, and I sat down and we brainstormed out an idea that it would be fun to have Chris, our number one designer, go head to head with somebody who’d never used Click Funnels before, and see who could build a website the fastest. We started brainstorming these ideas, and it went from this really simple idea to us renting out an octagon and having these two fight it out in the octagon. We got really excited. This was Thursday.

I had this guy who wanted to do the video, so I called him up and said, “Hey, do you have some time next week to do videos?” He said, “No, I’m flying into Tokyo on Monday.” I was like, “On Monday? Crap. I need these before Monday.” He’s like, “I have tomorrow, Friday, if you want to do it then.” I’m like, “All right, man. Let’s do it,” and so Thursday night, I’m scrambling to try to write scripts for this four video launch sequence. Typically I think, most people spend a couple of weeks writing out scripts to launch a brand-new company [laughs], but literally, I had to do it in about an hour.

Then I had to find an octagon, so I’m calling around, and luckily, some of my buddies own an MMA gym and we were able to rent an octagon. We got the camera person in. I needed to find somebody to be the other person competing against Chris. One of my friends is an author in town. She’s written a book, and she’s been super successful. She’s a life coach, and she also certifies life coaches, so I called her and begged her, and she dropped everything, moved all of her appointments around so she could show up and be the other person, and on and on and on.

That day, I get a call from the Ferrari place, because my Ferrari, which is a whole other story for another podcast, has been in the shop for six weeks. They’re like, “The Ferrari’s done,” and I’m like, “Oh, sweet. We can have the Ferrari in the video.” So I raced down to go grab the Ferrari, and on my way back, trying to get home, it died about thirteen times [laughs], so it still doesn’t actually work, but at least it moves forward long enough so you can catch a glimpse of us driving it on the video [laughs].

So we put the whole thing together, and then the video guy is scrambling because he’s flying to Tokyo Monday morning at 6 a.m., so he’s scrambling to edit the videos and put it all together and get all of his stuff done. Then he texts me Sunday night at about five in the morning and says, “Hey, I got it pretty much done. I left the hard drive out in front of my house, and you can go grab it, and hopefully the files will all work for you.” [laughs]

So I go and grab the thing, and it looked good, but there were some tweaks I needed, and my brother, who’s my main video guy, was heading out of town Monday morning, so I called him and tell him and his wife they can’t leave yet, and so he goes down on his computer and he’s editing the videos and tweaking some stuff to get it just perfect [laughs]. I swear, his wife is probably cursing me out, because they were leaving on this big family vacation. We get that back, and then at the same time, we’re in the process of moving our e-mail auto-responders again, for about the third time this year, to this company called MaroPost, and we’re having issues there. We can’t get the list imported [laughs], and then their scrubbing process, which should take an hour, took about three days.

Then we started building out the launch funnel inside Click Funnels, and honestly, the only funnel I’d never tested yet was the launch funnels, so we started testing them. The first time around, there’re always issues that come with any funnel. Then we’re rebuilding our entire launch funnel sequences and Click Funnels and we’re adding features, and it’s like this storm of things, literally, for the last four or five days. I don’t even know.

Finally, yesterday, I was in the office, and I hadn’t slept in about three days in a row. I literally am living off of our supplement that we’re launching in the MMA market, called “MMA Ignite”. I take a shot of that, every few hours to wake me back up, but the effects of it had stopped working yesterday. I think my body was just done. I was just dragging, putting all of the pieces together, and then finally we got the launch page up. We got the video live. MaroPost uploaded. I sent the e-mail out to the list, and I sat down, and I was just like [sighs], “We did it.” I was so excited.

I went home, played with the kids for a bunch of time, and then checked my phone, and a whole bunch of people were texting, “Man, that video is awesome. It’s the best video you’ve ever done.” You know, all of the things people message me on Facebook and stuff about how impressed they were with it all, and how good the scripts were and everything. It just made me smile, knowing that we pulled the whole thing off, literally, in about a day, if even that. I think it turned out pretty good, so behind the exterior, there’s always crazy stuff happening inside.

Oh, and not only that, we’ve got our support team, right? We ramped up because we were getting ready for Click Funnels, but then, low and behold, Neuracel just went crazy, and so we’ve got three full-time support people who’re doing Neuracel, and we have no one to support Click Funnels, so we’ve been scrambling and trying to hire people in Boise. We haven’t found anyone good.

Luckily, thankfully, and hopefully some of you guys listening have probably got some great friends who’ve volunteered who are good at something, like Garrett Pierson. He’s the owner of a whole bunch of sites, Trust Guard, Shopper Approved, Kart Rocket. He just dedicated his time. He’s coming up for a week to work for free just to help us during the launch week [laughs]. We’ve got a couple of other people that are I met on Facebook that are friends that are going to come in and work for a couple of weeks. People are literally flying here just to help out with the launch, just to help us so that it will go off opefullyHwithout a hitch while we’re finding a more long-term support team.

So anyway, it’s just kind of crazy. I’m grateful for everyone on my team that’s made this happen. I’m grateful for everybody outside of it, people like Garrett and others, who don’t have any vested interest, but just care about me and about us enough to come and throw in a helping hand. Some really cool things are happening, but I just wanted to share that, because I’m sure a lot of you guys, in your business, you see you’re doing stuff, and you feel like nothing’s working, and you’re going crazy, and you’re freaking out. Even though it may look like on the outside that we have it all together all of the time, we’re just like everybody else. It’s a lot of work and a lot of juggling, and when it all comes together in the end, it feels really, really good.

I’m excited. Launch Week is in less than a week – Launch Day. We’re just going to launch to our internal list first and we’re going to test that out and make sure we can handle the support, and then we’ll open it up to affiliates after that. It’s pretty exciting.

After I got home last night, after the kids went down, I had a chance to finally watch “24”, which was awesome, because it’s was Wednesday night, so I’ve had two or three nights in a row of wishing I could watch it, but I’ve been too busy working. I got to watch it last night. It was exciting, and I wish that show would never end. For those guys who are watching it right now, they only have twelve episodes a season, and they just finished up with number ten, so there’s only two more to go. We should have a 24-Dot Com Secrets “Marketing in Your Car” party for everyone. That would be fun.

Anyway, I’m in the office. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve got to go clean up a couple more messes and stuff for video number two, but I’m excited for it all. I appreciate you guys listening. I hope you got something out of this one, and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.

Jun 24, 2014

How to stop focusing on the good things, so you can grow the great things.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

All right, guys and gals, I’m actually driving right now in a brand new Lexus. Not because I bought a new Lexus, but because I took mine in for an oil change, and it turns out something was jacking it, and so they wouldn’t give me a loaner car. Then Brent that works with me told them, “You know Russell’s in the market for a new car. You might as well give him something nice. He may come and buy from you guys,” and so they gave me a brand new Lexus. I’m driving a pretty sweet car right now.

Today, it’s about seven in the morning. I’ve been awake for three hours so far. I got up early this morning for my accountability call, which again, I’ve mentioned this to you guys multiple times, and I encourage you to do this if you haven’t done this yet – find an accountability partner. The way we do ours is I write him a check, he writes me a check, and every two weeks we meet together. We have some goals and if we don’t keep one of our goals – if he doesn’t keep his goal, then I cash his check, and vice versa.

Right now I’m doing that with him, and I’m doing it with someone else in a spiritual standpoint. I have some spiritual goals, and I have a buddy who does, too. We did the same thing. We wrote each other checks, and if one of us screws up, we cash the other person’s check. It’s amazing what happens when you do this. I’m going to write a book about it someday, because I’m making huge strides in my business, and in my personal life, so I’m going to try to find another couple of accountability partners. Maybe I’ll do a weight loss one as well, and a couple of other things.

Today I want to talk about the entrepreneurial – I don’t even know what the right word is – ADD, right? Something we all get. We get into these shiny object syndromes, and the guy I had my meeting with, my accountability partner, today we were talking about stuff and I was showing him our businesses and how we were doing. I showed him our supplement business, which is blowing up and growing faster than anything I’ve ever had, and faster than I probably want it to be [laughs]. It’s a business that scares me. There’s liability that makes me nervous. There’s inventory management. All of these things that I haven’t done in the past, I can learn, and we’re learning and we’re doing, but it’s not my core competency. We’re making good money on it.

He asked me an interesting question. He said, “If you were to get rid of that business, Russell, how much money do you think you would make focusing on your core passion, your core business?” which is our marketing and Click Funnels and some of the other stuff that’s coming out in the next couple of weeks. I sat back and I thought about it for a while. He said, “You know, Russell, you’re struggling right now because this business is netting you whatever each month, but what you don’t understand is that that business may be costing you even more in your focus. You look at retailers like Wal-Mart. They have all of this shelf space, right? They look at every single SKU on the shelf, and if something’s not performing or making enough, they get rid of it, right? Their shelf space – they’ve got to be very protective of it. Entrepreneurs like us, our shelf space is between our ears, in our mind, and we’ve got to be very, very aware of it, and be very careful. If something’s taking up a lot of shelf space, and if it’s not making as much money as it should, you’ve got to take it out, because it could be suffocating other parts of your business.”

I was thinking about that this morning. I was thinking about how, whichever part of the business I focus on starts growing, so when we focus on supplements, “Boom,” it starts growing and growing and growing, and then all of the sudden, everything else starts hurting. All of the sudden we’ll look and say, “Hey, the coaching business is hurting,” and I shift my focus over there, and “Boom.” It starts growing and growing and growing. Then I look back and the supplements are suffering, and everything else is suffering. Whatever we’re focusing on is growing. So, what’s the opportunity that you have and that I have that’s going to make us the most amount of money? Let’s focus a hundred percent of our time and effort there, and let it grow. Don’t let these other good things suffocate and kill the great things.

This is stuff, obviously, I know and I’ve heard before, but it was a good reminder for me this morning, and it made me start thinking about some of my side projects, and made me start thinking about what I can sell, what I can kill, what I can give to partners, what I can do and where I can do it to get to the point where I can focus on the great things, and so that’s my focus for today. I just got home from the gym, and I’m going to go see my kids and play with them for a little bit, and then I’ll be in the office to go try to accomplish that, so it should be fun.

I hope you guys have an awesome day. I hope you guys can do what I do and take some inventory of your mental shelf space, and make some good decisions so that you’re focusing on the great things and not the good things. Thanks guys, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Jun 17, 2014

Are you the type of person who finds problems or are you the type of person who finds answers? Find out who you are on today’s exciting episode!

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell, and I want to welcome you to a very late night “Marketing in Your Car”.

It is currently 1:14 in the morning, and it’s funny. I volunteered at our church to lock up the building this week, and I completely forgot [laughs]. I was about to go to bed, and all of the sudden it popped into my head, so I’m driving to the church to go lock up. I thought I would jump on the phone and leave you guys all a message.

Today was the first day back after being gone for two weeks, which is kind of stressful. I don’t know – our business runs well, but when you get back there’re all of these little fires that are on fire when you come back, and you’ve got to figure out how to put the fires out and what to do, and there’re so many questions. You have this stuff you want to get done. You want to move forward, but all of this reactive stuff keeps pulling you back and pulling you back. I’m sure you guys have felt that.

It’s funny, because I still remember when my wife and I were engaged. I was maybe twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and I was starting this business. I thought I was so cool. I had my laptop, and I was selling stuff on eBay. I had a website, and I probably had two customers total, maybe [laughs]. I might not even have been that lucky, but I remember on our honeymoon, every day I’d have to turn on my laptop and check my e-mails and make sure customer support had been handled. I didn’t want my business to collapse, and it makes me laugh so hard now. I could have not e-mailed those two customers back for that whole week, and it probably would have been a smart idea.

But I digress, so I’ll come back to what I was talking about. I’m sure most of you guys who own your own business have that. You leave for a little bit, and you come back, and it’s just like you have to spend a day or two putting out all of these fires. Today for us, we specifically had a lot of stuff. I’m outside, and its 1:14 in the morning, so if I get mugged or something, we’re going to catch it live on the podcast [laughs], so all of you faithful marketers in your cars are going to be hanging out. Okay, the first door’s locked.

Anyway, so basically, I came back, and our supplement has been blowing up. I’ve talked about this during the podcasts. It’s literally just going crazy. We can’t even keep up with it. Literally, if we wouldn’t have run out of inventory a little while ago [laughs], we probably would have passed a million dollars in sales this month, which is crazy. It’s just growing and growing, and it’s like a wildfire. We can’t put it down. The immediate buyers, we had to cut them down to a fourth of what they were spending, and they’re still spending like crazy. We’re trying to order new supplements and import the ingredients from all over the country. The growing season’s over, and they don’t have enough in stock of the things we need. It’s just issue after issue after issue, and problem after problem [laughs].

We’re behind on support, and we’ve got two full-time support people and they’re still so far behind, we have to hire another two or three or four more on top of that. We’re putting out ads, and we’re trying to hire people. You have people that are applying for ads. We have an ad out there that’s pretty good, that gets them to want to. In theory, it gets them to. We make them jump through a bunch of hoops and do a bunch of stuff. They have to apply, and we have to get good people.

We ended up getting ten or fifteen good people that actually went through all of the hoops that we put out there and applied. We called them back, and out of everyone, only two people called us back. It’s just amazing how people, humans – disappoint me [laughs] over and over and over again. They just don’t do stuff. Its like, “If you need a job, then return the call, or...” I don’t know – just whatever.

So all of these kinds of things are happening, and then we’ve got our mini call center that we’ve set up, and they need more leads, and these other leads they don’t like. We need a new funnel. Our funnel has been stale because we’ve been driving so much traffic to it. It’s been seen by all of the audiences on Facebook. It’s been worn out. We need new leads for it. It’s just thing after thing.

Click Funnels is almost about to launch. We found out that there’s an error here, and we’ve got this thing here, and the day we were planning on launching, it turns out everyone on our team’s out of town. Literally, just all of these issues today – thing after thing, and by the end of the day, I have this little couch by my desk, and at the end of the day, I laid down on it, and I felt this overwhelming feeling. I was like, “Man, I’ve made more choices in the last eight hours than I typically make in a year,” and all of them are big choices.

I think it was Dan Kennedy who said that every six months or every forty-five days or something, that an entrepreneur’s going to make a decision that will make or break their business. I felt like today, I made enough decisions for our entire years’ worth of stuff [laughs]. I was lying on the couch, and I was overwhelmed. It was like, “Ugh, I’m so far behind.” I’m sure you guys have felt that, right? It made me think about – well not at first. At first I just felt overwhelmed. I had a sick feeling. My wife texted me and she said, “Are you coming home for dinner?” and I was like, “Yes, I need to get out of here. I need to just get away from it.” So I got away from it for a while. I ate some dinner. We may or may not have watched “The Bachelorette” tonight, which may or may not be my favorite show [laughs]. I kind of passed out during it a little bit, because I was pretty beat up and tired, and I fell asleep for a little bit.

Then I woke back up, and when I woke back up, I had some ideas. I contacted one guy, and I asked him questions. I got a whole bunch of ideas for the supplement, like how to fix that one. My buddy just gave me a bunch of some really good stuff from his experience. And then all of the sudden, I was just lying there, and this other idea just popped in to my head about how we could solve the application problem for our call center, and all of these things started coming, and I’m like, "Hey, Collette, I've got to go back to work. I’ve got to get all of this stuff implemented quickly, before everyone else wakes up in the morning,” and so I went back into the office until about 12:30, and I literally got most of the issues all lined out with all of the stuff I was stressing out about and all of the issues. My brain just needed a little reboot, and then I was ready to go back in and answer the rest of the questions and solve the problems, and now I feel like most of the problems are solved.

