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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
Nov 12, 2013

As we transition from a YouTube generation to a Pinterest generation, this new type of sales letter is going to win.

---Transcript---

Good morning. This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey guys and gals and anyone who is out there in podcast land and listening today. I am excited today because today I am going to be working on our supplement. A lot of you guys know if you have been listening to this or following me, we have a supplement. I have been wanting to do a supplement for 10 years now, and finally about a year ago we put one together and launched it and it’s been great. We are having a ton of fun with it.

We have been testing a lot of different things. Initially what we started doing with it, we started with a free plus shipping type thing where they would get the first bottle for free. We would charge them shipping, and after 14 days we would start billing their card and ship them out a new supplement, which has been working good.

We are at point now where our recurring is around $50,000 a month from it. Not too bad for a little side project. Right? We should do half a million bucks or so this year from that supplement. So that is kind of cool. I want to grow it big. I have been people who got supplements who are doing half a million dollars a month or more.

I am on this eternal mission to figure out how in the world do I scale it. I think it is how it goes. The weight is really hard to scale immediately. We are spending $80 or so to get a free customer. In some cases we are able to break even by day 14, which is awesome. Sometimes it takes to day 45 or beyond to break even. I don’t know about you, but I have a risk. I am pretty into taking risks and stuff, but I am risk intolerant with my money.

Day 45, if we haven’t broke even by that point it kind of scares me. How do we create something where we can break even at day one or make a profit at day one and go from there? That has been the mission that we have trying to look at. We are looking at all the other people that are doing really well with supplements right now.

Ed O’Keefe has a really good supplement that I take now. I bought it to go through the sales process, and I am actually addicted to it. There are bunch of really good supplements as well. I have been watching their funnels. What has been interesting is that most of the guys that killing it right now aren’t doing free plus shipping type things anymore. They are selling one, three or four bottles off their order page and upsales for other things.

We are working on that. What I really want to talk about today is an interesting thing that I have been looking at. The shift from the sales video back to the sales letter. For the last two year, sales videos have been the thing that has been crushing it. I don’t think it is going to go away at all, but it is interesting. For a while it felt like the market was in this YouTube generation where everyone is watching videos.

Over the last year or so it seemed like it shifted more to the Pinterest generation where we are looking at images and text, if that makes sense. For example, if you post a video on YouTube or you post an image on YouTube, traditionally you are going to get way more comments, shares, likes, things like that from an image than you ever would from a video.

Isn’t that interesting? Where forever it was video, video, video. With our supplement we created a sales video version and sales letter version. The sales letter, we also did it a lot different than we normally do. We are trying to test some things that go against what I have always believed as the norms. I am testing to see if maybe I am wrong. If I am wrong, that is cool.

I would rather be wrong and rich than right and broke. We are testing this out, and I have been looking at, if you guys know Miconi, he owns Mind Valley, and if you look at them, they are crushing it right now in the personal development space. If you look at the way they design their websites and sales letters, they are very different. They are not a traditional sales letter, or even the sales letter way that I have done them and I have taught them where you are starting with a star story and a solution and you are going through this process.

They are more like these blocks of stuff. That’s the best way to explain it. If you look at one of Mind Valley’s sales letters, go to MindValley.com, and look at their sales letters, he sells theirs 10 or 12 blocks. Each block is its own little message. People can scan it. It almost looks like infographics. You scan it and see the things. Each block has a topic. They have bullet points. They have pictures and the next block and the next block and the next block. There is not a logical story progression throughout. It is just like we are talking about the benefits. This block we are talking about the guarantee. This block we are talking about what other people have said about it. This is the ingredient block and stuff like that. We design this sales letter to go that way.

We are going to be doing tons of testing and video versus sales letter versus video with sales letter versus tons of different things we are going to try out. It is really interesting to me right now that I feel like, I look at different markets. If you look at the warriors for example, all of the offers that are in there, none of them are video, very few of them are video.

The majority are all text. I am wondering if we are going to start transitioning back to a spot where people prefer more text based sales letter so they can scan more. They can get their information. If so, I am curious and I am interested to see if it will change the way the sales letters are built because the old school, traditional sales letter is a long story.

You can’t just scan because you are going to miss the point of the story. Whereas the way that Mind Valley is doing theirs and the way  we are doing this one, is it very scannable. Each block is independent of itself. If you are looking at that chunk, that block whatever you want to call it. It has one message. Each block has its own core message.

Anyway, it is just very interesting. I am excited to test this and see what is happening. I definitely think that we are transitioning away from the YouTube generation and transitioning towards the Pinterest image, text generation. Beware of that in your marketing. Look at how else can you add more text elements. At least, if you don’t have, you don’t want to make text sales letters, at least have an option that has a text version of your sales video.

I think people are getting now where they don’t want to watch videos as much. It was intriguing for years, but now it’s like, “Oh crap. A video.” Whereas you have text, they can scan, they can find what they want. It is interesting. I don’t know if I am right or wrong, but I am predicting the rebirth of the sales letter. The rebirth will be much different from the old sales letter. I don’t think it is going to be story based. I think it is going to be block based.

That is what I have for today. I am at the office. I am going to go play with my new sales letter. The smackdown will begin. Video versus sales letter. Maybe it will be a combination of both that wins. I don’t know, but we are going to find out. We are going to put it to the test because I want to see where people minds are at right now. It will be interesting. I am here at the laboratory. I am going to step in, and I will report my results back to you guys in the next week or two or three when we get some testing done, drive some traffic and see what people are responding best to.

Thanks so much everybody, and we will talk to you all again soon.

Nov 8, 2013

How to finally get past your sticking points and finish your projects once and for all.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone. This is Russell, and I am actually driving to the office, and I wanted to do a really quick Marketing in Your Car Podcast so here we are.

Today’s podcast is because, this is something probably a lot of us deal with. I just dealt with it, and it was very painful and it is over now. I want to talk about it because it will make some of you guys get some crap done that you have been waiting on doing forever.

We’ve been working on a relaunch of our dotcomsecretsx site for probably three or four months now. It has gone way too long. The biggest reason why is because instead of things that everyone is waiting on me to get done. It is stuff I really, really, really hate doing. I realize I associate so much pain with this one piece of the process that I just avoid it at all costs.

No matter what is happening I block out time. I will come in super early in the morning, a million different things that I try to do to get it done, and I can’t figure out ways to not do it. I have so much pain associated with it that I don’t get it done. I think, and I bet that a lot of you guys are probably the same way. There’s things in your marketing journey or your entrepreneur journey that you know that you have to do, but there’s one or two things that you associate so much pain with that you never do it.

Probably the biggest one that I have seen people do, and it blows my mind. Honestly, it has been good for me and my business, but it’s not so good for you and your business. A lot of people are willing to spend money on training, information programs and seminars and things like that where they are learning, they feel like they are getting value. They are scared to death. They have so much pain associated with spending money in advertising. What if the ad doesn’t work?

What if whatever we click on, nobody buys? There is so much pain they never do it. We just finished a group of coaching students. One of the students came back and was like, “How come I haven’t made any money yet?” I asked if he finished anything, and he asked why he wasn’t making money. The last step was I showed you how to buy ads, and I asked if he bought any ads yet. He said no. That’s the reason you aren’t making money yet. It is up to you at this point.

I think about the things in my life that cause me pain that I avoid them at all costs even if they are things that I need to do to be happy or more successful, whatever it might be. I have been trying to isolate those things, write them out. Look at what they are and why my  brain subconsciously creates so much pain associated with them. Then, I start thinking about, I learned this originally from Tony Robbins and since then I study it through NLP and a bunch of other things, was just the concept of pleasure versus pain.

Our brains will always either move away from pain or towards pleasure, towards pleasure, away from pain. When we have a task like that, that is holding us up, the problem is that our brain sees that as pain. It moves away from pain and towards pleasure, tries to find what I can do? I can go to Facebook. I can find pleasure there. I can go eat. I can find pleasure. I can go talk to my friends. I can find pleasure there.

Our brain tries to shift us to pleasure as fast as they can because it doesn’t want to have to deal with pain. For me, I realize forever this has been looming. What I tried to do, and it worked effectively, because I just finished my big painful task that I have been dreading for six weeks now. Six weeks I have been delaying this task that took me 20 minutes to do because I associated so much pain with it.

What I had to do, is I had to go find out, I had to create something that had so much pleasure, so much more exciting that my brain was like, “I want that. I want that more than I am scared of the pain.” I created this thing that I wanted. I am not going to tell you what it is because it stupid and childish, but it’s a pleasure thing for me. It was something that I actually wanted. I created that thing, and I said, “You cannot have that until this task is done.”

It made that pleasure so big and so exciting and so big that the pain of that task just got smaller and smaller and smaller, and I finished it. I just did it you guys. I am excited. I just want to throw that out there for you guys because I am sure that you have, each of us, all of us. I have this in a lot of other areas of my life, and I am sure you guys do too. You have this thing that is causing you so much pain, and you are avoiding it like the plague, even though it is the thing you need to do to get to the real pleasure, the true pleasure, the real happiness.

What I want you guys to do is think about that and figure out how can I create something so pleasurable and so great as a reward for myself that I will go through anything to get it. Think about wrestling. I used to go three, four days in a row without eating any food, two days without drinking any water, going through this horrible, physical pain. I would do this while I wearing plastic suits in wrestling, trying to lose 20 pounds in a three day period of time. I would do that every single week for 10 years.

Why would I do that? I had so much pleasure in winning a wrestling match. That pleasure, that high whatever you want to call it, was so big, I was willing to sacrifice food and water and social life and everything. Everything I had just because I wanted my hand raised after a match. That’s how much pleasure that created for me.

If you can start doing that in your life and look at and find those pain points that are keeping you from what you want to and create pleasure to help burst you through it, I promise you guys will see a ton of success, just like I just did. I feel great right now. Now, I am at the gym and I am excited. That is it for today. I am at the gym, and I am going to go work out. All you guys find out what your sticking points are and smash through them this weekend and have some fun. Thanks everybody. I will talk to you soon.

Nov 7, 2013

How a tiny shift in your packaging can dramatically increase your sales.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody! It is rainy here in Boise today. This is the Marketing in Your Car, Podcast. Alright, so my wife had a really cool experience that has some definite marketing benefits, so I want to talk to you guys today. A couple years ago I was at the Tony Robbins event, and he talked about the evils of cow milk. Not really, but he did talk about how he isn’t a really big believer in cow milk, and gave some good compelling arguments why.

I am not saying he is right or wrong, but we decided at that point to try and wean off of milk. We shifted from milk. We initially tried soy milk which was nasty. Then, we tried the rice milk. Then, we fell in love with almond milk. We have been drinking almond milk probably two and a half, three years or so. Took us a little while to get our kids weaned off regular milk. Finally got it. Tried different brands, and finally my kids and my wife and everyone settled in on this one brand, which I think is Blue something.

Anyway, so yesterday my wife went shopping at the grocery store. When she’s there, she walks in and there’s these three dudes in big suits, like tall guys in suits. My wife is shorter anyway. These guys are walking around, and she is going around shopping. She gets back to the milk section, and she is going to buy some almond milk. These three guys are standing right in front of the milk and staring at the milk.

She’s like, how am I going to get in there? She said excuse me, excuse me and squeezes through the guys and goes in and opens it up, and grabs four or five of these big cartons of almond milk, and puts them in her cart. The guys turn around and says, “Excuse me m’am. Do you mind if we ask you a question?” She says, “What?” “How come you bought the Blue Diamond brand as opposed to Silk?” She picks up the Blue Diamond brand, and she shows the picture on the outside and says, “There’s raspberries on the picture on the front of this box.” They said, “What do you mean?” She said, “We tried to buy Silk, but my kids wouldn’t drink it because there’s no raspberries on the box. This one has raspberries, and they thought it looked good, so that’s the one that they will drink.”

The guy said, “Seriously? That’s the reason you bought that over the other one?” She said, “Yeah. The only reason why is because it has raspberries on the box.” The guy says, “It’s a dollar cheaper than Silk.” She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay a dollar more for it. It is the fact it has raspberries on the box.”

He said, “Whatever. I don’t believe you. How about this? I will pay you a dollar for each bottle of Silk you buy or each box of Silk milk you buy right now.” She said, “If I was to do that I would be out 10 bucks because my kids wouldn’t drink this milk, and it would sit in my fridge and go bad.”

He said, “That’s so interesting. We are actually representatives of Silk. We work for Silk, and we are here just trying to figure how to increase sales and placement, and stuff like that. That’s just very interesting. That’s the reason why. It wasn’t because it was cheaper. It was because the picture on the box had raspberries on it.”

I just wanted you guys to think about that, the power of perception. Isn’t it strange that my wife, we buy four or five boxes of almond milk a week, probably spend three or four grand a year on this almond milk. We buy one brand over the other is not because of the cost. It is because of the packaging, what it looks like on the outside. It is just really interesting.

I have seen people who have products who just change the cover of the product, and they see sales change. For example, Matt Furey. He created a product. It was actually the very first product I bought of his. It was called the Martial Art of Wrestling. I bought it, and it was this glossy book, and it looked really nice and exciting. I read it, and loved it and everything.

Five years later when I found out what he was doing, and I was learning about internet marketing and all this stuff I went  listened to an interview. He was talking about his first product failure. He said it was this book he created called The Martial Art of Wrestling. He was like, “I spent all this money. It was nice and glossy. It was great, and nobody bought it. I had a huge bedroom filled with thousands of these books that nobody bought.”

It turns out I was the only person that actually bought it. Anyway, he was like, “Later on, I knew the content was amazing. Anyone who did read it, loved it. My next run of it, before the other one ever ran out, I decided to change the packaging, and made it more secretive and underground, and less like a book.

I made the cover black and white, non-glossy. Just paper. Instead of the Martial Art of Wrestling book, The Martial Art of Wrestling. Just made it more secretive and underground, just tweak the packaging dramatically increased sales.

If you have a product you are selling, and it’s not doing well maybe you just have to put some raspberries on the outside of the box. Maybe it’s not so much the product or the marketing or the sales funnel. Maybe it’s just you have to wrap it a little different, and make it so it’s a little more appealing to people.

I spend a lot of time in our businesses, I try to figure out the right hook and the right angle and the right thing. That stuff is very important. I can start working with somebody, and they have a product or business and they are struggling. We come in and not touch anything, just tweak their angle and hook a little bit and blow it up overnight. It is important. Think about that. Think about the raspberries on the outside of your box, what you can tweak and change to make it more appealing to your customers. That is it for the day. I am at the office. I am a little nervous to get out of the car because it is raining. I have a two foot step into the office.