Now by tomorrow, I’ll go in, which tomorrow’s the fun day, because I’ve got lifting. I’m lifting weights in probably four hours from now, and I’ll have jiu jitsu practice tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun, but anyway tomorrow I’m going to go in and just do normal stuff, but it made me think tonight about something my dad told me, and I hope I don’t offend anyone with this. That’s not my intention. The sprinklers are on, so hopefully you guys can still hear me. So I don’t want to offend anybody, but my dad told me something when I was a kid, and my dad is an entrepreneur like me, and he had a bunch of his own little businesses and stuff that he did, and I don’t remember the situation when he told me, but I remember it had a big impact on me. He said, “Russell, there’re two kinds of people in this world. There're people who find problems, and there’re people who find the answers. You always want to be the latter.”

That had a big, profound impact on me, and I started thinking about that in all areas of my life, actually. I was thinking about wrestling. I was thinking about my family. I was thinking about business, thinking about our coaching programs, thinking about everything. There are two types of people. People who find the problems, and people who find the answers to the problems, and I was thinking about how, not all of them, but a lot of the employees on my team are people who find problems. They find a problem. If they have a problem, they come to you with it and say, “I found a problem. I found a problem,” and they just don’t find the answer.

There are a couple of guys on my team that are amazing people at finding answers. One of them who I’ll mention is this guy named John Parkes, on my team and one of the neatest people I’ve ever met in my life. I watched him today, because he gets the brunt of the problem people. They go to him first before they come to me. He has the major job of solving most of the problems. People come to him with all sorts of questions, and he finds them answers. He’s able to think about it, and find an answer. He’s a great person at finding answers.

It’s interesting. I’ve done this experiment over the years with people when they ask me questions, just to see. I think I heard Tony Robbins do it the first time. That’s probably where I got it from. People would ask him something. They would ask him a question, and he would say, “Well what do you think?” and they’d go, “Well, I don’t know the answer.” He’d say, “Well if you did know the answer, what do you think it would be?” The person would almost always give the correct answer afterwards, and so I’ve done that sometimes in the past. It’s interesting that most people can solve their own problems just by asking, “Well what do you think the answer would be if this was you?” and magically they can go, and they can answer these problems.

I think all of us have the ability to be the person that finds the answer, but for whatever reason, we’re nervous, or we like that crutch, or we have this thing where we always want to put it on somebody else. The person who’s willing to find the answers becomes the leader in every situation. In wrestling, I became a leader because people brought me problems and I found answers. In business, I’ve become a leader because of that as well. I look at our coaching program, and it’s interesting – a lot of the calls I do with our students – they come, and they’ve got an issue, and most of the time, they know the answer, and they just want me to tell them that they’re right. It’s just interesting how much people need that validation.

I think for you guys that are listening to this, think about yourself. Which kind of person are you right now? Are you the kind of person who finds the problem, or are you the kind of person who finds the answer? If you’re really the person that’s going to find the problem, I think the fastest way you can get a pay raise, or get more friends, or a bigger following, or whatever that thing is, is you’ve got to shift to the other kind of person, and I know that the answer’s there. When I hear some of our support people come and ask John questions, I know they know the answer, but they want the validation. They want him to answer it for them, because they don’t want to mess up. They don’t want to get in trouble, and they want somebody else to blame if something goes wrong, but if you’re willing to step into that role and be that person, and be the one who’s taking the brunt of the responsibility on your shoulders and if it’s wrong then you take it, you will go a lot further in this life.

That’s for sure, so that’s my message for tonight, and those of you who are entrepreneurs who have those days like I had today where it’s hard and you get beat down and you just want to lay down and cry for a while, just know that it’s okay. Lay down. Take a little nap. Watch The Bachelorette or whatever show it is that you need to, but then get back up and get back to work and solve your problems and make it happen. For all of you guys, focus on that. Focus on shifting from being someone who finds problems to somebody who finds the answers, and as soon as you do that, it will change everything around you.

That is it. I’m home. It’s 1:26 in the morning. I am up in four and a half hours to life weights. [laughs] I hope I don’t pass out. Hopefully something I said made a lot of sense. I’m pretty tired, so I’m not really sure, but I appreciate you guys listening in. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and I will talk to you all again soon. Thanks, guys.

Jun 16, 2014

Russell’s test for increasing his energy and focus for this week.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. It’s been a long time, but I want to welcome you to another “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, guys and gals. I hope you guys are having an awesome time. I actually took almost two weeks off from everything, which sounds really nice, but it’s really painful for entrepreneurs like me who just want to go and create cool stuff, so I’m back in the heat of it, and I’m super excited for this week. I hope you are as well.

While I was in San Diego, some really cool stuff happened. I had a chance to hang out with Todd, who’s one of my partners. He’s the one who has coded all of the Click Funnels, and it’s always fun hanging out with him, just talking about everything from financial stuff to making money to health to weight loss. Always fun stuff, and he got me thinking about a lot of things.

I had a chance to hang out with a guy named Drew Canole. Some of you guys may know Drew. If not, check out FitLife.TV, I think. It may be FitLifeTV.com – one of those two, anyway. Drew is a juicing expert and a super-cool guy. I saw him online, and I was really impressed with him. It turned out that he was in San Diego, so I wanted to go meet him. I had a chance to go hang out with him.

This weekend, I decided that I was going to go, and I was going to try some experiments on myself from an eating standpoint. I’m really going to track it closely. It’s interesting. I’ve done diets and weight loss things for my whole life. All the time from when I was wrestling and I was losing twenty-five to thirty pounds a week, to when I was just out of shape and trying to figure out how to get back into it, but I’ve never been that good at tracking everything, especially from a food consumption standpoint.

What I did is I went out on Saturday, and I went to Whole Foods, because I wanted to do the whole organic, grass-fed everything. I spent a lot of money [laughs], because Whole Foods is not cheap. I bought tons of vegetables – everything I could find – all of the leafy greens and as many different varieties of vegetables as I could find, and I went and found the organic grass-fed meat, and found a bunch of stuff. I came home yesterday, and I took all of my vegetables and I broke them down into five different days, so I’m going to be juicing every day for the next five days. From Mercola.com, I bought his new juicer, which is different from the one I had before. The one I had before was the Jack LaLanne one, which spins and grinds. This one’s got more of an auger in it or something like that, where it squishes the juice out instead of cutting it, so it’s supposed to stay fresher longer. I don’t know [laughs]. I thought it looked cool on the video. I’m not going to lie [laughs].

So I’m doing the whole juice thing, and then I started making frittatas, which if you don’t know what a frittata is, it’s probably the best way to eat simply, so I probably spent an hour yesterday, on Sunday, making frittatas that will last me for at least a week, if not longer. Basically, it’s eggs and vegetables and a whole bunch of stuff like that all mixed. It’s like an omelet/quiche thing, but we call them frittatas. I made some huge ones, and what was awesome, because I went and put in tons of spinach and kale and broccoli and okra and all of these really cool vegetables in my frittatas. I’m just veg-ing it up like crazy. So this is my experiment, guys. I’m calling it my hippie paleo juicing week-long thing [laughs]. I don’t know what I’m going to call it – something like that.

It’s funny. We’ve been teasing about how we were in San Diego, and the area we were in had all of these hippie-type people there. Everyone’s got dreadlocks, and they’re surfing all day long. We were joking about how when I was younger, we used to always make fun of the hippie culture and stuff like that – eating green, where now it’s the cool thing to do, so this is my hippie juicing paleo, because the frittatas are pure paleo the way we build them. It’s going to be fun, so I’m excited.

I’m excited to see how much energy I get from the whole process this week. It should be really, really cool, because I’ve got a lot of stuff happening this week, so I need the energy. I need the excitement. I need the newness of it all, so I’m excited. I’ll let you guys know throughout the week how it goes.

For you guys, I would say, “This week, figure out something different. Figure out a pattern interrupt. Figure out something that you’ve been doing. If it’s diet, or if it’s health, or if it’s how you wake up in the morning, or if it’s how you work, or whatever, figure out something, and just do a big interrupt like I’m doing right now – just a big pattern interrupt. Do something that’s just going to totally shock your system, and see what happens. For all I know, this could be the worst thing in the world, but I’m still excited for it. I think it’s going to be awesome.

I’m at the office, you guys. I am going to go and get some stuff done today. I hope you guys enjoy your Monday, and we will talk to you all again soon.

Jun 2, 2014

Why you should never ask somebody for free advice.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and I have a very special “Marketing in Your Car” for you for today.

Hey, everyone. I just got my hair cut, and I’m driving back home. I actually wanted to do a special podcast. I don’t normally log into Facebook very much because it stresses me out. Typically I’m getting a lot of people who are asking me for my help for free. It’s just hard, because I want to, and I wish I could give them all the attention. The problem is, with everything I’m doing right now in my own company, in my own business, and in my own coaching clients, it’s hard to find time to even sleep at night. There’s so much stuff always happening, and so I don’t typically log in that often, but the last week, I did for a couple of reasons. I just checked again when I was walking out of getting my hair cut. I saw a message, and it just made me think, so I want to tell you about two different people that approached me on Facebook. I won’t use their real names, but I want to share their approaches with you, because they were both very different.

The first guy that contacted me basically said, “Hey Russell, I’ve been watching you for a bunch of years. I love your stuff. I think you’re awesome. How much would it cost to buy an hour of your time?” I said, “Right now, I sell an hour for twenty-five hundred bucks,” and he wrote back and said, “Oh, that’s kind of steep, but hey, man, I love your stuff, and I think you can help me, so where do I send the money?” So I told him. He sent the money. Two days later, we were on the phone. We spent an hour on the phone with him looking at his funnel, building it out, tweaking it, giving him all the advice that he needed, and after he was done, he was like, “Man, that was awesome. I feel like I’ve shifted my focus. I know exactly where I’m going now, I’m going to go ahead and implement it. Hey, do you mind if I shoot some questions now and then as I’m building this thing out, to help me create it?” and I’m like, “Yeah, no worries.” So he went out, and he’s been building, and he shot me a couple of questions. I gave him some feedback, and I haven’t minded because he understood the value of my time, and what it takes for me to spend some time. I don’t mind helping him now, because he valued my time up front, and he was willing to invest, and now he’s trying to implement what I showed him, and so of course I’m going to help steer him in the right direction and have success. It’s been awesome.

Then I have this other guy. Again, a really nice guy, and my heart strings go out to him and to other people that I’ve gotten this message from. Literally, I think, five or six people this week sent me similar messages about, “Hey Russell, I love your stuff. I don’t have any money, but I want to work with you. I’d love it if you could get on the phone with me and coach me through this. I’ll give you half of my profits, and I’ll do all of this kind of stuff.” That’s their mentality, and it’s tough, because honestly, for me as a person, I can’t even tell you how much I want to, but it’s hard. Most of those I don’t respond back to, because it’s just so hard for me to tell them “No”, but it’s like, “You have to understand, that when I was getting started, I never would have gone to somebody who is as busy or had as much success, and just ask them for their time. I always would have gone and figured out how I could provide value to them, whether it’s money or whatever, because their time is valuable.”

I look at my schedule. For example, this week, I was at the office twice until 3 a.m. in the morning this week trying to get some projects done. I literally had, I think, seven or eight one-hour phone call consultations with people. Every single one of those people, outside of the first guy I told you about – he paid $2,500 – everybody else paid $25,000 for those, and it was hard for me to fit those $25,000 one-hour calls into my schedule, because it’s so busy with everything. I obviously made the time, because they made the investment.

Plus I’ve got the Reactive Coaching for our $25,000 students, and then on top of that, I’ve got my own projects and my own businesses, and in our supplement company, we’re in the process of trying to hire three or four more people. It has by far eclipsed our internet marketing business [laughs] to this point, which is exciting. We’re about to launch Click Funnels, which is a brand new company. We’re in the process of trying to find new office space and probably hiring a staff of, who knows – ten to twelve people to help with that.

I literally don’t have time to sleep right now. I go home. I spend time in the morning with my family and kids and at night with my family and kids. As soon as they all pass out, I’m back to work trying to move things forward, and it’s hard when I get an e-mail saying, “I just need an hour of your time. Remember what it was like when you were just beginning and you had no ability? If you had just gotten some guru to help you...,” and how it would help them, and again, my heart strings go out to them, but I don’t think people really understand the reality of it.

For me to carve out another hour of my time, I would have to put one of my projects on hold, and you look at opportunity cost. The one lesson I learned from my college education is opportunity cost. With opportunity cost, if you remember the concept, you’ve got two options. The opportunity cost is what you lost by not taking the other option, so for example, if I was to jump on the phone with this guy for an hour, the opportunity cost is that I’ve either got to give up an hour of time with my family, which is not something I’m willing to do at all, or I’ve got to carve out an hour of time from all of my other projects.

An hour of focused time working towards Click Funnels or an hour towards something else, will make me a lot of money. It’s hard, because what he is asking for and what people like that are asking for – they don’t understand what they’re asking for. They’re asking for an hour of your time. An hour of your time, literally, on the low end, is $2,500. I was trying to be nice to this guy, but because he was willing to respect the value of my time, I was willing to do it for $2,500, but the reality is an hour of time that’s focused on your own business is worth so much more than that.

I just wanted to share. It’s been on my mind. I may send him this podcast, and I hope it doesn’t hurt his feelings. That’s not my intention, but more so just to help him understand the value of other people’s time, and if you want to get someone’s attention, you’ve got to look at things differently.

When I first got into this business, I remember I went to this event, and there was this guy that was at the event. He was in this Mastermind group, and he was in four or five others, and I was like, “How in the world did you get in all of these groups?” and he said, “I learned something early on in life, Russell. I learned I can either work my way in, or I can buy my way in. It’s way easier just to buy your way in.” He had spent tons of money in to getting in to these different clubs.

I said, “How in the world do you afford that?” I think he had spent almost a hundred grand in these Masterminds. He said, “Well, I couldn’t afford it, so instead of complaining about the fact that I didn’t have the resources to afford it, I tried to get resourceful. I went out to a bunch of Internet marketing forums, and I found a bunch of people who were in similar situations like me. They couldn’t afford it, but they wanted the information, and so I said, “Look. This is the deal. I’m going to invest in these five Mastermind groups, and my total cost is going to be X amount of dollars. I can’t afford it right now, but if you will pay X amount of dollars into it, I will go to these events, and I will learn. I will do everything, and when I come back from these events, I will bring back and break down everything I learned, all the notes, give you everything, and you’ll get a chance, at a fraction of the cost, to go to all of these events with me, basically, to get all of the information I extract from these.” This guy literally got ten people to give him $10,000. He had $100,000 in cash to go out and join the best Masterminds in the world. I was just like, “Wow.” – resourcefulness, right? He didn’t have the resources, but he figured out a way to make it happen.