Going to have a good day today, hope you guys will as well. We will talk to you all soon.

You are listening to Marketing in Your Car with Russell Brunson, the best podcast to help you easily launch and grow your own online business. Grab the wheel. Get in gear, and market in your car.

Nov 5, 2013

Lessons in entrepreneurship Russell learned last night while shooting zombies in the head.

---Transcript---

Hey guys and gals! This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Hey guys, so last night I had a chance to do something really fun. My wife and I went to this thing called the “zombie apocalypse.” Actually, it’s called Zombie Acres, where basically [laughter] I’m sure some of you guys, hopefully, have had a chance to do paintballing, which is very fun.

Where you go out in a field, and you have teams, and you shoot each other and try to kill each other, right? So what Zombie Acres was, was kind of like that except for backwards.

Instead of us going and shooting our friends, there’s a whole bunch of zombies attacking us, and we get to shoot them with paintballs, and it was a really fun thing, so we showed up there.

They had this huge bus, the Zombie Acres bus. And we get inside, and the windows are all busted out of the bus, and there’s a paintball gun out of every single window.

And so you go and you sit in the bus, and they drive around this haunted cornfield, and you get to shoot zombies.

The zombies are attacking you and jumping on the bus and coming in the doors and the windows, and you’re just pounding them in the face with paintballs, as fast as you can go.

And anyway, it was like, seriously, one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life. You know, I’ve been to a lot of haunted houses and stuff, and this trumped that by ten times.

So that was kind of what we did last night, it was super fun, and the reason why we did it, one of the guys who lives by me, he actually just started that as a company this year.

And I’m not sure how he got the whole idea behind it or anything, but they put the concept together and they found -- first, they were trying to buy a lot, but it was too expensive to buy someplace to do it.

So they partnered with some people, and they found some land to do it at, and they started doing it, and they promoted on Facebook and did a bunch of cool things. And it was just fun watching this little startup growing, and them using Internet marketing and all these things to kind of grow their business.

What was interesting is, I’ve been watching these guys. This was their first season doing it, and last night was actually the last night. So I’m watching them, externally, kind of seeing what they’re doing from the marketing.

And before it launched, they did a big pre-launch through Facebook, just locally here, and they were getting people to guess where it was going to be at, and it’s caused all this hype in pre-launch, which was awesome, and then boom!

They announced where it was going to be at, and then they did their first day, and then from there they posted pictures and videos and got people excited and more people started coming.

And then about half way through the season, they hit an obstacle -- and as most entrepreneurs, we know we hit obstacles a lot, right?

Yesterday, I hit like four new obstacles in my business that all are seemingly insurmountable. But we’ll figure out a way to break through them, right?

That’s kind of what happened to them. The city they were doing it is called Meridian, which is right next to Boise, and the Meridian City Council or whatever it was, came down and basically said, hey, you can't shoot paintballs outdoors in Meridian or whatever.

So they had to basically shut down, and they were shut down for about a week or so, and I felt really bad for them. But I just kind of watched it just to see how… I don’t know. I like seeing how entrepreneurs react.

You know, it’s interesting. You go to a store, if the employee behind the counter has a little issue, they just give up, right? But the entrepreneur in a business is always a lot more stubborn and pigheaded, and they figure out ways to get crap done, right?

So I just kind of watched them, and I just assumed that they were going to be done for the season, and then boom! About a week later, they’re back up and running.

And sure enough, he didn’t let that obstacle stop him, and went and they found another place in another city, set up shop over there, partnered with this farm.

That’s a farm called Linder Farms, and they already a ton of people coming for their corn maize and things like that -- and they set up shop right out there in the corn maize and kept going and finished through the season.

I just was impressed with their perseverance to kind of break through those sticking points.

And then, last night, again the first time that I had a chance to actually go. I had meant to go throughout the whole season, and things came up and then boom! They got shut down, and then it got re-opened, and just things keep happening, and we never got to make it.

Finally last night, we had a chance to go on the closing night, and we were on the very last bus. And it was awesome because when I was going there, I remember sitting there at first, and I showed up and I saw these two huge buses they had, like school bus style buses.

They’re all painted. The windows had been busted out. They basically had a paintball in every single window, and I was just looking at it.

And then, I saw like the staff that was, you know, doing tickets, and I saw the staff inside the buses, keeping people’s guns loaded and enough ammo, and I saw like all the zombies, and I was like, “there are a lot of costs involved with this little business that they’ve got.”

I was kind of doing the math, and I was, you know, looking at it. It was $30 a seat to be on the bus. Look how many windows there are, you know, and I’m looking.

They were making $600 -- $500 to $600 per busload -- and I was like, you know, that’s not bad money. But they’ve got a lot of costs, and I’m like, “I wonder how this is doing?

And I was noticing some things, you know, like when we went there. Like it was cold and I think they could have had some profit opportunities, if they would have sold hot chocolate or hand warmers or a bunch of things like that.

At the end, you know, they could take a picture, a lot of little things like that they could come back and really monetize.

But the brilliance came when I got on the thing, so I think it was, like I said, $30 per person to get on the bus, and then they give you 150 paintballs, which I assume 150 paintballs would last a pretty good amount of time.

I found out later, 150 paintballs lasts about three seconds, and so I’m at the brrrp boom! Balls gone! And they’re like, “Hey, if you want more paintballs, you know, the next 100 paintballs is five bucks.”

I’m like, “Yeah! Give me some more paintballs.” Pull out five bucks. Boom! Give me more paintballs. And about 10 seconds later, those are gone. So I paid another five bucks, boom!

Anyway, we ended up spending every penny that was in my wallet in paintballs, and by the end we were completely like… we were still not finished, and I was completely out of money, and I couldn’t buy any more paintballs.

And next to me there was a kid that was, man, probably 14, 15 years old, and he went and bought four refills of paintballs, so he spent an extra $20 on paintballs.

Again, everyone on the bus was doing this, and I started doing the math and that’s when I saw the brilliance of their business model: You’re getting in $30 is basically kind of covering their costs, and then when you’re in the bus, just keep buying more and more paintballs, is where they’re making money.

I mean, off of me they probably made an extra $80. They got us in and made $20, so there’s $100 between two of us, then there are 20 other people on the bus.

I was really impressed to see like how they were monetizing internally with the selling of additional paintballs, and I probably would have spent $200 or more if I wouldn’t have of ran out of cash.

They only take cash when your on the bus. I thought, you know, if they would figure out a way to do more, like a bar tab, where I’m like “another one, another one!” At the end bill me, I mean, I probably would have spent and extra… Goll, who knows, hundreds of dollars? I was having so much fun.

Anyway, it was really, really cool, and I started looking at that business model, and I started thinking like it’s kind of like the razor blade business.

You know, like if you go to the store, you buy razor blades, like the actual thing, the actual shaver thing isn’t that expensive, right? You can get those for like a dollar or two.

A lot of times they just give them away, you know, kind of like the bus ride. Then after you’ve got it, you got to buy razors, and you run a razor for a week or two weeks, and then it starts getting dull, and starts hurting, so boom!

You get a new one, a new one, and these keep replacing these razor blades, and that’s how that business makes a ton of money, and razor blades happen to be expensive.