I always think about one of my favorite people I ever met in my entire life, and this is in the business, or out of the business, but it’s a guy named Stu McLaren. Before I even met Stu, I was putting on this workshop called “Affiliate Boot Camp”, and Stu paid $1,000 to be part of this boot camp. He’s one of the smartest people I have ever met. It was a life-training series that I did, and I’d do a teleseminar. Every teleseminar, I’d open it up for questions at the end, and the first person to pop on was Stu, saying, “Hey, Russell, that was amazing. I’m Stu McLaren. That session you gave was amazing. It just totally built me up,” and he talked about why it was so great. He’d ask me some questions, and then he’d thank me, and, “Boom.” Literally, for ten sessions in a row, Stu was the first one asking questions, the first one thanking me, all of that kind of stuff, and it was awesome. Then at the end of the event, he called me up one day, and he was like, “Hey, man, I’ve got an idea. We should work on this project together.” I knew who Stu was, and I knew he’d given me so much value from that side. Me, as an educator and a teacher – to have somebody invest in my business and thank me and all of these things along the way, it changes it. Where now, just like the dude who paid the twenty-five hundred bucks, I have a vested interest in him. I want him to be successful. I want him to take the advice. Yeah, I’m going to pick up the phone, and I’m going to return the call.

The other interesting thing is, in my Mastermind group, in our inner circle, we have a couple of different levels – anywhere from $8,000 up to $25,000 in our coaching program, and inside the programs, all of our members are able to ask me questions each week. They can submit video clips and write questions to me, and we can chat back and forth. It’s a cool process. What’s interesting is that the majority of people who ask me questions will jump on and ask me a question, and that’s it. We move on. Sometimes, they’ll say, “Hey, thanks,” but that’s it. There’re not many people that say, “Thanks,” and I’m fine with that.

I’m not looking for thanks, but there’s one guy whose name is Simon Cryer, and Simon signs up for the coaching program, goes in there, studies a bunch of stuff, and then he jumps into this thing where he can message me, and makes me this video, and all the video said was, “You know, Russell, thank you. This was one of the most amazing things in the world. It was awesome. It was...,” and all of this stuff. I watched the video, and then I was waiting for him to ask me a favor, a question, or whatever, and he never did. He just thanked me, and I was like, “Dude, that guy’s awesome.” Simon’s name, I remembered.

A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed me a question, and because I knew Simon’s name, and because he’d given me value, I literally sat up that night while my wife was angry at me, because she wanted me to go to bed [laughs]. I spent almost an hour on the computer making videos for him, mapping out the whole game process, showed him what he was doing right, showed him what he was doing wrong, sent him all of my files. I literally gave him a years’ worth of my research. I gave it all to him, one hundred percent, and I just said, “Hey, here you go, Simon.” He told me when he got that that he started crying, because he couldn’t believe that I would give him that. I told him afterwards, “You know what, Simon? You’re the first person that ever thanked me.”

It was interesting how that works, and so the reason for this, you guys, is I would just say – I don’t know what I’m trying to say, to be honest, but when you want things in life, there’s the right way and the wrong way to do it. The right way is to figure out how you can provide as much value as possible to other people, and if you do that, it’s amazing what they’ll do back in return for you.

Sometimes that is paying people, right? I pay coaches all of the time. I wrote Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher a check for $25,000 in January, because I wanted some of their help. I’m friends with them. I could text them. I could call them, but I wanted to show them that I have respect for them and what they do, so I wrote them a check. I asked them one or two little questions here and there, and those things have transformed my business.

I look at Bill Glaser. I was in his Mastermind group for six years. I spoke on his stage tons of times, and one day I had a question. Instead of calling him and saying, “Hey, Bill, I have a question for you,” I called his assistant, and I sent him, I think, fifteen hundred bucks for an hour of his time. We got on the phone, and we talked through it. It’s just you understanding that people are busy, and yes, they may have time, and they’re there for their buddies or whatever, but if you’re going to pick their brains or you’re going to do whatever, understand that that’s not a small thing.

I have people all the time that are like, “Hey, man, let me take you to lunch and pick your brain.” In my life, I have not had the luxury of having lunch for months. I don’t have time for lunch. I eat while I’m working, because I don’t have time to break away and go to lunch. I have too many projects and too many things that are happening. If I were to go to lunch, I would miss time with my family, so I don’t eat lunch. So for them to say, “Hey, Russell, I want to take you to lunch and pick your brain,” it seems like in their mind, they’re thinking it’s such a small thing –“Hey, I’m going to buy you lunch,” but for me to pull away and go to lunch, it’s like, “You don’t understand the opportunity cost of that. That will cost me on the lowest end, $2,500, and on the high end, I’m losing $10,000 to $15,000 or more by letting you take me to lunch to pick my brain.”

I think that it’s important to understand that, especially with people you’re trying to get to, trying to get access to and need information from. Figure out ways that you can provide value first. Coming to someone and saying, “Hey, I’ll give you half of my business,” or, “Hey, if you do this, I could make a lot of money, and I’ll give you part of it back,” that’s the same pitch everyone is giving them.

It’s funny. I had a guy – this is another one. I get these all of the time, so I apologize for the rant here, but I had a guy the other day who came up to me and said, “Hey, Russell, this is the deal. I pitch you. You’re the one I want to work with on this project. This project’s awesome. What I want you to do is I want you to work with me to set the entire thing up. We’ll do this, this, and this. Help me launch and help me do everything and from that I’ll give you a percentage of the profits.” I wrote him back, and I was like, “Dude, for the effort that it would take for me to go and do what you just asked me to do, <em> </em>I could do the exact same thing on my own project and keep all of the money. I don’t think you understand that. You’re not providing me value by giving me half of your company and letting me do all of the work. There’s no value for me in that, all right?”

And so it’s just an understanding of you looking at the people that you want information from and figuring out, “How can I serve them first?” Stu McLaren was smart. He did not come to me, day one, and say, “Russell, I need this. I need this. I need this.” He said, “How can I serve Russell first? I’m going to join his coaching program and ask him questions. I’m going to edify him, and I’m going to do all of this stuff, and I’m going to build a relationship,” and now, when Stu calls, I will drop anything. When Stu says, “Russell, I need this,” I will. To this day, if Stu was to call me at three in the morning and tell me that he needs an accountant, I’d be there. That’s how much rapport he’s built with me.

I look at somebody like Simon. After that whole thing happened, I happened to be in Dallas one day, and I think Simon’s from Dallas. We e-mailed, and an hour later, we’re hanging out. We spent the whole day together, and I consider him a close friend. He came out to Boise. We went to the fights together. All of this stuff came from him saying, “Thanks,” from him figuring out what I needed in my life to help me. Because of that now, I have this reciprocity, where I want to make sure he’s successful, and he’s going to be successful, because he played his cards right.

This guy that came to me first and said, “Hey, I’m going to pay you twenty-five hundred bucks for an hour of your time because that’s what it’s worth to you right now,” I’ve probably answered fifteen questions for him since then, because he respected my time. It helped me to feel that value first, and so, yes, I want to help him back out in the other direction.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears. In all aspects of your life, whether it’s relationships, whether it’s business or whatever it is, this advice is important. It’s key, and you need to understand it.

I don’t want to admit this, but one of my favorite shows on TV is “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”. I watch this show, and I cringe every single time, because these guys get two minutes with the bachelor or the bachelorette to get to know them, and the ones that always blow it are the ones that get on there and go, “Okay, so my name is Joe, and this is what I do, and this is what I love,” and they just start talking about themselves, and just dump all of this garbage on the person that they’re on this date with. The girl gets done and walks away, and they’re like, “Wow. I know everything about that guy, but he didn’t ask me a single question about myself.” The guys who are successful are the ones who sit down and ask the girl questions. –“Tell me about you. Tell me about this.” Those are the ones that succeed. The ones that fall in love are the ones who are not talking about themselves and telling them why they’re great. It’s the ones who go on the dates and ask questions to the other person.

When I was in college, I had a roommate. He was one of the most fascinating people ever, and I say that because I always thought that. I remember always thinking that this guy – John Merritt was his name. I thought, “This guy’s just fascinating.” He was one of the coolest people. I just thought he was awesome.

One day, I came home from something, and I sat down, and I was talking to him, and he literally asked me questions directly for probably an hour straight – just question after question. Everything he had to say, he seemed more fascinated by what I said, and I was like, “Man,” and all of the sudden, in the middle of this I remember pausing and thinking, “Oh, wow. I think he’s so fascinating, but I’ve never asked him a single question. I’m like that guy – I’m the bad date, but he’s the most amazing person in the world.” He just kept asking me question after question after question. Everything I said, he seemed fascinated by, and that’s what he gave me. That’s why I always wanted to be around John. Everyone wanted to be around John. He was one of the neatest people ever.

So anyway, there’s some stuff for all of you guys to think about. I have no idea if this went the right direction or not, but I hope that you guys got some value out of it.

I am at the bank grabbing some money, so I’m going to jump off for now, and I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all soon.

May 29, 2014

The little app that helps me get done three times more than anyone else I know.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, everybody. I hope you have an awesome day today. I was at the office late last night working on some secret projects, but some cool stuff happened. One, for example – I think I’ve mentioned this before. I’ve been working on a book that is my first real book. I really going to get it published and try to do the whole “New York Times ‘Best Seller’” thing, but anyway, I needed somebody to write some blurbs and stuff for the book. I needed someone to write a “Forward” and that kind of stuff.

My dream person to write the Forward was Tony Robbins, because I know Tony, and so I came to him. –“Would you mind writing me a forward for my new book?” I was assuming he’d say, “No,” because he’s pretty dang busy, you know? He wrote me back and said, “Hey, I wish I could, but I’m in the middle of writing my own book, but if you want, I could write a blurb, a quote, to put on the book.” So I was like, “All right.” So he sent me a quote last night, and it was awesome.

I’m driving, so I don’t have it in front of me, but it was something about how – well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You guys will see it. It made me feel pretty good. I was excited. I’ve got a quote from Tony that’s going to be on the book, and then I still need a forward written. I think I’m going to get either Dan Kennedy or Bill Glaser for the forward. I need them both. Can you do two forwards? That would be pretty sweet.

Anyway, I’m super excited for the book. It’s almost done. I should have the rough draft all finished by this weekend, and then I’m heading out to a Mastermind meeting out in San Diego, and so I’m going to be proofreading it out there. It should be pretty awesome, so I’m excited for that, for today.

I want to share with you guys a tool. I don’t share enough tools with you guys, I don’t think, so maybe I’ll start doing more of this. There’re three or four tools that I use to run my entire business, and this one I’m going to share with you guys today is about the simplest, most dumb thing in the world. At first, honestly, I downloaded it as a joke, and then I started using it, and now I’d say I probably look at it thirty times a day. It’s one of my most important things ever.

The story behind it is that back when I first got my phone – actually that’s not true. I’d had my phone for a couple of years. One time I was looking for some kind of task management or to do list software, and there’re tons of them out there. Most of them are just lame, but there was this one that was called “Tomorrow”, and basically what it is, is this app on your phone. You have a “To Do” list, and you put in all of your to do’s, and then can see them all there. What you can do is, if you say, “I’m not going to get this done today,” you can click a little button, and it pushes it to tomorrow. That’s all the app does. It’s a to-do list, and then you can push things to tomorrow. I think the joke behind it is, “Oh, just push it off.” You can just slack off and keep pushing things until tomorrow.

I started using it on my phone for a while. I didn’t really use it a lot, but then one day, I don’t know what happened. I was getting ready to look for some to-do software, and I found that they actually have an online version as well that syncs with your phone and with your iPod and your iPad and with all of your devices, so I logged in there. It’s “Tomorrow dot D-O”. Tomorrow.do is the website. It’s free to use. I log in there, and I have my huge to-do list.

What’s cool about it is that in the past, I’d have to-do’s – I’d have a notepad of paper, and things just always slipped through the cracks for some reason. It always slipped through the cracks. I’d have a notepad of paper at my house, and one at the office, and one in my car. I’d have all of these papers everywhere, and it was hard to keep track of everything. Whereas now, with Tomorrow.do, it’s on my phone. It’s at my office. It’s on all of my computers. What’s cool is when I’m sitting there, like when I’m driving somewhere, and it’s like, “Oh crap, I need to do this thing,” I open up the app real quick and type it in, and, “Boom,” it’s saved.

Then what it does is, at midnight, everything that was on tomorrow’s, “Boom,” all gets shifted over to today, because now it’s today. If I’m up late at night, usually I’ll do it at night, if not, then first thing in the morning when I wake up. I’ll see all of my to-dos. Everything that is still in my queue for me to do, and then I just start going through and I just push everything until tomorrow that I know I’m not going to be able to do today. I push, push, push, push, push, and then all I have left a list of four or five things I need to do today, and it just feels awesome.

I go through it, and every time I get something done, I log back in, cross it off, and I can’t even tell you the feeling I get after I cross something off. It’s like the greatest thing in the world. Literally, for the last eighteen months or so, this little tool has been how I’ve been able to push forward and get things done and not have things slip through the cracks, and just keep cranking on things, and so, if you’re looking for a way to get more done and make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and also for me, it organizes my day. It shows me exactly what’s most important, but I don’t lose track of the stuff I still need to do. It’s my favorite thing in the world, and it’s free, so I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Just go to Tomorrow.do, log in and create an account, and download the app. I think the app’s just called “Tomorrow”, I believe, but if you can’t find the app, just go to the website and the website will link to the app as well, but it is awesome.

Anyway, I’m at the office today. I’m going to go in to the office, and the first thing I’m going to do is open Tomorrow.do, look at my tasks, shove everything off until tomorrow that I’m not going to get done today. Then I’m going to start busting out those things, and I’ll bet you I will accomplish more in the next four or five hours than you can do all day, because I’ve got this little tool. You guys, go try it out. You will love it. I’m at the office. I’m going to go have some fun. I will talk to you guys soon. Thanks for listening.

May 23, 2014

Last night I saw one of the most powerful uses of the “attractive character” ever. Let me show you how Lindsey Sterling used the “attractive character” to get her audience to fall in love with her.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, everyone. It’s early, and I’m heading to the gym, but it’s nice, because now that it’s summertime, it looks like noon at 6:30 in the morning. I love summer. I’m excited for it.

I wanted to share with you guys a really, super awesome experience. Last night, my wife and I had a chance to go to a Lindsey Stirling concert. If you don’t know who Lindsey Stirling is yet, go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling”, and look. There’re a couple of really good videos. One of them is of her playing violin and dancing in fire, and one’s her running through igloos. It's definitely worth watching.

She did a show up here in Boise in a really small venue called “The Knitting Factory”, where only about five or six hundred people could jam into this place. It’s standing room only. We went to it, and it was awesome. I’ve heard a couple of pretty cool things in my life, and this was one of the neatest experiences in entertainment I’ve ever seen. We were talking about it beforehand, the fact that, if you watch her, she plays the violin while she dances. It’s a really cool blend of talents. It’s just so different. She was on “America’s Got Talent” a bunch of years ago, and Pierce Morgan kicked her off [laughs], and all of this stuff, but she just kept going and going, and now she’s got this. I think this is her second tour, and she’s done really, really well. What’s interesting is, if you look at her, she’s really good at playing the violin. I’d say she’s an above-average violin player, and she’s a good dancer. I wouldn’t say she’s a great dancer. She’s a good dancer, but the fact that she blends those two together makes her unique and different, and literally, the show last night, I felt like was world-class. I can’t even say enough about how awesome it was.