Just like the printer business, right? They give away printers for free, and they sell ink over and over and over again. And that’s kind of the concept, and I thought it was brilliant, and executed perfectly.

Like I said, a couple things they could do, I think, to extract more money from me and the other customers.

At the end, I wish they’d had a professional photographer for taking pictures of us and the zombies; like that would have been something I would have definitely paid for, and I think most people there would have paid for.

Plus you could have used those pictures on Facebook, to help spread the message even further.

But as a whole, it was a fun night. An awesome to see entrepreneurship thriving and just see some people, who, obviously, went through a lot of trails and headaches to accomplish what they did, but to see them succeed last night.

And like I said, we were the very last bus, the last thing of the season, and afterwards they were out there taking pictures of all the zombies by the bus, and it was just cool -- and I was proud of them, to see them succeed with their new little business.

So that’s kind of what I wanted to just talk about today. Just to share a really fun experience that we had here, and then to share some of the outward entrepreneur things that they were able to do to succeed.

I hope that gives you guys some motivation in whatever business you’re in because you’re going to come into all sorts of troubles and issues.

You know, you may not be kicked out of your city because of your business, but you’re probably going to lose your Internet or you’re going to get your autoresponder shut down.

I can't tell you how many issues I’ve run into in my business every single day, and the entrepreneurs are the ones who figure out ways around it and figure out how to succeed.

And, man, that was a lot of fun! So if any of you guys are in Boise next October time, let me know and I’ll take you guys to Zombie Acres, and we will shoot some zombies and have some fun. It’s a good time.

So with that, I appreciate you guys. I’m at the office now. I’m getting back to work, and I’ll talk to you guys again soon.

Nov 4, 2013

Is it possible to find a happy medium?

---Transcript---

Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to the Marketing In You Car podcast.

Today, I’m not in my Ferrari because it’s freezing! But we’re here and we’re having some fun.

Hey guy and gals! So I appreciate you guys all being here today on the podcast and listening in. We have a very fun and exciting day today happening. It starts off, actually, yesterday. Well, maybe like even a month ago.

A month ago, for those of you who know me, I’m not like a very big video game guy. But I love like the old-school video games, and so I found this Nintendo controller, like one of the original ones, but it’s a USB based one.

So I bought it, and I really didn’t know what to do with it, and then last night with my kids I went and I found how to download an emulator, and I downloaded all of the original games that we used to play.

So I had “Mario 1, 2, 3.” We had “Double-Dribble,” “Contra,” “Milon’s Secret Castle,” “Legacy Of The Wizard,” anyway all the fun games, and we started playing it last night, and I was up till forever playing it.

And it’s Daylight Savings, and so I was actually up even… I was up to like 2:00 or 3:00, technically. I think it was like 1:00 or 2:00 I went to bed, but it was like 2:00 or 3:00 in my brain because of Daylight Savings.

So anyway, that was fun and I’m excited to get back tonight. I have to get home from the office and keep playing. I got to beat some of my old games again. Oh, “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out,” I have that one too.

Anyway, so it’s been a lot of fun. But I want to talk to you guys about what I’ve been thinking about this whole weekend. Because I’m kind of having a big shift, and it goes against everything that I thought I believed about marketing, and I think that I just sold myself on it.

For those who have been following me for any amount of time, you know that I’m kind of like a hard-core like Dad Kennedy style, outbound marketer, right? We’re very aggressive with our emails and our banners and our direct mail and our -- everything that we’re doing.

And it works! Okay, like we’ve been very successful with it, but I keep watching like all these newer type companies that are coming out, and watching their huge growth they’re having. And what’s interesting, as I watch what they’re doing, and it’s very… kind of the opposite of what I’m doing.

In fact, they all kind of call like, what I do and what we focus on, the “outbound marketing,” what they do “inbound marketing.” And I’ve seen infographic about like how outbound marketing, you’re like “spammers” and “the email marketers,” and, you know, all these guys.

And the inbound marketers, the ones who “create good content” and “people come and listen to them,” and bla, bla, bla, and while I don’t completely agree with them, there are some valid, really, really, really good things that I have been getting from them that I enjoy.

I think there’s a blend of the two that you can really find a happy medium, and I think that using, you know, they would call outbound marketing techniques --- promote your inbound marketing -- is really where the magic is if you can find that sweet spot.

And so, I’ve been looking for the last month or so, for those of you guys who know, we’ve been publishing the DotComSecrets Labs print newsletter for, man, for a long time!

I think it’s been seven years we’ve been publishing a print newsletter. In the last five or six months, it’s been the DotComSecrets Labs Newsletter, and people will have loved the Labs newsletter.

They’ve been going crazy for it. Anyone who gets their hands on it, it’s just like “this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” And the problem is, though, it’s really a hard product to sell. It’s kind of like insurance, right? Like everybody needs insurance, but nobody really wants insurance.

Now if they get it, they’re grateful for it. It’s kind of like this: like we just really have a hard time getting mass appeal, and then about a month ago the girl that’s been doing our newsletter, she’s had her second baby and she just said, “Hey, I don’t have time now to keep dedicating to this.”

And so, I’m kind of at this crossroad, and what do we do? Do we find a new publisher? Do we just cancel it altogether, or what do we do? I kind of have this weekend, what I’m leaning towards, and I may not do it, so don’t hold me accountable to this if I don’t.

But I was like what if -- like anyone who gets the newsletter in their hands and sees the split tests and the results and all this stuff, I get -- it instantly makes them raving fans.

Mark Call said, “By far, it was the best Internet marketing product he’s ever purchased in his history online.” You know, everybody else that sees it, loves it. Like our Facebook reviews are just raving, from David Frey, from just everybody, right?

And so, I was like, “What if we just stopped selling that and just started giving it away? Like what if I made like a real blog, like people do in the blogging world, and I just every day blogged split test results? It showed cool thing, after cool thing, after cool, after cool thing?”

I’m always just like have a kind of fear. I’m like, “Well, why should I actually give all this stuff away? Like people will pay for it.” But I’m like, what if I did, though? If I give that away, it would create these raving fans who then come back and purchase everything else we have.

That’s been kind of my thought process over the weekend. I’ve got to talk to my guys and see what they think about it. They may think I’m crazy.

But I really think that, you know, one of the big shifts in my business over the last month or so is, bringing in all the social media and bringing in all these things that we haven’t been doing.

And I think that the reason why it’s so powerful is because, first off, it makes you relevant. Second off, it’s really rebuilding our platform.

You know, like I said, we’ve been building our platform for the last 10 years, but the platform shifted. And I’ve got to be honest: I’ve been slower to change over than I probably should have been.

So these are all the things that we’re trying to do to really rebuild our platform from the social media standpoint, and just doing cool stuff to get everybody raving fans where they just spend more time with us, and, in return, hopefully, spend some more money with us.

So that’s the kind of the game plot. I don’t know. We’re excited, and anyway I appreciate you guys listening. I just got to the office. I’ve got a fun-filled day of stuff I’m going to be doing. I’m fired up, excited. I found this company that does infographics.

You know, I’ve got tons of processes that we teach in our company, and I was like whiteboarding out. But I was like wouldn’t that be cool if we have an infographic for each one of them? So like the DotComSecrets X process, we take someone through it. You make an infographic of that.

Our DotComSecrets Local, our Micro-Continuity, our Underachiever, like making infographics of each of these different topics. The people can print them out. You know, put them on the wall, whatever. Pass them around.

Anyway, I’m excited about that too. I’m going to be having them do a DotComSecrets X infographic today, so I’m fired up! I’m excited for today. It’s going to be good.

I hope you guys are excited as well. If you’re liking this podcast, please go to iTunes and let me know. I love reading the reviews. It gets me excited, and other than that, you guys, I will talk to you all again very, very soon.

Thanks, you guys, and this is Russell signing off.

Oct 31, 2013

Here are the core reasons why Russell is finally getting involved in social media.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very special Halloween Marketing In Your Car.

Everyone, so this Russell and today is… It just happens to be my favorite holiday, which is Halloween, and a lot of people think, “Halloween is your favorite holiday, Russell?”

But yes, I don’t know why. I just have so many fond memories of getting candy, and smashing pumpkins and everything else fun I did as a kid, and now it’s fun to take my kids out -- not smashing pumpkins, I try to teach them respect.

We’re definitely going out and getting candy, making some witches brew, a bunch of other fun stuff, so it’s going to be a fun day today. Anyway, I’m really excited.

So today I want to talk about just the kind of stuff that’s been happening in our business. What’s been interesting is, as we’ve been trying to kind of shift up our business model and change a whole bunch of things, you guys will start seeing a bunch of changes happening over the next two months in our business.

We’ve been, you know, about six months worth of back-work, and doing stuff that no one can really see yet, but you will all be able to see it very, very soon, a whole new re-brand of all of our sites, all of our brands, things like that.

And one of the big pieces that we’re doing is focusing a lot more now on social media, things like that, and it’s interesting because I’ve always fought social media. I’ve never wanted to do… I didn’t want to tweet. I didn’t want to do Facebook.

I didn’t want to do all that kind of stuff, but it’s getting to the point now where I just can't ignore it anymore, and we’re getting more and more involved. And it’s been interesting like, for any of you guys who are SEO type people or curious about SEO, it’s really interesting how much SEO has been changing.

We used to have full-time teams of people who did SEO, and now we’ve pretty much canceled and let go of all of them.

What we’re finding, and it’s interesting -- and I think that this will be the trend, moving forward with SEO -- is like it’s having a lot less to do with like backlinking and things like that. It’s having a lot more to do with like the actual social interactions that people are having.

I’ve heard stories and read things that talk about how the new future of SEO is, basically, social media. Where instead of someone going to Google and typing in, you know, “work at home,” instead of finding whoever has gotten the most backlinks, it will look at you and look at your social profile.

See the people who you care about, and then see if any of the people you care about, if they’ve liked something. Or they’ve commented on something, they asked who’s making work at home make money.

And if they have, then boom! That will show up on top, and it’s just interesting that that’s the direction that things are going, where search and social are now becoming one.

So I think that’s why we’re now focusing on that and trying to learn the game and trying to be engaging, and trying to build a Fan Page, and trying to tweet and all these nerdy things that I never wanted to do.

But we’re doing them now, and I think that right now they’re important but soon they’re going to be essential. I mean, look at like back in the day we’re used to go spend a ton of money for a backlink, right?

You get the perfect backlink and almost instantly you can get ranked very, very quickly. Where I think now it’s going to be a lot more like networking, and finding the social influencers in a space.

For example, lets say I’m in… like let’s say I’m in the diabetes market, right? Which we are… and so, you know, and now I want people searching for diabetes to show up.

So what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to go out there and network and find people who are big, prominent names in diabetes, whatever, and get them to comment about me on their social media, on their Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus or LinkedIn or whatever.

But if I get that person to do it, now all those people’s followers, in the future when they start searching for stuff, I’m going to pop up, and so I really think it’s interesting.

It’s moving away from like the technical SEO, you know, to get rankings where it’s X amount of links, and the link quality and the link density and latent SIMATIC index and all these things we used to focus on to try to beat the search engines, right? And now it’s not. Now it’s being social. It’s getting people to talk about you. It’s networking. It’s gone back to like organic business.

It’s really interesting, and so again despite the fact that I’ve been fighting it for years, we’re now jumping in and trying to focus on that because I think that’s going to be the future for all of us.

And I also look at like when I first got into this business, the way that I grew my business was networking. Like I was out there on the forums, meeting everybody in my industry. I was getting to know them.

I was going to events and meeting them, and I became very, very social, and then somewhere along the line I had kids and a wife and a company and we just stopped being as social, and so…

Oop, I’m pausing because I just drove past a cop in the Ferrari, and he’s looking at me now.

Anyway, we basically, as I said I stopped being as social, and luckily I built a lot of deep connections and relationships, and I had a lot of really good partners.

But if I look at my business now, and I think that nothing is stagnating at all. We’re still growing, but it hasn’t grown as it should because I haven’t been out there networking, and the new place to network is not the events, it’s not the forums -- it’s social media. It’s Facebook, and I hadn’t been putting in my time there.

And so, just for you guys, you know, think about the same types of things. This networking stuff that we’re talking about, it’s good from so many standpoints. It’s now good for the social traffic, obviously.

It’s good for future SEO rankings and things like that, and it’s also really good just for finding partners and friends and networking and things like that, and so I just want to stress to you guys that now is the time to get social, if you haven’t yet.

Jump on the bandwagon with me. You know, I fought it for years, but now we’re jumping in and I think that all you guys should, as well.

So, anyway that’s what’s happening for our Halloween today. I’m really excited. I just got to the office. I’ve got my fake biceps. My Halloween costume is these fake biceps, and then a blonde mullet wig. [Laughter] Which is kind of fun.

I had it the other day, and my daughter said that I looked like a muscle woman because my mullet was long and blonde. So anyway, I’m dressing up like a muscleman, with a long mullet, and going to have a fun day today.

So I’m excited. I hope you guys are as well, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Oct 21, 2013

The question that Russell asked that helped him raise an extra $500,000 in extra cash by the end of the year.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody! This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to today’s Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Hey guys, so we just finished a two-day mastermind here in Boise. I just actually drove my brother, who’s our audio-video guy, back to the airport. He’s flying back home, and I’m driving back, to go hang out with my kids and my wife and stuff, and so I’ve got probably 15 minutes or so in the car.

I just wanted to talk to you guys about some cool stuff I’ve been thinking about. And what I want to talk about is probably one of the most important things that I think any of us could ever think about. It’s had a really profound impact on me the last like week, so I’m excited to talk about it.

So earlier this week -- my wife and I have been planning on building a house for a while. We’ve been looking at a lot of stuff, and we finally found some land we like and everything.

And then just like last minute, I think it was on Tuesday, we saw this house. It looked really cool. So we’re like, “Oh let’s just call the realtor and go check it out.”

So we go check out the house and it’s amazing! It’s 11,000 square feet, it’s on five acres, it has everything we could dream of in a house.

Plus like the yard is amazing. There’s a swimming pool, there’s a hot tub, there’s like a full orchard worth of trees. Like seriously, the coolest house like I think I’ve ever seen, and so I want it really bad, right?

And the only problem is, to buy a house that size, we had to have a down payment of $500,000 to be able to move forward on the house, and I don’t care who you are, a half a million bucks is a lot of money, right?