It was interesting, though. There was one thing I wanted to mention, because I thought it was profound from a marketing standpoint. I don’t think many other people really caught it, but as you guys all know, I’m obsessed with this whole marketing thing. I’m looking at what people are doing and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it and the reaction from the crowd and stuff like that. The one thing that she did that was super cool – she came out, and she played two or three songs, and everyone was going crazy. Then she needed to take a break really quickly to change outfits. She goes off the stage, and all of the sudden, behind, on the main stage, there’s a screen that’s got effects and all of these things happening. All of the sudden, this thing pops up, like a little movie, and it says, “I don’t think we’ve been officially introduced yet,” and then it shows Lindsey when she’s an infant, and it shows her as a toddler, and it shows her as a two-year-old, and a three-year-old, and then five, and six. It’s showing her throughout her whole life – these little video clips of her saying cute little things and doing stuff, and showing her dancing, and showing her practicing violin. All of her experience that got her to this point, basically, you saw in this little three-minute video, and literally, instantly, it went from everyone going there, thinking who she was and seeing her as a fan, all of the sudden, everyone saw her at a different level.

At the event last weekend, I talked a lot about the “attractive character”. I’m sure you guys, if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you’ve heard me talk about that and the importance of it and what it does for your brand and for everything you’re doing. I would look at that video, and it was just like, “Man, look at how it changed everybody in this room. We all went from Lindsey Stirling and people who wanted to get out for the night to do an event to people who were fans. She did that all in a little three-minute video. It was not professionally done, but it brought out all of the elements of attractive character, and it was awesome.

I’m in the gym, but I want to keep talking about this, so I’m going to pause it, and hopefully when I come back out to the car, my recorder won’t have shut off. I’m going to pause this, and I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.

All right, I am back. That was a hard workout [laughs]. So I’m going to continue where we left off. We were talking about Lindsey’s concert. I was talking about the video and the whole attractive character concept, and I’ve had a lot of people ask me, when we talk about attractive character, “How do you introduce yourself to the audience, and how do you build this relationship?”

A lot of times, I think people are confused. They’re thinking, “How do I do this on the front end before someone meets me?” You create your own squeeze page or on your landing page or whatever, to get somebody in the door, just like Lindsey. She started the concert. She came out. She did two or three songs, and then after we built that initial rapport, it’s like, “Here, let me tell you my story.” Boom – all of the sudden, it sucks you in. For us, usually on your front end or your squeeze page, it’s kind of blind, trying to get somebody in the door. Now if they’re in the door – “Boom.” Now it’s where you introduce your attractive character and everything else.

One of the big questions we had at our event last weekend was from one of the girls that were there. She was really cool. She was talking about how, “How come all of the ads are ugly, and they’ve got red outlines, and you go to these squeeze pages, and there’s no branding? They’re just ugly. I want to have banners that are brown and yellow and that use my colors,” and all of these things. I was trying to explain it to her, and I said, “That’s fine, but there’s a time and a place. Your initial goal is to get as many people in your front door as possible. Because of that, you’ve got to use what works, and what works a lot of times is this cheesy stuff – headlines and color schemes that probably don’t match your brand and your fill, but that’s okay, because your initial goal is to just get them in the door.” As soon as they come through that front door, for us at least, we immediately transition from a kind of a cold, high-conversion funnel to our branding stuff.

That’s the way that we look at the way that we drive our traffic. It’s a two-step process. Step One, bring them in with whatever converts the best, and then immediately, now that you’ve got them, they’re on your list. Now it’s time to start building your brand and your attractive character and all of those things, where now you’re getting them to build the relationship. That’s how you start getting people to convert better on the back end, because I agree one hundred percent. I think that branding on the back end is important. In fact, I think you’ll sell way more.

For example, this week we sold four people our $25,000 package, which is awesome. That’s by far a record for our high-end coaching things in a week. We sold four of them on the phones. I never could have done that off of a cold campaign, where somebody comes in off of a cold squeeze page, and we call them to sell. No, they come in off of a cold campaign, and then after we’ve got them, now we share our attractive character, and we share stories, and we share our branding. We do all of this stuff to warm up that relationship, and get us to the point where somebody will come in at a higher level.

Anyway, I’m not sure how exactly that relates to Lindsey’s concert, but it’s just something that’s interesting. The other thing, and again, this is me, from the marketing standpoint. I always look at situations and stuff from the perspective of, “What would I be doing different if this was mine. If they hired me as a consultant, what would I do?” One of the big things that I notice – oh, and there’s a cop, a motorcycle cop, shooting people with his gun [laughs], and I think I clipped it.

All right, I’m back. I was looking at what they’re doing, and they had this pre-band come out first, and they were great. They sang and got everybody excited, and then they took thirty minutes to reset the stage and everything. Then Lindsey came out, and again, she was just awesome, from the very first second she walked in. What was interesting is I’m looking at this room. There were maybe five hundred to a thousand people, all jammed. We’re all standing-room only, and it’s a really cool facility, and literally, there were probably ten of us – my wife and I, and a couple of others who were jumping around, having fun, and everybody else was just kind of standing there looking at her. I think everyone enjoyed the experience, but we were at the equivalent of a rock concert or more, and nobody’s moving around.

I was thinking a lot about Tony Robbins, when we did his events, and when we were at his event, I’m the kind of person who, I don’t like dancing. We didn’t dance at our wedding. I just don’t do that. At my first Tony Robbins event that I went to, everybody was dancing like crazy, and for the first eight hours, I refused to participate in the shenanigans. I did not want to be dancing, right? [laughs] After a while, he broke me down to where we were all just going crazy, and it was awesome. I remember that next day was the first time I ever met with Tony. We had a little private meeting, and we were talking. We were in Toronto, and he said that it always takes a while to get the audience in a state where they’re willing to jump around and dance and go crazy and leave their inhibitions behind, and he said that at some events, that happens really, really fast, and other ones take a long time. He said that Toronto took a long time. It took five or six hours before he felt like he’d broken through and everyone was playing full out.

So it took a process, but I was thinking about what Tony does. When you show up at his event, he’s got thirty people on stage dancing, and they’re trying to get the whole audience dancing, and everything’s moving, so as soon as he walks out on stage, the whole audience is already dancing and moving and jumping around, and so it’s easy to kind of step into that and start running with it.

At Lindsey’s thing, everyone was sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting, and then she comes out at level ten, but nobody had been moving and dancing and jumping, just people like my wife and I, who’d been to Tony Robbins. We like jumping around now [laughs]. We’re jumping around, and everyone else is sitting there, even after her seventh or eighth performance. It was insane. It was so good, and again, my wife and I are jumping around crazy, and she like comes out to the audience, “You guys are awesome. There’s a pack of girls out there going crazy,” and literally, there was probably twenty of us, maybe in the whole audience who were going nuts.

I think for her I would look at, before she comes out, getting a bunch of people on stage, getting the audience dancing and moving and coach them and train them and get them to get in the right state that you want so that when you show up, their energy level’s at a different level.

Two times ago, when we were in New York, we went to “The David Letterman Show”, and what was really interesting was the fact that before the show, we had someone who took our entire audience and coached us through the entire process and coached us through what we’d need to do. –“This is what David needs. He needs you laughing. He needs you moving. He needs your energy,” and they’d coach us through it, and when we got into the studio, and it was the same thing. They’d coach us through it again, and they got us all prepped. Then Dave came out, and, “Boom,” we were at level ten by the time he showed up. I think from a marketing standpoint, that pre-frame is big.

Now that concept can work anywhere. When I used to do teleseminars and webinars, I would get on there, and they were all quiet and then when we’d get started answering, I’d say, “Hi, this is Russell,” and I’d get started” I remember five or six years ago, I was doing a teleseminar with Armond Morin, and I showed up ten minutes early. He was on there for ten minutes prepping the event, getting people excited, getting them fired up. –“This is what’s going to be happening. You’re going to have a chance to listen to Russell, and it’s going to be great. Thank you so much for coming,” and then he had this loop, where he kept on getting people fired up for this thing, for ten or fifteen minutes before we started. Then, “Boom,” we started, and we were at a level ten.

So that state, the state that whatever people enter into whatever experience – your teleseminar, your webinar, your event, your sales process – there’s a lot of ways you guys can manipulate that. If Lindsey’s crew were to hire me, that’s what I would be focusing on – how to manipulate that pre-frame before she shows up, so that when she shows up, and when she stepped on the stage, it would be at a level ten from day one. And I’d say that idea is for you guys too. Think about all of your sales processes, how to crank that up and get your audience at level ten before you start speaking or selling or teaching.

I’m back home. I’m going to go eat and get ready for the day. I appreciate you guys. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you have a chance to go to a Lindsey Stirling concert, do it. It was awesome. Worst case – just go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling” and watch some of her stuff, and you guys will be blown away by her talent, for sure. All right, guys. I’m out. We’ll talk to you again soon.

May 22, 2014

When is it smart to expand and grow your company vs keeping it small and lean?

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell, again, and welcome to “Marketing in Your Car”.

All right, guys and gals, and everybody else who’s listening in, I’m heading to the office today, and this is what’s been on my mind, because we’re about to do a really, really cool thing. As you guys know, I’ve been talking and bragging and being super-excited about Click Funnels. Last weekend, as you know, we did our Mastermind, and we did our live event. Some of my buddies were at the event, Garrett and Scott – they run a couple of sites. They run TrustGuard.com, ShopperApproved.com, KartRocket.com, and they’ve been really, really successful in the software space. In fact, I can’t tell their numbers, but last month they did insanely well for themselves.

What was cool is while they were sharing their pricing model and how they upgrade people and stuff like that, it opened a huge light bulb in my head, because the way our old pricing was structured, we really had some virtual limits on what we could do and how much money we could make. Anyway, that’s where things were at, and after they showed us their pricing model, it opened up the door to a whole new world, and I’m really, really excited. And then they showed us where they had this mini call center that ascends people who get a free trial, and sends them in to a yearly contract which goes from $0 up to, for a year, $3,000 or $4,000 for that contract.

I really think that that’s the route that we need to go with our company. We completely changed our pricing structure because of it, and with that, we started looking at, “Hey, if we’re going to do this model – what they’re doing, we’ve got to have our own mini call center that’s [? 49:24] ascending trial people, and doing demos, and upgrading them, and this whole thing,” If we’re going to do that, and we’re going to do it right, we’ve got to build a team to be able to do that [laughs]. We’re about a month away from rolling out Click Funnels, and we want to have people in place so that when customers are coming in, we’ve got to obviously have a support team, which is going to be big, but also a team to upgrade and to do demos and everything else. We were mapping it out yesterday. To do that, we’re going to need a small team of people, initially, of, who knows? Four or five people, maybe, which now brings me to my own personal fears.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve got fears in business. Earlier in my career, I went and got excited, and we ended up building a company with over a hundred employees, and it was scary, but it was exciting. But it went down, and so now I’m in a spot where we’ve got something that I think is going to grow, and it’s going to grow really, really rapidly, and we want to make sure that the infrastructure and everything’s in place. So what do you do? Do you not build those things out, and try to keep it small and lean, and support suffers a little bit? Or do you put the extra costs in and try to go big? There’re so many variables, and so the question on my mind today is to grow, or not to grow? What do you do?

I’m just kind of walking you guys through my mindset, because part of me wants to have this whole infrastructure in place from Day One so that we can scale, and part of me is nervous about that, and I’m sure that a lot of you guys are kind of in that same spot. A lot of people are always asking me, “Russell, we’re building our company. Who should we be hiring first? When should we be hiring people?”, and all of that kind of thing.

Some of the best advice I got was from the book, “REWORK”. He talks about in there that you only hire when it hurts, and so anyway, I have these three or four different internal dialogs happening inside my mind, and I’m not sure of the answer yet, so I’m excited to say I’m going to meet with the team and be going over that, and figure it out. Obviously if we do decide to take this span, we’re going to start with the smallest team possible, but also big enough that we’ll be able to handle the influx.

Some of the cool things that we’re planning when we roll this out, as you guys will see, we’re going to have a Tesla club. We’re going to be giving away a Ferrari. We’re going to be doing a bunch of really cool things, and to be able to facilitate that, obviously, there’s going to be a lot of growth, and we need to have things in place, and so we’re in this ‘chicken and the egg’ kind of spot, and it’s really fun, and it’s really exciting. I’m excited to see what comes from it, but anyway, that’s the game plan today.

One of my big focuses is to figure out, internally, are we going to grow or are we not going to grow? Are we going to figure out smarter ways to do it? Are we going to try to have this happen with people that are outside of the company, or are we going to try to do internal? If we do keep it internal, do we get a bigger office? What are the plans? What should we do? So instead of doing it the way I used to do it, where we would just start running – which there’re benefits to the ready-fire-aim model, but I want to try to do this right this time. I want to make sure that as we’re growing, that we’re growing correctly, and that we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t put our company at any kind of risk or harm, but in a way that we’re growing very organically, but very rapidly as well.

Anyway, it’s a fun conundrum. I don’t know if that’s the right word. It’s a fun puzzle. I don’t know about you guys, but man, business is so much fun. It’s every day waking up and you’re playing this game, and you’re trying to figure out what goes where and what’s going to be the best way of how to optimize it, but every single thing you’re doing, you’re always risking. You’re gambling, and sometimes you’re gambles pay off, and sometimes they don’t.

One of our 25K clients – I had a call from him yesterday. He’s a young, 22-year-old kid who’s crushing right now, doing over a hundred grand a month, and he’s doing awesome. It’s interesting. We test things, and he’s like, “I’ll run ten things, and eight of the ten will be losers, but those other two just blow up, and they make everything else worthwhile.”

It’s interesting, and so I look at us in our spot right now, and it’s exciting and fun in trying to decide which direction we want to go, but doing it, again, more methodically this time, as opposed to just running and jumping like I often did in the past. For you guys, I hope that gives you some excitement, and helps you start thinking about your business. Is it time to grow? If so, what’s the strategy? What’s the right way? What’s the wrong way? How do you do it virtually versus internally?    All of the fun things we’re coming up with – I’ll let you guys know in the future what we come up with, and where we’re headed.

Part of me would love to get a new office. Our office is nice now, but one that’s a little bit bigger, where we could have more space for our team to be doing that kind of stuff, but then also, it would be fun to have our own little spot where we could do our own little video studio, and a couple of other things, and so I may call my old commercial real estate realtor up here in Boise and look around and see if we can find a spot that’s a little bit bigger that give us the ability to have some cool stuff like that. So who know? I’m excited.

I’m at the office. I’m going to go have some fun today. I’ve got about two hours of work, then I’m heading to jiu jitsu, which will give me about an hour and a half to go and try to beat some people up, which always helps me out, and then tonight, we’re going to go watch Lindsey Stirling, which will be pretty exciting. If you don’t know who Lindsey Stirling is yet, go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling”, and look for the video where she’s playing the violin in the fire. She’s a rock star, and that’s who we’re going to go see tonight. It should be a fun day. I’m excited. Thanks, you guys, and we will talk to you all again soon.

May 21, 2014

A simple lesson that Russell learned from his carpet cleaner.

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Hey, everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to an amazing, beautiful outside day, and a new episode of “Marketing in Your Car”.

I just want to share. I had something that made me smile over the last day or so. I thought I would bring it up to you guys. As you know, we had a big, huge event out here in Boise for the last four days. It was awesome. People loved it. It’s some of the best stuff we’ve ever done, and I’m really proud of it.

One of the things we talked a lot about was funnels. We talked a lot about how to structure your funnel the right way, how to make a lot of money, and one thing I taught is that the concept of that amateurs focus on the front end, and smart business owners like you and me focus on the back end. How do we structure that? How do we put more of our effort over there? After that, I had a funny experience.

We’ve been getting our carpets cleaned for probably the last three years from this guy, and he’s a really nice guy. My wife always talks about him, but I’d never had a chance to meet him. So he was coming over to our house, and he was cleaning the carpet again. I’d say this is the sixth or seventh time we’ve hired him to clean the carpets. He’s made some pretty good money off of us. So I was talking to him, and he said, “Yeah, so you used to own CitySmart.com, right?” to which I said, “Yeah.” “City Smart”used to be, back before Groupon came out. When Groupon was only nine cities, we saw what they were doing, so we  launched a Groupon here in Boise called City Smart, and we were growing it and everything, and then Groupon and Living Social came in and beat us out, unfortunately, but it was a lot of fun.

Supposedly we ran his offer on City Smart, and I asked him, “That’s interesting. How did it go for you?” and he goes, “It was horrible, the worst thing I ever did.” I said, “Really? What happened?” He said, “Well, I did it, and from that I ended up getting like, I don’t know, 150 customers. I went and cleaned the houses, and I made no money off of it. It was a complete waste of my time and energy.” I said, “Really? That’s interesting. So how did my wife meet you?” He goes, “Well she bought one of the things off of City Smart.” I was like, “Interesting,” and then I just kind of left it there, to see if he would pick up what I was laying down, and he totally missed it [laughs].

I just want for all of you guys who actually understand marketing and business to smile with me, because that guy didn’t realize that that little cheapy thing he’d run on City Smart, that at least us, if nobody else, at least us – we came in so far, and have hired him at least six or seven times since then, probably spent $1,000 or more with him, and we will continue to keep doing that, because he’s a nice guy and does a great job. I’m guessing those other 150 people we gave him – clients that we drove to him – I’m guessing a big percentage of those guys probably hired him to come back again and again. I would bet that if he looked at his stats from that City Smart promotion, it was probably the best thing that his business ever had – ever.

And that wasn’t even considering the fact that he’s a horrible sales person. If it wasn’t for my wife and the fact that when she meets somebody she likes, she just keeps hiring them over and over and over again, but he never follows up. If you look at one of my buddies, Joe Polish, he teaches carpet cleaners how to  build these big businesses, and what he teaches carpet cleaners is that when someone comes in, get them on a continuity program where you go back every three months and clean their carpet. If he was to pitch us a maintenance fee, where we paid him ninety-seven bucks a month and then three times a year, he came and cleaned our carpets at a discount, we would have done it, and I’m betting out of those 150 other people, a lot of other people would have done it as well [laughs].

It just made me smile. It’s unfortunate, but it made me laugh, that someone like that, who got all of these leads from us was upset about the experience, whereas it’s exactly what’s fueling his business right now. I just want all of you guys to know, and I want to make sure all of you guys understand that I know [laughs] that amateurs focus on the front end. I would rather lose $20, $30, $40, $50 on the front end sale if it acquires a customer, because that customer, as you’ve seen with my wife and I and the carpet cleaning did buy, and we’ve continued to buy it over and over and over again.

So for you guys, think about your businesses. What are you being short-sighted on? What are you freaking out on because the front end is not quite right? What could you change around to make it a lot better for you and for your business?

I’m at the office. It’s a beautiful day. I’m excited. Remember, amateurs focus on the front end, and you guys, as people inside DotComSecrets and inside the “Marketing in Your Car” podcasts, you understand that we focus on the back end. That’s it for today, you guys. Have a great day, and we’ll talk to you guys all again, soon.

May 9, 2014

How coaching people, through what you do naturally everyday, can change your business forever.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, guys and gals. It’s been a while since I’ve done a podcast. It’s just been nose-to-the-grindstone, going crazy, and I just haven’t pulled up for a moment. I’m driving right now to get my haircut. My hair also has not had a chance [laughs] to have anyone pay attention to it. I look like a wookie. My hair is huge, so I’m getting it all cut down today, and getting prepared for an event that we’re doing here in Boise next week for all of our Inner Circle members. It’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited.

Here’s some backstory on it. It’s interesting. I’ve wanted to write a book for [laughs] probably ten years now. I keep trying, and it’s hard, so finally last year, I just decided, “I’ve got to do it.” You look at the best people, and they hire really good ghost writers, so I went to out there and tried to find a ghost writer. My biggest thing is that I wanted the book to be the same things I teach at events, the things that I believe in, and that we do every single day, and I wanted it to sound like it came from me. I went and researched a bunch of people, and I found someone who specializes in writing in your actual voice. She’s been awesome, and so I hired her. She’s not been cheap, by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s writing a book for me. It’s important.

She’s been working on the book, and doing the book’s been forcing me to set down, chapter by chapter, in excruciating detail, and record audios and mind maps, and everything in my core – the things I teach. It’s been really fun, as I have been getting out all of these things. What’s interesting is, she may have told me, or somebody else told me, “When you start writing a book is the first time that you really start understanding what you actually do.” It’s been interesting because the mechanics behind what we do every single day, when you try to teach them to somebody at this level, it changes. You really have to dig deeper, and you start getting connections in things you wouldn’t normally see or do. It’s kind of fascinating.

As I was doing this whole thing, I said, “You know what? I know on the back end we’re going to want to sell something, so I want to do an event where I actually go through and I teach all of this stuff as well, plus it will force me to get into these thoughts much deeper,” so I’m putting them down, and we mapped out an event, which is the event happening next week. It broke down everything we were teaching into twelve core secrets. You guys know “DotComSecrets”, so it’s “Twelve Dot Com Secrets”, and they’re all focused around doubling your traffic, conversion, or sales.

It’s been really, really fun. If you guys haven’t had that experience of writing a book yet, I really definitely recommend doing it. It actually reminds me a lot of my wrestling in high school. I was a great wrestler. I was a state champ, I think, second place in the country. I went to college, and then when I was in college, they started inviting me to come teach at wrestling camps.

I remember my first summer after my freshman year, going to these camps and teaching younger kids. I remember the big epiphany I had on things. I can remember working with these kids and teaching them stuff and showing them stuff, and they wouldn’t get it, so I’d have to break it down and break it down until the point where it was just so simple that they’d be like, “Oh, I can see how it works.” When I would do that, it made me start realizing why the wrestling move worked. –“The reason why this works for me is because of the way my positioning was this, the way my hips were this, my arm was here, my leg was here.” You start seeing things you don’t see at a level when you’re in it all of the time, right?

I really think that going back and teaching wrestling camps during the off season helped me a lot as a wrestler. I just was able to learn so much more about what I was doing. You never really see it, and after you realize that this is working because of this, this, and this, then you look at it like, “Well, where else can I apply those principals, those things that are working?” So that’s what’s been happening with this book. It’s been interesting.

One thing that I wanted to do was I wanted each chapter to be a stand-alone, yet they all kind of build on each other, but I wanted them to be like if you were struggling in one part of your business, you could take a chapter and just read it and learn something, but I was like, “I want to go deeper than that. I want it to be like where you can just pick up an image and look at the image, and the image – like if you haven’t read the chapter, you look at the image, and it won’t really make sense, but when you read the chapter, and you come back to that image, it makes perfect sense.” That way, it’s kind of burned into your memory, so if you come back a year later, and you’re flipping through the book, and you see this diagram or this sketched-out concept, instantly, everything you learned before will come back, and it will be just like a flood of memories –“Boom.” It will be there really, really fast.

And so, what’s cool is that for every single core concept I teach and I do and I believe in that we’ve been doing, I’ve been breaking them down into these really cool, drawn-out process flows, where Step One is this, Step Two, Step Three, and so on. I literally went through an entire yellow pad of paper sketching out all of these different concepts, and I’ve been taking pictures of them, and I send them to one of my designers, who then takes it, and makes it look like a really professionally hand-drawn image instead of my scribblings on yellow paper, but it’s really cool.

Today what was fun is one of the chapters – I have a whole chapter that’s when we get to the sales and the copywriting and how we sell stuff online section, that I call “Inception Secrets”. It comes from a presentation I actually gave at mine and Daegen Smith’s event, where I was talking about how in sales and marketing how much business has changed.

In the 1980s, the average attention span of a person was twenty minutes, and today, the average attention span is only nine seconds. Is that crazy? Every nine seconds, your brain’s looking for the next text message or Facebook or e-mail or whatever, and so you can’t focus. Because of that, that’s the world we’re selling in now. If you look at how sales has been taught for years, you know that these brilliant copywriters back in the day, Eugene Schwartz and all of these guys that you study and learn about, while what they taught was correct, and what they showed is true, it’s not as relevant today, just because the environment that we’re selling in is so different.

They would have evolved and gotten to the point where they could sell something in nine seconds, but they didn’t have to back then, and so the Inception Secrets is this evolution of copywriting and how it’s changed. One of the big things is that people that don’t want to be sold to. They love to buy things, and so if you can create a selling environment where they think it’s their idea – you’re basically showing them a process, and then all of the sudden they have this epiphany that they think is their epiphany. It’s kind of like the movie “Inception”, where they would place an idea inside of somebody’s dream which would cause them to do or say or change something.

That’s what the whole concept of that chapter was. It’s like, “How do you illustrate that? How do you create these epiphanies in people’s minds so that they don’t feel like they’re being sold, that they’re buying in?” That was a concept at Todd’s event, but it was like, “How do I materialize that in to a graph where you can look at it and have a process that you can follow to be able to create an inception?” It took me about a day to sit down and really map that out and all of the pieces and all of the things, and it will come out and say, “Boom. Here’s the graph. This is how you do it. Here’s how you create inception in somebody’s mind in the sales process.”

In the next chapter, I go through the different sales scripts for different points in the sales funnel, and I think there’re six core scripts that I use, and again, I go through and down and break those down into excruciating detail, like every single thing. It turned out so cool, like one of them is basically my copywriting template, and it’s based off of – I can’t remember who I learned it from initially. I think it was Gary Halbert, or it might have been Dan Kennedy, but anyway, I talk about the core fundamentals of a sales letter as a star, a story, and a solution.

A star is the person the sales letter is about. The story is their story, and the solution is the product that you’re offering, so it starts out with the three sections, but then inside each section, what’s the process you take somebody through? In the star section, I think there were five things that you take somebody through, and then in the story, I think, there were twelve things, and in the solution there were eighteen things. When you write your copy, you pull out these three diagrams, you start at number one, and, “Boom, boom, boom.” By the time you’ve gone through the whole thing, you’ve got your sales letter written very simply and very easily, knowing that you’re following a proven model.

I just went through all of my old sales letters and literally, I just had like this huge table of everything I’ve ever done or learned or created about writing copy and broke all of that stuff down into these little simple diagrams. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m excited for it.

“What’s the point of this podcast?” you may be asking. Outside of getting excited to see the book someday, and then hopefully getting excited for the event, if you’re coming – and I’m sure we’ll sell recordings of that later on down the road, but what’s the point of this podcast?

I think that the real point of it is a couple of things. First off, it comes back to when I talked about back when I was wrestling. I was a good wrestler. I was a state champ. I took second place in the country. I was an All-American. I did great in high school, yet it wasn’t until I started teaching other people what I was doing that I was able to break down things to a fundamental level where I really found out what made what I was doing work. When I learned that, I was able to apply it in so many different areas, and I think it’s the exact same thing with businesses. I think for you, whatever it is that you do, or you teach, or whatever your business is, I think one of the most powerful exercises you  can do is try to teach it to somebody else, even if you’re not a “How to Make Money” or “How to Start a business” business.

If you want to grow your business, one core thing that you can do is sit down and work with other people showing them how to fix their business, or change their business, and start getting your thinking at a different level. You start realizing why what you’re doing is working, why your funnels look this way, why they’re converting, and which part’s not.

I think one of the biggest strategic advantages I’ve had over a lot of the other Internet marketing coaches is just first off, I’ve run a lot of businesses. I do a bunch of stuff. The second off is because our coaching business has been so successful for so many years, I’ve had a chance to work with hundreds and hundreds of different businesses every single year, so I have had a chance to look at different funnels and their processes and coach them through it. Again, I think I get a unique perspective on it because of that, and so I want to tell you guys that same kind of thing. If you’re in business and you want to grow, then focus on helping somebody else’s business, because it will help you so much more to start seeing those things. But then also from your content standpoint, whatever it is you’re selling, how can you teach people more? Even if you’re in a weight loss space, how can you get you more hands in, and teach you more, and break things down more so that you can become better and better at your craft and your art?

That’s the first big take-away, and I think the second one is, just because this was so valuable for me, is try to take all of the core things you teach, and again, if you’re writing a book, it could be fifty pages on a concept and how can you map it, how can you break that down into one piece of paper, sketched out, like in a process for Step One, Two, Three, et cetera. –“Here’s the way you do it.” I was thinking about this as I was going through, like what I do in business is very, very – there’s an art and a science. The art is the beauty, and you’re tweaking and testing and trying all sorts of things. And then there’s the science, which is like, “Here’s the specifics,” and I think the Internet, at least in my business, is more art than science. I think there’s so much art to it. It’s me taking my art, but I have to translate it into a scientific process so that other people can model it, right? I don’t know if that makes sense to you guys. I’m rambling a little bit, but it’s a really cool process.

What you do in your business is art. It’s hard to teach art to other people. I can tell people, “Here’s the conception,” and go into things, and hope that a lot of them do the stuff, but most people don’t, except for the other artists, right? For example, I remember teaching events, and I had a bunch of people there who just wanted to get a process down, and they can’t. I’m telling them all of these different ways they could do it, and they can’t figure it out because of that. People like, for example a Daegen Smith, who was in the room. He’s an artist. I could show him all of this stuff, and he could take that and turn it into his own art. But other people might take that, and it doesn’t help them, so to really help other people, I think, for the masses, because you’ll be able to help other people sharing your art, but if you can to tweak it so that you’re turning your art into a science, again, into a process, now other people can replicate it. That’s where it’s going to be so much better.

An example is one of my trainers that I work out with. I was asking him, “What should I be eating?” He’s like, “Well it depends. There’re all these elements, these variables, and it all depends on all of this stuff,” which is all true, and I get that. That’s the art of it, though. It’s looking down and being able to look at the person’s situation and their life and this and that, and we paint this picture of what’s going to work for you. That’s awesome, but for the masses, you can’t do that. How do you create a template where you can plug people in? That’s where I think the scalability comes in with your content, your offer, your art, and how you can scale it.

I’m in one of those kinds of things where I’ve been sitting at thousands of things, and I’ve been looking at them and mapping them out for the last ten hours, and so maybe I sound kind of weird to some of you guys listening, but I hope you got something out of it. I really hope that you guys take some time and take your art and break it down into a science. Try to make it something that’s a process. As you will see when my book comes out, it’s my best attempt possible to do that, and then second off, go and find somebody else who wants to be like you, coach them through it, because the process of coaching someone through your process and what you’re doing will open up so much stuff for you.