So I’m like, “Well, how can I?” Anyway, so I started to just… like my wife is like, “I want this house. I want this house.” I’m like, “We can't really afford it.” But I was like, “Don’t worry. I’ll start thinking about it, and I’ll figure out a way that we can get it.”

And so, all of a sudden I started asking some interesting questions. The question I asked was: “How can I make a half a million dollars in extra cash before the end of the year?

So the next two and a half months, and typically if someone says something like that, you’re like, “You’re crazy. There’s no way you can make a half million dollars in two and a half months extra on top of what you’re doing.”

I was like “there’s got to be a way,” so I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and my wife’s like, “Don’t talk about something like that. It’s not good.”

You know, she thinks it’s like you. What I’m going to do is illegal or something, that she’s just kind of funny like that. She doesn’t like when I plot and scheme ideas, so I’m like, “No, there’s got to be a way that we can do that.”

So, I went back home and went back to the office, and we’re all working and I kind of told those guys, “You know, I love the house. I want to move in.”

And Brent and John share an office with me, and I kind of asked them, “You know, like how can I make an extra half a million dollars this year?” And they kind of just like are working and kind of commenting, and they’re not paying attention.

Finally, I was like, “Guys! Stop what you’re doing, like this is actually really an important thing. We need to be asking ourselves questions like this more often. Like how can we make an extra million dollars or half a million dollars cash in the next like two months?”

And so, they kind of put everything down and started focusing, and we started asking questions. We started kind of evolving this thing, and within about 45 minutes we created a very realistic, concrete plan that I honestly think we could execute to make a half million dollars in the next two months, and we got it done. And then I kind of stopped, and said, “You guys, we need to ask ourselves questions like this more often.”

I was like, “You know, an hour ago, we were working on these projects, and we never asked the question how can we make an extra half a million dollars. We just… we’re were just working on our thing.”

And I started thinking like, if we look at a squeeze page, and we say, “How can we improve the conversion on the squeeze page?” and we ask that question, we’ll figure out a way to make it better.

If we do a sales letter, how can we make this better? If we ask that question, we’ll figure out a way to make it better, and what I was thinking is like when you ask the right questions, the right things will come.

If you ask big questions, you’ll be able to figure out the solutions to big things. So kind of an example of what we were figuring out for our $100,000 offer, or to make a half million dollars, I was like:

“You know, we do a product launch and try to sell a $1,000 product, and sell 500 of them, I’m like, ‘Oh, that sounds like so much work!’ I was like, ‘We could do this… We could do this…’”

And all of a sudden I was like, “What if we… What if we created a $100,000 package and just sold five of them?” and like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. What can we sell for $100,000?”

I’m like, “Well, think about this… Like we launched this call center. We launched this little mini call center in our office. We’ve got two sales people. We hardly generate any leads.

It’s very few leads, very targeted. And right now, with two sales people, we’re averaging, not quite, but pretty close to $100,000 a week in sales.

And I was like, “Think about this. If we found five people who have a business, but they don’t have this little like mini call center thing that we just built, and it could literally make them $100,000 a week.

“What if we come in and say, ‘Hey, pay us $100,000, and I will come to your office, and my team will come and build out the whole thing. We’ll train sales people for you. We’ll get the whole thing done, and you will leave with a business that can make you $100.000 a week.

“Would you pay me $100,000 if I gave you business that made you $100,000 a week?” Everyone was like, “Yeah! I would. That’s a no-brainer. Of course I would.”

You know, obviously, it was just like, yeah, it’s a good deal. But I’m like, but still the same thing is I’m kind of scared. Like if you’re going to write a check for $100.000, there’s so much risk in that so much fear. And like, is that actually going to work or not work? I was like, “Well, what if we did this. What if we came back and said:

“Hey, give us $100.000, but don’t give it to us, put it in an escrow account. And we’ll look at it, and then we’ll come in, and we’ll build this entire thing for you for free.

“We’ll set it up. We’ll launch it. We’ll run it, and we’ll watch it, and we’ll help make sure it works, and we will wait until it’s made $100,000.

“And as soon as it’s made $100.000 in gross profits, then that $100,000 that you put escrow will be released to me, and then you’ll have a business that you can keep running to make $100,000 a week.”

I was like, who would say no to that? Like as long as you have the ability to put $100,000 in escrow, who would not do that? Like I’m going to make you $100,000 before you ever give me any of the money, and so it starts being like that.

I’m like this is actually really good. Like this is something I would have paid for in a heartbeat, and it’s got to be the right business, the right company, right?

But if it’s the right fit, we could literally come in and in less than a week we could build this whole thing out for somebody, and have a new asset hooked to their business and make them $100,000 a week.

And so, I started getting excited. So I was talking to some guy, and this guy, I kind of mentioned it to him. And he was like, “Dude, I know tons of people who would go for that.”

So he started calling some people, and we got two or three people lined up that may do it. Then by mastermind group, when I kind of pitch it, and soon as I do everyone’s going crazy, and one person is like… they’re like:

“We’re not on spot yet. We can’t do it, but I know somebody who would be very interested, who wants to do it,” so then we got one potential client.

Then Daegan told me, he’s like, “There’s a guy who was talking to me two weeks ago, who said, ‘All I want is the call center. I want somebody to come and set the whole thing up for me, and I’d pay anything -- any amount to do it.’”

Boom! We got a lead right there, and then the guy in the room also said he wanted us to do it for him.

So within two days of me just asking that question, of how I can make a half a million dollars in a month, I’ve already got six people, potentially, who are able and interested in giving me $100,000, for me to come set this thing up for them, and I was just like, how cool is that?

And it’s just interesting like, most of us -- the difference between successful people and not successful people is successful people ask the right questions -- and I’m really kind of ashamed of myself. I haven’t been asking better questions lately.

My questions lately have been stupid. They’ve been like… they haven’t been big enough questions, you know, and so I’m going to start every single morning, waking up, and like asking a big question or multiple big questions, and then using that throughout the day, try to answer those questions.

Because my question is like how can I get my work done today, or how can I whatever, nothing good is going to happen. If my question is like how can I make an extra million dollars, how can I change more people’s lives, how can I double the size of my list?

Like if I ask questions like that, then suddenly my focus goes there. And as Tony Robbins says, “Where focus goes, energy flows,” and we just started to start picking the right questions. And if you pick the right questions, you’ll start growing correctly.

I think we focus too much on trivial things that don’t really matter, as opposed to picking the right questions to help us grow our business the right way.

It’s kind of funny… and then later that night in the mastermind -- seriously I need to learn to take my own advice sometimes. But we were at dinner, and I was talking about how the Ferrari, we would probably do a contest and give away the Ferrari, and do a fun kind of thing like that.

I was talking about that, and one of my friends, who works for ClickBank said, “Hey, you should have ClickBank. Use part of ClickBank to give away your Ferrari.” And I’m like, “Well, there’s no way they’re going to do that.”

He’s like, “Why not?” and I’m like, and I told him all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. He’s like, “Dude, you’re just not asking the right question.” I’m like, “There’s no way that will ever work.”

And he kept like making fun of me. He’s like, “You just ask. Ask a better question! Like you’re asking the wrong question.” And I kept telling him, I was like -- his name is BJ.

I’m like, “BJ, this… ClickBank would never in a million years go for this. Like it’s a mute point. Doesn’t even, like it’s not worth even discussing.