I am here, ready to get my hair cut. Ready for my head to be a little bit smaller [laughs], and excited for those of you guys who are coming out to the event next week. We’ll be hanging out, and we’ll be covering some stuff, and you guys will get the first copy of all of these worksheets I’ve been working on. I’ve been creating a huge book in a binder for everybody that has all of the stuff in there, and then the next time that it will be open will be when my book is done. Hopefully, we’ll have that done by the end of summer. I’m going to try to do one of those “New York Times ‘Best Seller’” campaigns. That’s one of those things on my list I want to accomplish someday, is to get on that list. That would be kind of fun. Hopefully this book will be the tool. I’ve spent more time and energy on this, I think, than any other project I’ve ever done [laughs], so hopefully this will be the tool to get us there, and change some people’s lives, and help get everyone thinking a little differently about their business. I’m excited, and I’m here, you guys, so I’ve got to bounce. I will talk to you all again soon. Thanks, everyone.

May 2, 2014

An interesting look on how to build a hundred million dollar company.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late-night “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, you guys, it is now 1:30 in the morning. I have almost officially been awake for twenty-four hours straight. I woke up yesterday [laughs] or today or whenever it was, at 4:30 in the morning. I came in early and spend three or four hours busting stuff out before everyone showed up. We worked all day, and we pulled mostly an all-nighter. I just started fading about twenty minutes ago. I just dropped Todd off at the hotel, and now I am driving back home to go get some sleep.

But as tired as I am right now, I don’t think I’ve ever been this fired up about a project ever in my life. We’ve created and we’ve sold a lot of stuff that I’m passionate about – a lot of things that I think are awesome and life-changing and all of those kinds of things, but this is the first time that...Today, I literally spent twelve to fourteen hours just building out funnels and click funnels, and I can’t tell you – I can literally do now what used to take me a programmer, a designer, and a webmaster – what it took three people to do, I can do now myself, and in a fraction of the time. I built an entire automated webinar in under an hour, and that’s because I was writing all of the copy. I was doing everything – the entire thing, from scratch, and got the whole thing done. We built out membership sites. We built out funnels, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am.

I think it’s going to change our industry. I think it’s going to change my personal life. I told everybody, “Even if we never sold this, what we’ve created would still be worth it, because this will change our business forever.” It just gets me excited and fired up about how we’re creating something that is that big. I just started thinking about how in most businesses, I think a lot of the time we sell ourselves short. We think about how to make money or what’s cool. How do we solve this problem for people? We create these little things. I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and this is the first time I feel like we’ve approached something and gone after something that’s bigger than any of us, and the fact that we’ve executed it as well as we have is just...I can’t even tell you how excited I am. It’s so cool.

So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about is tonight while we were working and talking through things, we kept referencing a guy named Jason Fried. He’s a guy who I had a chance to actually interview a little while ago, maybe about two or three years ago now. He owns a company called 37 Signals. You guys have probably heard of him before. Actually they just changed their company name to Base Camp. They’re the creators of Base Camp.

A while ago they wrote this book called, “REWORK”. In fact, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people in the world, was the one that recommended REWORK to me. We were at Pirate’s Cove at my Mastermind meeting, and we were talking about books and stuff, and he said, “Hey, you should read this book, ‘REWORK’,” so I went and bought it. It’s a really quick read. You could probably read the whole thing in maybe an hour and a half to two hours. It’s basically that Jason and the partners, when they were creating Base Camp, wrote a book about their experience with the business, and it was the exact opposite of what everybody else was doing.

I remember that I read the entire book, and I remember there were simple, fast chapters – just one concept at a time, and I remember going through it and thinking that every single mistake that I had made in my business, they addressed in REWORK [laughs] as a thing, and I was like, “Man, I wish we would have done this or that,” and so forth. I’ve probably read it three or four times over the last five or six years, and like I said, I had a chance to interview Jason on the book. He was a cool guy.

I remember the same month, I tried to interview him and also Gary Vaynerchuk. Jason was like, “Yeah, man, I’ll do it,” and jumped on the phone. Super low maintenance, it was awesome. Didn’t ask for anything, just giving back to the community, and Gary Vaynerchuk [laughs] said that he’d let me interview him if I bought five hundred copies of his book, which was about eight or ten grand or whatever that was. It was like, “Huh,” and anyway, just a really cool guy.

But some of the lessons – one of the things they talked about was when they created Base Camp. They were a website design company, and they were trying to do project management software, and there was no good project management software, so they went and they created their own. They created it the way they wanted it. They scratched through an itch, and created this thing that as it turned out, everybody wanted it, and, “Boom.” This launched their whole company. I think they have over a million users right now. I think that’s what they said. A million users, paying up to ninety-seven bucks a month, which is crazy.

We were talking about Click Funnels. We built Click Funnels to scratch our own itch, to try to speed up our process of launching offers and rolling out funnels. We created it for us, and now I have the privilege of sharing it with others. That’s the way I really look at it.

It’s interesting, but anyway, there’re so many good lessons in that book, I can’t recommend it enough, you guys. I think the fact that we’d read it – everyone on our team had read it multiple times. I think it’s really influenced a lot of our thoughts and our decisions in how we’re growing our company. We were looking at, as we started growing Click Funnels, the company’s called Etison, E-T-I-S-O-N, we were talking about how to grow it, and we saw that there were two different routes.

One route we saw was with a company called, “iContact”, where the owner, Ryan, went and took on funding and did the whole VC thing and brought in money and had millions and millions of dollars of investor money. He grew it that way and they weren’t really profitable until he sold out. And man, he sold out. I think they sold for about seventy or eighty million dollars. I’ve never built a company that way. I don’t understand that way, but that’s the way he did it, and so for a while, we were looking at it, and we were like, “Wow. Let’s build a company like that.”

But then you look at the other side, and you look at 37 Signals. You look at the way Jason has built it, and all of the lessons they teach in REWORK about only hiring when it’s painful, keeping it small, and that your goal isn’t to try to grow. Your goal can be just to serve people and all of these lessons that are counter to what the rest of the world teaches, and I think we made a decision as a team that we wanted to do it this way – the way that the guys in 37 Signals did. That’s the way that fits into our lifestyle and what we want to do. Like I say, I can’t recommend that book enough.

They also came out with another book recently, called “REMOTE”, and what’s interesting about REMOTE is, if you guys watch “TED Talks” – I think it’s at Ted.com – you search for Jason Fried. He gave a TED Talk about this as well, what the book’s all about. He talked about [laughs] – and this week’s been a perfect example of it. He talked about how when you need to get work done, where do you go? Nobody says, “I go to the office to get work done.” They say, “Well, I come in earlier. I stay late,” or, “I do it during my lunch hour.”

It’s interesting how people at work don’t get work done [laughs], right? They’re talking. They’re doing all of this kind of stuff, and he talked about the fact that if you send all of your employees home and have people work remotely, how much more stuff you can get done, because at work, people don’t work. They’re talking. They’re hanging out. All of this other stuff’s happening. I remember in the TED Talk, he’s talking about, “Would you rather have an employee...?” like everyone’s employees are at the office so that they can be focused, but what if your employee was at home watching TV all day while they were working? If they were watching TV, yes, they’d be distracted a little bit, but that’s a lot less distracting than the boss coming in, or the secretary, or the water cooler talk, or every single person passing through their desk area that wants to communicate and chat. It was interesting when he put it into that perspective, and the book, REMOTE, is all about that – having everybody start working remotely.

As we’re building this new company and thinking a lot about these types of things, and the direction we want to move with things, and how to structure things, and how to grow, I really think that the guys that we’re looking at and I think that the guys that you should be looking at, as well, is 37 Signals, or Base Camp is their new company name. So definitely get REWORK, get REMOTE. It could be your reading for this weekend. Those books are worth their weight in gold, I can tell you that much for sure.

Anyway, you guys, I am home. It’s now 1:47 in the morning. I’m going to get some sleep. I’m taking my three-year-old son to the zoo tomorrow morning, which is super exciting. I’m fired up. That’s the game plan.

Look out you guys. Click Funnel’s coming soon. We’re going to open our second wave of beta next week, and we’re going to roll that for about a month, because we’re going on vacation [laughs]. My family and Todd’s family, and so when we get back from vacation is when we’re going to do the big roll out, but it’s all coming soon. All of the pieces are falling together.

All right, guys, I am in my garage, so I’m going to check out, and I will talk to you soon.

Apr 29, 2014

The new pre-frame that almost always doubles conversions on any type of Facebook traffic campaigns.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a beautiful, sunny “Marketing in Your Car”.

All right, everyone. I hope you’re having an awesome day. My first question for everyone out there is, “Do you guys think we should do new theme song for our podcast?” [laughs] I keep getting comments about it. It’s funny, because I bought the domain, MarketingInYourCar, almost ten years ago. When podcasts first came out, I was like, “That’d be a cool idea for a podcast, so I’m going to buy that.” Then one of my buddies, Paul Colgin, had a friend who used to write jingles, and he’s like, “You should have him write a jingle for your podcast.” So he wrote that almost ten years ago, and then it was almost ten years later that I finally worked on a podcast [laughs]. We put it in there, and it’s been kind of funny.

Today, I have something fun to tell you guys about, because I think this is something that could be a game changer for most of you guys. I don’t want you to dismiss it, because I almost dismissed it. I actually did dismiss it once. The second time, it was like someone hit me in the head with a bell, and I thought, “Ah, I see what I’m missing.”

In my high-end $21,000 Mastermind group that Daegan Smith and I run, one of the guys in our group is a guy named Glen Ledwell. He owns MindMovies.com. At our first Mastermind meeting, he was talking about in their business how they never get traffic from Facebook to convert – that for whatever reason, it just wouldn’t work, and so they were trying all of these different things. He said that finally they decided just to add a quiz in front of their landing page. They have their landing page, and all they did was add this little quiz, and the quiz is not even a real quiz. It doesn’t do anything. It asks five or six questions about something, and then it lands on a page that has their sales video. Actually for them, it was landing on a webinar registration page, and then they just recently did one with an “Invisible Funnel” webinar page as well – [coughs] excuse me – so that was the concept, right?

He showed us the numbers. At the first Mastermind, he said, “Hey, we did this, and it doubled our conversions,” and I’m like, “Oh, nice.” I didn’t think much about it. Then at the last one, he showed us, and he actually showed us some very specific numbers. It took these campaigns that were at break-even or losing on Facebook and instantly doubled them. Let’s say he was getting a 1.3 percent conversion rate. He ended up getting 2.6 or higher conversion rate, not by changing anything, just by adding a quiz in the front of it. I thought, “Man, isn’t that interesting?”

So right now, I’ve been working on this new campaign, and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to add a quiz in front of this campaign and just see what happens.” That’s what we’re doing right now. Hopefully in the next day or two, I’m rolling out this new funnel thing that we’re doing, and you’ll notice in the front of it, it’s got a quiz. The quiz asks six different questions, but it doesn’t really do much, other than just ask questions, and then it lands them on a page to sign up for something that costs a little more money. I’m really excited to see the test of that versus just going directly to the page, and seeing what happens. I’m really interested.

For you guys, especially if you’re driving traffic from Facebook, I recommend trying that – try and put a little quiz. Again, the quiz is very simple. You’ll see mine. Mine’s basically, “Take this quick two-minute quiz, and find out how to double your traffic, conversions, and sales.” The first question is, “Where did you hear about us from?” and they pick an option. The next step is, “How much traffic are you currently getting on your site?” The next step is, “How many split tests do you run?” The next step is, “What are your...” Just some basic questions just to get them engaged. It’s an engagement device, where they start taking these little micro-commitments and clicking on something. They’re taking this quiz, and for whatever reason – it doesn’t make logical sense to me – for whatever reason, it gets somebody in a state where more people now will take action, just because they’re clicking on these buttons, and you’re asking them questions.

The other interesting thing, now that I think about it is, I went to this Mastermind group earlier this year. It’s called the “Ocean’s Four Mastermind Group”, with a bunch of guys, and one of the guys, Ryan LeVeck, was talking about how he quizzes in all of the markets that he’s in, as well, and how great of a big thing it is. I think it might be the new big thing, you guys, so if you’re running campaigns on Facebook, try a little mini quiz ahead, before you land somebody on your sales video page, and just see what happens. I think you’ll be amazed with the results. I know I’m excited to find out, and I will return and report and let you guys know what we find out in the next week or so, after we run our first real quiz.

I’m at the office. I’m going to go implement this stuff, and I will talk to you guys soon.

Apr 28, 2014

Short message from Russell on his drive home from the tournament. And how, what he learned this weekend, relates to your business.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I welcome you to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. As you can tell right now, my voice is almost gone. Hopefully I will make it for the next four or five minutes to share with you my weekend.

Basically, I am guessing there are a lot of people listening for the very first time. I just finished my Jiu Jitsu tournament and everyone is asking me. I thought, “Instead of telling them the answer, I am going to make them all go to the podcast and listen to hear what happened.” That is the game plan here; I am going to tell you what is happening.

If you are a first-time listener, welcome. You are going to love it. Every day I do a five or six-minute podcast as I am driving to the office. I share a couple of cool marketing tips. I want to welcome you as you start listening. Please listen to some of the backup episodes. Usually we talk a lot more about marketing, conversions, and sales and fun stuff.

I want to welcome you. I had a very fun tournament. The last time I competed in Jiu Jitsu was a year and a half ago. I do not consider myself a Jiu Jitsu guy; I am still a wrestler who is trying to learn Jiu Jitsu.

It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot of cool stuff. I won a couple of matches and lost a couple of matches. It is fun to get back out there and try to kill yourself.

I have a couple of lessons I learned this weekend that are valuable from a marketing standpoint, as well. First, I am still kind of learning all the rules. In my first match I went out there against this dude with a long beard.

Just to put this in perspective, I still cannot grow a beard. This dude had a six-inch long beard. We started rolling and I almost took him out at the beginning. I did not quite get it and he put me in his guard, so we had no points. It was zero to zero. Then, literally, he locked his guard so tight that I could not get out of it, so the match ended zero to zero.

I assumed, as a wrestler, that we would go into overtime and I would have a chance to take him down again. I did not think he was that good. However, the match ended and he got the win and I was super confused. I found out the rules afterwards and that he basically won.

The first lesson I learned was that when you go into any situation, you have to understand the rules. I wish I had understood because I would have done a lot of things differently. I would have scrambled better and tried to open him up more. I thought we were tied, so I thought, “You know what? I am just going to hang out here until we can break and go into overtime.” Apparently, they do not do that in Jiu Jitsu.

I think that many times in business people just do not know the rules either. You get into something and you are scared to do stuff. You think, “Should I do this or that?” You do not realize where your boundaries are. Marketing is one of those things where you have to understand your boundaries because you have to push them. You have to be a bit aggressive in order to get people’s attention. It is interesting. You are competing against so many other people. It is kind of funny. In my first eight or nine years in business I never looked at it as a competition.

In January, I had a chance to go to an event and hear Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank” speak, and it was interesting. He was talking. He’s the bald guy on Shark Tank who’s just always angry and that kind of stuff, but he was talking [coughs] – excuse me – and he was talking about how business is like a war. He was like, “You have to go out there and find out who your competitors are. Your job is really to go out there and figure out how you can beat them.”

I’ve never looked at business that way. I thought it was always just like, “Oh, everyone’s happy. Let’s all get along,” and we’ve done well with that, but if you want to dominate your space and become the number one person, you’ve got to look at it more like a war, or like a wrestling match, or jiu jitsu, or whatever, where you’ve got to beat them. You’ve got to figure out the strategic things behind it, and part of it is understanding the rules – what you can and can’t do, and then after you know that, go and push it. Push the envelope hard to beat them.