And he kept saying, “Dude, you’re the one who talked about, say, ask a better question,” and I was just kind of upset and annoyed with him, so I kind of ignored him.

Anyway, the next day we’re sitting in the mastermind meeting, and all these discussions are happening, and then after talking to BJ, and all of a sudden boom!

It hit me. A way that we could partner with ClickBank on the Ferrari launch, and I said, “BJ, like I just answered the question.” I said, “Because you forced that question into my head, annoyingly, it was in there and my brain figured out an answer.”

And within a day we had the answer to this thing that, potentially, can make me insane amounts of money -- an actual quarter million dollars a month -- because I had that question forced into my head.

If I would have asked the question, I probably could of figured it out a lot quicker. So I just want you guys to all just start thinking about the quality of the questions you’re asking, and how often you’re asking them.

I teach a Sunday school class today, and I teach the 15 and 16-year-old kids, and so today in class I was just talking about this concept about questions, and I was like, “What are your goals and your dreams and your desires?”

And they kind of were telling me things they’re trying to accomplish, what they’re doing, and so what we did is we took a minute. I had everyone pause for just a minute, and I actually timed it.

I said, “I’m going to give you a minute right now. I want you to pick one big goal or one big question to be your focus for this week, and then I want you to come back next week and report back to me what happened, because you focused on that question for an entire week.”

And so, we paused, and then had everyone sit there and think for a little bit, like what would be their question, and I didn’t have them tell me what they were because I don’t want to…

You know, since with people that age, they’re embarrassed to show their real desires and their dreams, what their questions are, so I didn’t ask them to share it with us.

But I gave them a full minute to think about it, and I ask them, “Do you all have your question?” And I said, “Okay, I want you guys to go home tonight, think about a question, and when you wake up in the morning, I want that question to be the first thing on your mind.

“And throughout the day, I want you to be thinking about that question, and then tomorrow, the next day, I want you to wake up in the morning and for an entire week I want you to focus on that question.”

And I said, “For most of you guys, I promise you, by day one or day two, this big, huge question that you didn’t think was even possible to answer, you’ll be able to answer, and it won’t take you a whole week.”

I was like my “how am I going to make a half a million dollars extra in the next two months,” which -- it’s a big order that I was asking my brain to come up with -- but sure enough, within hours, we had the answer, okay?

The question of how can I get ClickBank to completely promote my launch to all their affiliate base is a big question! Not even logical! And within a day we had the answer.

Okay, so just start thinking big, thinking way bigger than you’ve ever thought before, and figure out that question that you never thought you’d ask and you probably shouldn’t ask.

If somebody knew you were going to ask it of yourself, they would make fun of you, and tell you it’s not possible. Or tell you that things like that don’t happen to people like you. And if you do that, I promise you cool stuff is going to happen.

And I think about the Ferrari… I’m like when the Ferrari contest came out, at first I looked at it and I was like, “I imagine a lot of people competing. “I’m not going to win,” and then the second I looked at it, I said:

“Huh! How can I win this?” and as soon as I did that, it opened up my brains to a pathway, and suddenly a month later we won a Ferrari, okay?

If you’ve ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he talked about the difference between financially rich people and financially poor people. He said, “Poor people say, ‘I can’t afford that,’ and rich people say, ‘How can I afford that?’”

Just a change in the question, how do you position it differently, how do you do it so that your mind doesn’t say, “Oh good! I’ll think about this” and relax, but instead, you put your mind in a state where it’s got to think, and got to figure it out.

And our minds, our subconscious minds, are so much smarter than we give them credit for. We just don’t ask because we’re so lazy, and it doesn’t want us to ask. It wants us just to hang out and watch T.V.

But if you turn the T.V. off, ask the question, then ask the question and keep asking and keep asking it, you’ll be shocked at how fast the answers will come.

I’m convinced of that. I’ve seen it twice this week, with seemingly impossible goals and dreams, coming about in reality in a matter of hours, after we asked the question, so ask the question and see what happens.

Anyway, that’s it for today you guys. I am actually just back from the airport, and I’m grabbing my wife and my kids from church, and then we’ll be heading home.

I hope you guys had a great weekend. It depends when you’re listening to this, but I hope everything has been great for you guys.

If you’re enjoying these podcasts at all, please share them with your friends. Post it on your blog.

Come and comment, and we love it, it’s fun to do, and I hope you guys are getting some ideas that will help effect your lives and your businesses, positively.

Thanks so much, you guys! This is Russell Brunson with the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Oct 10, 2013

Russell is driving home a 2 AM in the morning and sharing some of the insights they got building out their new SAAS products. Russell also shares with you what it’s like being a super hot girl!

---Transcript---

Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to an exciting edition of the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

It is actually 2:00 in the morning. I just dropped off Todd at the hotel. Todd is our developer. You guys heard about him in the last episode, and I’m in the Ferrari driving home at 2:00 in the morning. It is freezing cold! And the top’s down, and I just passed a cop.

But the top will remain down because we’re driving a Ferrari. You don’t put a top up. I don’t care if it’s two in the morning, if it’s freezing cold, that’s how we roll and run the Ferrari.

So in the last episode, I was talking about developing software is a service type product, and what’s been fun is basically the last two weeks Todd has been here in town.

We’ve been developing a brand new product, and I’m super fired up about it because I think it’s going to change the way that people do marketing. I know it’s going to change the way I do things.

It’s going to make it where, basically, I can do all the marketing by myself without any webmasters, developers or anything, which is exciting. So anyway, I’m excited for it. But I’m more excited just to talk more about you guys, about software as a service.

And we talked about it last time, just some of the benefits of it. But the reality is like it’s been interesting is we’ve developed this product.

You know, in the past when we developed products, we tried to give it so many features and so many things that it’s just overwhelming to customers and to us to support it, and to create.

And we’ve really been following this model just like making a strip-down, bare bones, as simple and as easy as possible, and as we’ve done that it’s just making a tool that I think people will use and stick with long-term.

One of the cool concepts we talked a lot about tonight, that I think I want to kind of focus this on with you guys is, when you’re creating, if you decide to create your own software -- if and when you’re creating your own software.

One of the biggest keys in the long-term success of your program, whatever you’re creating, is if you can create something that has pain and disconnect.

And it makes me laugh… I’ve been doing membership sites now for, man, seven or eight years. We’ve made millions of dollars off membership sites. But one of the constant dilemmas we have is there’s always this constant churn and burn. We’re always just adding people into the funnel.

I just passed another cop, so I might go onto the side street here. Anyway, it’s a constant burn and churn when you have a typical membership site because content is good, but it’s not essential.

Like when somebody -- you know, their credit card comes up, and they’re looking at their bills -- like when they look at like “Oh, it’s a membership site. I enjoy it. But, hey, you know, it’s… I don’t have to have it.”

So it’s creating something that if somebody wanted to cancel, there’s huge pain and disconnect. And that’s really what -- you know, not that we’re trying to develop things that cause pain, that would hurt our client’s business.

But is something that is so valuable and so useful that if they ever canceled it, would be very painful. So, you know, if for some reason their credit card failed, they’re just going to think, “Oh my credit card failed, no big deal.”

If their credit card failed, within two minutes they would call you because they’re using your service so much that they have to have it to function. And that’s the kind of product that you’ve really got to create, and I think that’s really the big secret.