Then the next is, because this is give and take, it’s just like a wrestling match or a jiu jitsu match. You’re going back and forth. I think more of us need to get more aggressive in our businesses a little bit and realize that we’re competing with other people. Find out who your competition is now, and how you dominate, how you beat those guys. Just something to think about.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last little while, especially as we’re getting close to launching Click Funnels. We’re going head to head against some big companies. One of our biggest competitors just got $5 million in VC funding, so they’re starting out with a bunch of cash and people and a team and an existing customer base, and we’re coming head to head against them. I don’t think they’re going to know what hit them. We’re going to attack and it’s going to be fun. We’re going to try to take their customer base very, very quickly. It’s war. It’s going to be fun.

Then some of the other software products we’re going to be competing with are big companies – companies like Infusionsoft. It’s a war that I’m ready for, and a war that I’m going to win, and I’m excited for it. Think about that with your business. Think about how you can be more aggressive, who you’re competing against, and how you can beat them.

Now a lot of times, there’re rooms for partnerships and friends and that kind of thing. At the same time, you’ve got to look at this as a sport. Business really is a sport.

Back to the jiu jitsu tournament. I lost that first match, and I won my next two matches. One guy, I came in for a headlock, and I choked him out on his feet. He literally went completely out, like passed out. He started attacking. I attacked once, and he was gone, and so I feel kind of bad. He just sat on the mat for four or five minutes afterwards trying to come to. That was kind of fun, and then the guy that I lost my first match to, he lost, so I had a chance to go against him again, and this time we wrestled. I wrestled a lot better, and then he caught me in this weird funky arm bar thing that I had to tap, which is no fun, by the way. Tapping’s the worst thing in the world. And then I went to some other divisions. I went to this “absolute” thing, and I had to wrestle some big huge dudes who were way bigger than me, but anyway, I had a fun time. I’m glad to be back. My voice is shot. I’m almost home. I’m going to go take a bath and then pass out for three or four days and then get back to work, so it should be fun.

Anyway, for all of you guys out there who are thinking about living your dreams. You’re nervous. You’re scared. Hopefully, you’ll get some inspiration that me as a 34-year-old dude that hasn’t really competed in ten or twelve years, just went up against a bunch of young guys who trained a lot more than me and just went head to head. I hope that gives you some inspiration to really just – don’t be afraid of things. Just go out there and do it. What’s the worst thing that could happen? You get tapped out. You lose some money. Whatever the worst case scenario is, it’s really not that bad. It’s more about the journey and the fun and having some joy in it.

That’s it for today, everyone. I am home. I’m going to go pass out. Thanks for listening, and if this is your first time, please tune in. We’ll share a lot more cool marketing and sales stuff, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Apr 25, 2014

The only strategy you need to get stuff done today.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell and welcome to another episode of Marketing in Your Car! Yesterday I pretty much just talked about Jiu Jitsu and kind of spun it with some business at the end.

Today may be kind of similar. No, there are some good lessons. Tomorrow I am fighting in a Jiu Jitsu tournament. I am in three different divisions, so I probably have ten to 15 matches tomorrow as long as I don’t get tapped out. It is going to be a lot of work and a lot of fun.

One thing, though, is that I weigh-in tonight. Tonight I have to weigh seven pounds lighter than I weigh right now. A lot of you are asking, “How do you lose seven pounds in a day, Russell?” The reality is that I am going to lose seven pounds in less than an hour.

We do it the old school way like we used to do it in wrestling. In fact, I went to my garage and I found a huge thing we had which had all of my old weight-cutting clothes. I had my plastics; I had my sweat suits; I had everything. For me, it was really exciting and nostalgic. It brought back so many memories. There were even my old t-shirts I used to cut weight were in there, my sweatpants, and everything.

I had some fun today and put them on. The pants with my plastics are pretty tight now. I am not quite the size I used to be, unfortunately. It was very, very fun.

Today I am going to work for a couple of hours and then head over to the gym, put on my plastics, and wrestle hard for an hour. In an hour—especially for the fact that I am not fat but I have some stuff on me—I should be able to lose the seven pounds in less than an hour. In fact, my record from cutting weight was 12 pounds in an hour. That was the most I ever did. My record for most total weight loss in a week was 30 pounds.

It is not natural weight loss. Do not ask me to teach you the secret to losing 30 pounds in a week. It is all dehydration. You put these plastic suits on and they suck the water out of you. You literally do not drink for three or four days. It makes me laugh when people say, “You can live without food for a week, but you cannot live without water for more than a day.” That is B.S. I have lived without water for multiple days while sucking water out of my body. It is definitely possible.

It is interesting that when you start cutting weight you stop eating and you stop drinking. Then you start trying to suck the water out of your body. As soon as you start getting dehydrated, your hunger pains disappear. It is kind of cool. You are not hungry, but you are thirsty the whole time. As soon as you weigh in you drink something and boom! Your hunger pains come back. It is interesting. Thirst is definitely worse than food.

Why am I telling you this? First, I am excited and I am going to cut weight today which is kind of a fun thing. The second thing is that I was thinking today about how we are in the middle of a huge project which we are about to launch. You have probably all heard of it, ClickFunnels. I am trying to get all of these things out.

Last night at 10:00 at night I was not done with our stuff. I came back into the office and worked for another three hours to get stuff done. One of my buddies, Xan Spencer (some of you know him) is one of the students who went through one of our courses a while ago. They actually won a Corvette from us and built a huge business.

He moved to Boise, he and his wife, a while ago and they are launching a new business. I showed up at the office last night at 10:00 and he was in there stuffing envelopes for these bracelets he is selling now. I thought, “Isn’t this awesome? We have entrepreneurs here late at night busting their butts to make their dreams come true.”

I was thinking about next week when Todd, our programmer for ClickFunnels, is flying in and we will probably pull five or six all-nighters in a row to get this thing done so we can roll it out and launch it the next week.

I want to talk to you about the fact that you have to set deadlines, otherwise nothing ever gets done. If I did not have weigh-ins tonight at 6:00, I would never lose these seven pounds. Because I do, an hour before I am going to suck it out, I will make weight, and I will weigh-in. If I did not have a deadline for launching ClickFunnels, it would never get done. Because there is a deadline, we are going to pull all-nighters until it is done.

I find it interesting that it does not matter if my deadline is a week from now or six months from now. Any way I do it, the week before I will be pulling all-nighters every single night to get it done. It is just the way it always works.

There is a tape I bought a long time ago from John Carlton and Gary Halbert. They were talking about the concept of silver or lead, “plata o plomo” or something like that. The concept was that when the Mexican drug lords down in Mexico want to change a law, do they try to run it through congress? Congress would be, “No!” We’re not giving you that law. Are you crazy?”

What they do is break into their homes that night, find the people who are the decision-makers, and they come to them with a gun and a bag of silver. They say, “You have two options. You need to change this law. You can do it through “plata or plomo,” through silver or lead. Either we will shoot you and you will die or we will bribe you, give you money, and you will change the law.”

When you have those two options, “plata o plomo,” lead or silver, what are you going to choose? You are always going to choose the money, right? It is a no-brainer, so that is what they do.

When I first heard that story, I started thinking of it for myself. I have to set “silver or lead” deadlines or else nothing will ever happen. Maybe it is just me, but if I do not have those deadlines, they will not happen. When I pick any project, I say, “This is the project and this is the deadline. This is when it has to be done.”

It is not like, “Oh, here is a soft deadline. Hopefully, eventually it will get done.” When you do that, it will keep moving forever. The second you set a hard date and say, “This is the day it will happen, somehow, magically, it will happen. It does not matter if it is a week from now, a month from now, six months or a year from now. Those last two or three days you will be pulling all-nighters to get it done. It is just the way it is. I do not care how much you plan. The week before or a couple nights before, you are going to have to kill yourself to get it done.

Most people just keep pushing it and pushing it. Because of this, they never get to their goal; they never actually hit it. It gets pushed into infinity.

For you guys, I recommend that for all your core projects you set a “silver or lead” deadline. It does not have to be on the project as a whole. Sometimes it is so massive it is hard to do it. Set a goal for each element, though. You can say, “This is step number one in this process I am doing or creating. Step number one is this and my silver or lead deadline is June 16<sup>th</sup> and it will happen on that day. It is not allowed to happen on June 17<sup>th</sup>. If I cannot sleep for three days, I will not sleep for three days because it is silver or lead; either I am going to get cash from this or I am going to die.”

If you can trick your mind to really believe this, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish. People always ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done?” A lot of it is because of my “silver or lead” deadlines. This is it. In my head I know this is the date and we cannot miss it. Sure, we could miss it, push it, and bump it another week or two. However, when you do that, it just keeps getting bumped and keeps getting bumped.

In my business, in my career, there have been the times I have been soft on my deadlines. We had a site we launched a little while ago and we literally kept pushing it for six months from our initial deadline. We said, “Oh, we will do it,” and we kept pushing it and pushing it. Six months later we finally sat down and said, “Boom! This is the ‘silver or lead’ deadline. It has to happen!” Guess what? It happened.

I hoped this helps you guys understand how to get stuff done. It is how I am going to make weight tonight. I am going to lose seven pounds in an hour. It is how we are going to get 10,000 people on ClickFunnels. It is how we are going to increase our coaching. All these things we are doing have “silver or lead” deadlines attached. If you do not have them yet, it is time to start creating them for yourself.

This is what I have for today. I am at the bank and I am going to pull some money out because my wife has been remodeling our house and this is what husbands do, right? That is my plan for right now. I appreciate you guys and I will let you know how the tournament goes after it is all said and done. Talk to you guys soon.

Apr 24, 2014

Structuring your business so you can do what you really love.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome to another exciting episode of Marketing in Your Car.

Hey, guys. Today it is kind of raining and I am heading to the office. I am actually excited because this weekend I have a Jiu Jitsu tournament. I am fired up! I have not competed in about 18 months or even more than that.

Here is my Jiu Jitsu journey. As most of you know, I was a wrestler through high school. I was a high school state champ and I took second place in the country. I was an All American in high school. I wrestled with BYU for a year and they cut the wrestling team, so I went to Boise State for the last four years. My senior year I ended up being ranked 14<sup>th</sup> when it all ended, I think. I did not quite meet my goals, but I did have a lot of fun. Still, my favorite thing in the world is wrestling, by far.

In my senior year, for all the UFC guys out there, I wrestled Johny Hendricks my senior year and I lost to him by one point. That little punk, I was actually turning him in a power half, I had the leg right and I was turning him, and he started screaming like a little girl. The ref stopped the mat and did not give me any points. If the ref stops something when you are in a turning position, you should get at least two, if not three, points. I did not get the points and he ended up winning by one point.

For all you guys who are Johny Hendricks fans, he cried when I tried to turn him. There you go.

Back to this, I got done wrestling, I got into business, and I got fat. I had a lot of fun and a few years later I decided I wanted to start wrestling again. We built an entire wrestling team out here. I did a podcast about it in the past, so I am not going to talk through the whole story. It went for a little while and then we had business issues and everything went crazy, so we had to shut it down.

I did not doing anything for a couple of years. Then one day I was flying home from Vegas and one of my buddies who wrestled at Boise State was on the flight. We sat next to each other and we were talking. He said, “Yeah, I am doing Jiu Jitsu now,” and he was really good.

I said, “Wow,” and he said, “Jiu Jitsu is kind of like wrestling for old, fat people. You do not have to be in good shape to be really good.”

I said, “That’s awesome! I might actually be good at that. My only thing is I could not take a punch. If I got punched, I would be pretty embarrassed. I would start crying or something.”

He said, “No, there is no punching in Jiu Jitsu. It is like wrestling, except you can tap somebody or choke them out or whatever.”

I said, “All right. That would be kind of fun. I might try that.” I got home and I was talking to one of my buddies who did Jiu Jitsu and he said, “There is a tournament this weekend. You should go to it.”

I said, “All right. I have nothing else to do, so I might as well show up.” I literally went to one practice the night before the tournament and I had somebody show me the basics of Jiu Jitsu. I did not know much other than that and I said, “I’m ready to go.”

I went to the tournament the next day and my very first match I did gi. I had to borrow some guy’s gi because I did not know what that was at the time. I put this gi on and I went out there. I was going against the first guy and I was beating him like a little girl and I thought, “This is the easiest sport in the world!” I was picking him up and slamming him down.

I found out if you put your knee on their belly you get four points. I thought, “Sweet!” and I just kept doing knee on belly over and over. I beat this guy 16 to nothing and just thrashed him. All of a sudden he reached up and grabbed my collar on my gi and he did some weird, funky thing. Everything started getting dark.

I thought, “Oh, no! What do I do?” He was choking me out. My eyes started getting hazy and he started getting darker and darker. I thought, “I don’t want to tap out. This is embarrassing! I was killing this guy. I don’t want to tap out!” Eventually I was almost gone and I tapped.

It was the worst feeling in the world. Getting pinned in wrestling is bad, but at least you can tell a story in your mind about how it did not really happen. When you tap, you have to tap and it is pretty embarrassing.

After that in the next three or four matches in gi I won. I had to take second or third in the tournament. They had no gi afterwards which, by the way, I found out I loved much more. I did no gi and in the very first match I was beating a guy and then I got caught in a triangle lock. I had never seen this before and I had to tap out. In the next match it was the same thing. I got caught in a triangle lock and got tapped out.

I thought, “Man, this is frustrating.” I was beating the guys on our feet every single time, but on the mat they triangle locked me. I remember walking out that day and a guy grabbed me. He was an old wrestler and he said, “Hey, just so you know, triangle is like kryptonite for wrestlers. All you wrestlers, when you take some guy and you cover—which is the setup for a triangle—if you just learn some basic Jiu Jitsu, you will be able to stop that from every happening.”

I thought, “All right, man. I am going to learn this thing.” I went back to the drawing board and started practicing. I had some buddies that were doing it; it was not formal practicing. We did it once or twice a week for the next six months or so. It was just the basics of learning not to get triangle. That was the core concept.

I participated in another tournament and I won both styles which is cool. Six months later there was another tournament and I won in both styles there. It was pretty fun, but then life happened and I kind of forgot about it for a while. I missed the next tournament, but I thought, “I want to keep doing it.”

About eight months ago or so, I decided that I wanted to get good at Jiu Jitsu. I did not have anything else going on. I was just doing business and family and everything. There was a lot happening, but I thought I could carve out a couple of hours a week just to do this and it would be fun. It is close to wrestling and it would be fun to do.

I hired a guy named Jason Flynn. He is a stud; he is a black belt dude. He had classes, but I thought, “I don’t want to do classes. I just want to do private one-on-ones with you twice a week.” I started paying him for that and for the last eight months I have been twice a week one-on-ones with this dude who is one of the toughest people I have ever met.

It has been very, very good. I finally learned the art of Jiu Jitsu which is fun. The tournament this weekend will be the first time I have competed in Jiu Jitsu where I actually know how to do Jiu Jitsu, so it will be fun. I am excited. I have to practice today and I have to cut weight tomorrow because I am a little heavy. I have to lose five pounds tomorrow. In about 45 minutes to an hour I should be able to lose that and have weigh-ins.

The party starts on Saturday. That is what is happening. I know it has nothing to do with marketing, but it has a lot to do with what I am passionate about. For all of you out there who have a passion, for me, if I could go back, if I could give away my business and start wresting as a freshman in college, I would do it in a heartbeat, no questions asked. I would walk away in a heartbeat.

I think all of you have something like that; a passion, something you love or you miss that you did in your prior life, right? I would try to look at your business as something that can facilitate that. All of us get into business for a purpose. You got in because you wanted freedom or time or whatever it is. After a while you get so addicted to the game that all the other stuff falls away and I think that is a shame.

For me, it was almost seven or eight years where I completely forgot about the stuff I loved. Make it a priority that your business is created in a way to fuel your real passions. Your business can be a passion, but do not let it be the core driver. Otherwise, I think you will get burned out and you will not love it long term.

There is my advice for today. For all of you guys out there, go get a workout in; go do some Jiu Jitsu; go do whatever it is you love to do and then get back to work and let’s make some money.

Thanks, everybody. We’ll talk to you soon.

Apr 21, 2014

Why Russell deleted his entire webinar and spent the last 4 hours rebuilding it from scratch.

---Transcript---

Good morning, everyone. This is Russell. It is 4:13 A.M. and I am just driving home from the office. I want to welcome you to a late-night, special edition of Marketing in Your Car.

You guys probably think I am crazy, but it is definitely 4:13 A.M. and I have a Webinar eight hours from now which I am very excited about. We have been pruning it all week long. Hopefully most of you  will be on there because it is going to be awesome.

This week has been so crammed with everything. I am working with a writer to write my book; we are trying to launch ClickFunnels, and a lot of other stuff. Every day I kept trying to find time to prepare the Webinar and I just have not had the time. It has been kind of crazy.

As you know from my last podcast, I want to do Jiu Jitsu and lift weights and everything else. Eventually it comes down to crunch time and you just kind of do it.

I worked on it today for a while and got my slides finished up. They are not finished, but I had four or five slides done when I left the office. I really needed to come back to the office to get some stuff done, so I came back to the office. It has been a long time since I have written a brand new Webinar from scratch. There was a time when I was writing a Webinar almost every month and I was very good at it.

When Automated Webinars came out, we did a DotComSecrets local one. That one just blew up. I think we did a million dollars the first 90 days with it. That one went on to do about $3 million. For almost a year I did not write another Webinar and then I wrote the DotComSecrets X Webinar. This one has been crushing it now for almost two years now. Maybe it is more than two years.

Anyway, I have gotten lazy. I have not had to do a Webinar for a long time and I have kind of forgotten how to do them. I am trying to get back into the flow of it and do stuff. I am going through a lot of notes and I remembered a guy who is really crushing it on Webinars. I almost paid him $50,000 to write a Webinar for me, for my Supplement Secrets offer. It kind of fell through last minute. I still may do it, but we did not end up doing it for this product.

Wow, there is somebody else out here driving at 4:00 in the morning. How strange is that? I am on some random, small road, and we came to a T and we both came at the very same time. That’s interesting.

I almost paid this dude $50,000 to do Webinars. His name is Jason Fladlien and he is crushing it with Webinars right now. It kind of fell through at the last minute and I was wondering if he had anything to teach in his Webinar system. I would be very curious to look at it to get some ideas.

I went to his Web site and there was a $1,000 product and a $50 product about how he does his Webinars. I thought, “Well, I don’t have time to go through a $1,000 course in the next hour.” It was probably about 10:00 at night when I got into the office and started doing this research.

I bought the $50 course. It was an ebook, so I printed it out and started looking through it. Actually, before I printed it out I scrolled through the PDF to see if it was going to be of value. I started scrolling through very quickly and I thought, “Oh, man! This is really, really good stuff.” There were different ways to present a Webinar which I have not done before.

One core concept, I am not sure if I did a Webinar or a podcast on this. I may have just talked about it at our mastermind group. It was talking about finding the one core thing and focusing on one belief, not trying to get people to believe a lot of things.

I was looking at the existing presentation I was creating. I was trying to get people to believe three or four things and Jason’s template works very much on the one belief thing. I took all my slides, all my notes, everything I had worked on for four or five hours today at the office, plus everything I had done up to that point and I deleted it all. I read through an 80-page ebook in an hour-and-a-half or so and remapped the entire thing.

I then spent from midnight until 4:00 A.M. building out the slides for my presentation. They are not quite finished yet. I would say they are probably about 80% finished, but I am excited.

Anyway, I just got home. I am going to take a nap. My wife is going to lift weights in two hours and then the kids should get up in three hours. Three hours from now my kids will be awake jumping on me. I have to get them breakfast and then I will hopefully have enough energy to come back, and finish the slides.

Also, we do not have the order page up or anything. I have to get the order sales page to flow  and the product is not completely finished either. It is close. I have to do all that stuff before noon Mountain Time which is less than eight hours from now.

Wish me luck! I am excited to see what happens. I will report back and let you know if I either bomb or if it is a huge success. I think it should be good, though. I think the pitch is pretty powerful. It is something I would pay for in a heartbeat. It should be good.

That is the game plan. I am going to get some sleep. I appreciate you guys listening. Hopefully you get a kick out of the fact that I am still up. I will talk to you guys soon.

Apr 17, 2014

Four life lessons that Russell learned this week, that you can implement to, hopefully, make your life a little bit better.

---Transcript---

Hey, everybody. This is Russell Brunson and I am doing a special Marketing in Your Car from inside the Mommy Mobile. Yes, I am inside my wife’s car and I am ready to do a great podcast.

I have no idea what direction we are going to go today on this podcast. Usually I have a theme I want to think about, but I have a lot of cool stuff happening and I am excited, so I am going to just start rambling. Hopefully something cool will come out of it and you will get some value out of it.

First, right now I am on day seven of my modified juice fast and I feel amazing. I want to talk about this because I think I just stumbled on something new. I am not sure if it is totally healthy and I may very well die in the near future from it, but I think it is awesome.

This is what I am doing. When I walk up in the morning I do my Bullet-proof hot chocolate which is the Mormon version of Bullet-proof coffee. It consists of chocolate, organic grass-fed Kerrygold butter, MCT oil, cocoa powder, and some Stevia. I blend it up and that is my breakfast in the morning. When I do this, I am not hungry and I feel pretty good the rest of the day. It is pretty awesome.

The second step is that I have been juicing and I was making a gallon of juice per day. This was fun, but all my juices kind of taste nasty because I just juice everything I can find in one huge gallon jug. I carry it around all day and keep drinking it.

I don’t mind it, but it is kind of gross, so I went to a place called Tree City here in Boise. They have this juice cleanse. Every day I go in the morning and they have six juices for me to drink throughout the day, so I have been drinking those. At night, just because everyone else is eating and I feel guilty (I don’t feel guilty, actually; I just get hungry) I usually eat some eggs. I don’t eat carbs, but just eggs.

I have done this now for almost a week and I feel awesome. I am not as tired; I have energy; I am not craving food. Well, I am not going to lie. When I do crave something in the middle of the day, I have been eating Quest Nutrition Bars. From a nutritional standpoint, they are the best protein bar you can get in the world. From a taste standpoint, it is like eating candy. I could live on Quest bars alone. You can go to their Web site, <a href="http://www.questnutrition.com">QuestNutrition.com</a>, and look for the cookies and cream one. Man! It is like eating Oreo cookies, but a thousand times better. They are all super high protein and very low carbs.

This is what I have been doing.

Second, I am actually driving right now to Jiu Jitsu. This week has been so slammed and so crazy. Typically, when I am this busy I cancel my Jiu Jitsu. Today my wife said, “You really should just cancel it.”

I said, “You know what? No! This is the thing I look forward to.” This is the reward at the end of the tunnel for me. It is going to beat up dudes. I don’t know why, but it is so appealing to me. This is what I want to do.

So many times we cut out the part of our life that brings us a lot of happiness because of work and other things. I was thinking about this in the case of many of us. Everyone has the things they like to do, right? Many times life gets in the way of those things. We need to make it more of a priority and say, “Look, this is what I do.”

For me right now it is Jiu Jitsu. Twice a week I want to do it, I am going to do it, and everything else has to fall to the side because I am going to do it; that is, outside of my family. With work, many times it fills the space you give it. If you have eight hours a day, it will fill eight hours. If you have 20 hours a day, it will fill 20 hours. Anyway, make sure you tie in those things you really want to do.

The reason we became entrepreneurs is that we wanted to do a bunch of stuff. We wanted more time, more money, more freedom, or more whatever. However, we then shackle ourselves down with our businesses to the point where because of our business we cannot do the stuff we want to do. It is kind of interesting.

There is another life lesson for today.

What else? Oh, the next thing is ClickFunnels. We are almost done with our initial beta. I cannot tell you how excited I am. I literally built an entire membership site last night in 20 minutes from start to finish to everything. It used to take a ton of time.

There is one limitation: You can only do a membership site the way we have it. If you want a fancy membership sites with a lot of other stuff, you have to use WishList Member (that’s a plug for Stu, my man!). However, if you want a basic membership site, man! In 20 minutes, start to finish, I had a membership site that I could start selling.

We were going through sales funnels that fast, automated Webinars; I am going through and creating all of these right now. Even if I never sold a single license to ClickFunnels, it will change my business forever. Now we can sell it and share it with everybody else in the world which is very, very exciting. It is going to be awesome.

We also just hired a full-time accountant which is a crazy thing. She has been coming in. This is the first time in my business where I have had someone do tons of in depth, not analytics, but almost like an autopsy. It is like doing an autopsy of our books, digging deep and trying to figure out everything. Where is the money coming from? Where is it going? Which of our offers are profitable? Which are not profitable?

Right now everything we do kind of gets lumped together, so at the end of the month we are thinking, “Yeah! We are profitable!” I have been learning one thing from my favorite show The Profit. Today, by the way, is the season finale. It is interesting because he goes into companies and tries to find where the profit is on each of the things they are selling. He gets rid of all the low-profit stuff and tries to sell more of the high-profit stuff.

Last night’s episode they were in a pie company. This pie company had an 80% margin on their key lime pie and they had a 10% profit margin on everything else. However, everything else took up 90% of the store. He got rid of all of it and transformed the store to 100% key lime pie and nothing else. Boom! All of a sudden it became profitable.

It was interesting like that. One of my big takeaways is looking at all of my funnels. We have a lot of them. Our support has to be in all of them and there are things happening and costs associated with each of them.   Which ones are actually making us money and which ones are not? We are trying to identify this, to drill down, and to figure out which products are profitable and which ones are not?

We are also looking at advertising sources. We used to group everything like, “Here are solo ads; here is Facebook; here is whatever.” We are digging deeper to figure out everything about our business. We have always been pretty good at numbers, but now we are getting very, very good, stripping out everything that is not profitable and focusing on the good stuff.

It is sad. We are shutting down Web sites, funnels, and pages that I love, but they are not making money or they are costing too much in time, energy, support, and headaches. It does not make a lot of sense.

Anyway, I am at Jiu Jitsu now. I am going to go in here. The dude I am going to roll with is way tougher than I am. I am going to try to beat him up today. That is my goal. My goal, actually, is to not get tapped out today from him. He is a stud, but it should be pretty fun.

Hopefully out of this you got something. If not, then just wait until next week and I will have some more good stuff. I appreciate you guys. Look for ClickFunnels.com. It is coming out soon. We are not far from the public release. Like I said, this will change our industry forever. It will change my business forever and I am sure it will change yours, as well.

That’s it for today. Thanks, and we will talk to you soon.

Apr 14, 2014

Russell’s new concoction to give him more energy, flush out his toxins, and loose a ton of weight in a very, very short period of time.

---Transcript---

Good morning everyone. I want to welcome you to another exciting, awesome, fun adventure in the Marketing in Your Car Podcast.

A lot of people actually who messaged me this weekend asking me about my cleanse, so I want to give you some updates on how it went. If you Google the “lemonade cayenne pepper cleanse,” you will see what I started doing.

I did that the very first day. I did the salt water flush. I just started drinking it the first day and it was pretty nasty. After drinking about half a gallon of it, one of my friends who was doing it with me started looking at what we made. There is lemon water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup.

He called me and said, “Do you realize there are 55 grams of sugar in a fourth cup of maples syrup?” We put a cup in and he said, “There are over 200 grams of sugar in here!”

I said, “Are you kidding me?” and I stopped drinking it. I said, “Dude, that’s not good.” I got rid of it, but I was already mentally into this cleanse mode. I thought, “I have to figure out a way to keep doing this,” so I kind of made up my own cleanse.

The reason they probably did the cleanse that way is to give you some carbs to keep your energy throughout the day. I think I have talked about this before on some of our podcasts. I have been studying the benefits of fat and using fats instead of carbs for energy and so on.

I thought, “What if I blend some stuff? What if I do the Bullet-proof hot chocolate thing for my energy?” I did it in the morning and the afternoon. It is organic, grass-fed Kerrygold butter and MCT oil mixed with some cocoa powder and some Stevia to make it taste good. I drink that and the rest of the day, instead of having this horrible sugar juice, I got a real juice.

I went to the grocery store and bought a ton of stuff: carrots, apples, cucumbers, celery, fennel, and anything that looked like it could be shoved into a blender or into a juicer. I brought it home and produced a gallon of juice and I drank that throughout the day instead. I have done this the last two days, so it has been three days now that I have been on this makeshift cleanse.

The amazing thing is that by doing the Bullet-proof and the juice cleanse and mixing those two together, I did not feel hungry the entire day. Right now it is the third day and I am supposed to be done, but this morning I woke up and I had no desire to pig-out like I normally would have done in this kind of situation. I just had some more Bullet-proof hot chocolate this morning, I juiced some more stuff, and I am just going to keep going with it.

Also, I checked my weight before. I was 206 pounds before and I was 200.4, so I lost almost six pounds in the last three days. I think I am just going to keep riding it. I am going to get down about ten more pounds, so I will keep riding this for another week or so and see how it works.

As I said, I am blending together the Bullet-proof hot chocolate thing with the juicing cleanse. So far I feel amazing. Who knows? This may be the new diet fad or the new cleanse, at least. I was thinking of names to call it like Butter Juice or something like that.

Anyway, I woke up this morning and did it again and I feel awesome. I am almost to the office right now. I have a consult today. Somebody paid $2,500 for a one-hour consult, so I get to dive into their business for the next 60 minutes, rip it apart, have some fun, and show them how to take it to the next level.

These guys seem really cool, so I am hoping they will upgrade and join our mastermind. If they want me to really affect their business it is the best way. I can then work with them throughout the entire year. That is the game plan.

If any of you want a $2,500 consult like these guys, it gives us an hour. It may sound like a lot of money, but I promise you I will make you ten times, at least, in that hour. Just let our office know. If not, just keep listening in and hopefully you will get some more good ideas.

I am at the office and my call starts in ten minutes. I am going to jump in there and give these guys a call and get into some fun, business-building activity. It should be fun.

For all of you who are interested, let me know if you want to know more about the Butter Juice diet. Maybe I will write up a little plan and call it The Butter Juice Cleanse and show you what I am doing. It is awesome and I feel great. I have a lot of energy and I am excited to drink my juice today. You can hear it in my gallon.

Thanks, everybody. I will talk to you soon.

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