I really think that next year, with this product rolling out, I think we could do $10-million pretty easily next year. And it’s just because we’ve created something that’s so powerful and so useful that the pain and disconnect is just so much, and so I really want you guys thinking about that.

Like if you do decide to develop a software program, like what kind of product or service can we create that ties our customers in so deeply that they just love it so much that they can't cancel?

It’s kind of like our supplement. Our supplement has been interesting because I think it’s kind of the case with any supplement you have. There is a percentage of people who it doesn’t work for, and there’s a percentage of people who it works great for.

And that’s how it is right now. If we have people, we have clients who are literally calling us saying:

“My bottle is empty, and my new next shipment hasn’t come in! I will pay you whatever it costs to overnight this thing. And make sure that I have that bottle here tomorrow because I don’t want to go through a single day without this in my system.”

We get those kinds of calls all the time, which is awesome and exciting. And so, again, it’s pain and disconnect. If those clients stop having our supplement, they’re in so much pain that they can't function, and so they don’t want to go without it.

And I think that, you know, in the past in the Internet marketing world, what people have taught and talked about it is just, you know, “create something that’s good and people will stick on it.”

But I think you’ve really got to create something that has such a big pain and disconnect that they can't leave you. They won’t leave you because it’s so important.

And that’s the kind of businesses we’re really trying to focus on, and I think you actually should be focusing on as well, and so, I just want to kind of throw that out there because that’s what we’re talking about right now, and it’s been a lot of fun.

The other thing that we are kind of playing with that I think is interesting that I want to throw out just an idea for you guys is:

If you do have a membership site or something that doesn’t have that big, huge pain and disconnect, you know, one thing that we’ve been looking at a lot recently is like, what’s our average customer value?

You know, and we did this before on our membership sites. You know, the average customer stays for one month or three months or six months or whatever it is.

When you find that number out, it’s very important to kind of just start focusing on that. Say, “okay, our average customer is staying for just three months at a time, you know, or six months at a time, whatever that is, if you know what that dollar amount is.

We’re going to be instituting one of our membership sites coming up next month, and I’m really excited for is… We’re going to give people the ability to buy out their membership site.

So if we know the average person stays for three months, that means that month number two or two and a half, we’re going to start a campaign basically saying:

“Hey, you’ve been a member for two months. So far, I hope you’re really enjoying the site. What we want to do is, we want to offer you the ability to buy out your contract.

“So basically, for an extra $100 or $200 or whatever it is, you can get a lifetime access to the site. So longer do you have to pay us $97 a month, just pay $200 and boom! You get lifetime access.”

And suddenly for anyone who takes that, we just basically increased, you know, we took that person from the average two to three months, to six or eight or twelve months of revenue.

Anyway, it’s a cool concept I’m really excited for, and I can share stats and results, as we get deeper into it and kind of see what happens.

But just think that. Think about what’s your average stick rate, and right before that average stick rate, give people the ability to buy out a membership at a discount.

Or people who cancel give them the ability to buy out the membership at a discount. Same kind of thing that, you know, they’re probably just tired of seeing the monthly payments. They probably still like what you have, so you said:

“Hey, you know, you may not like paying $97 a month. But for how about $200, we’ll give you lifetime access. You never have to pay again.”

And just some fun things to start looking at, just different ways to look at your numbers when you’re doing reoccurring revenue, continuity, and things like that. So anyway, I hope these are just a couple fun ideas.

Again, you know, I am so tired right now. We’ve been going like, literally the last two weeks that Todd has been here, we been going late nights like this almost every single night.

I’m pretty sure my wife is ready to kill me, but sometimes that’s what you do as an entrepreneur. You burn the midnight oil to create something really cool that will pay you for the rest of your life.

And so that’s what we’ve been doing and just having that kind of fun, so my brain is kind of all over the place. I just wanted to share with you guys some interesting ideas while I’m driving home, so it’s been a lot of fun.

I’ve also had a lot of people email me, asking what it’s like driving the Ferrari, now that I’ve been in Boise driving it for the last week or so. It’s been interesting.

Like the first day we had it and parked at the office, we probably had four or five different sets of people who came to the office, parked, came to the door and asked like, “Who’s Ferrari is that? Who’s Ferrari is that?”

Like it wasn’t just someone driving by, like they actually came into our office, and asked to see and ask me questions about it. This one kid that drove by, and the guy got so excited he called all his friends.

We had this group of like all these teenaged boys outside our office just checking out the car, and they literally sat outside for over an hour, taking pictures and just looking at it. I thought it was the funniest thing!

And then, the other thing that’s been interesting is I kind of know what it feels like now to be a really super hot girl. Like, literally, when I’m driving down the street, I have guys driving -- be honking their horns, waving, yelling catcalls at me.

I had people like, pulling into parking lots and asking me questions, like I’ve never felt that. I’ve never had the opportunity to be a super, smoking hot girl, but I could imagine that’s probably what it’s like for them.

Like they get approached, they have people yelling at them; here people are just like staring. Literally, I can watch as I drive down the road and almost every guy has this like really weird like whiplash, you know, where they’re following the car.

And so, I can kind of empathize now with super hot girls, and I feel bad for them sometimes because that would be really, really hard and annoying. At first it’s kind of cool and flattering, but after a while it would be annoying.

So anyway, I’m still in the stage where I like being the super hot girl, and I’m enjoying everyone yelling at me in my car. But I’m sure it will go away, and we keep talking about, you know, what are we going to do with it?

Obviously, I don’t think I want to drive a Ferrari the rest of my life. I would like to, but… You know, winning a Ferrari is cool, but I think we told you guys in one of the other episodes, it’s just the tax liability is like…

Basically, Joel, he won. You know, he gave me the car so he wrote it off on his taxes as a $130,000 loss. We basically incurred a $130,000 gift, and so I had to pay taxes on $130-grand. Which in my tax bracket is like $60-grand or something crazy like that, so by winning the car I’ve got to pay $60-grand, plus I’ve got to pay sales tax. I’ve got pay like another eight or nine grand as soon as I register it, which I’m doing tomorrow.

It’s kind of just an expensive machine, so I think after like the thrill of driving, it wears off. We’re going to do a contest and give it away. We talked about selling it, but selling it…

Let’s say I sold it for $130- $150-grand, you know, after paying taxes I still would make $70- $80-grand. Whereas, if I did a contest, and if I execute it correctly, we could make a lot more than that.

So we’re actually going to, using the Ferrari in a contest, to give away our new software we’re launching. So who knows! We’ll see. Time will tell. It’ll be a lot of fun.

Anyway I just got home, you guys. I’m ready to crash and go to bed. I hope you guys are having a great day, having a fun time being an entrepreneur.

Think about some of these cool things I’m sharing with you. Hopefully, you guys implement it in whatever your business you’re in, and I will talk to y’all again soon.

Thanks so much, you guys!

Oct 3, 2013

What I learned when launching our first real SAAS program.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I’m actually not driving to the office today. I’m driving to a hotel to pick up our programmer. He is a stud. Some of you guys may know him.

He is in town for the next couple of weeks working on some cool projects, so I am going to grab him from the hotel. I have kind of a little longer drive today, so I thought I would do a podcast and talk to you about what we are doing right now, because it’s exciting.

Just to get the wheels in your head turning if you are doing any software as a service products, SAAS (software as a service). This is kind of an interesting time in the internet world.

When I first got online, the thing to create were these little .exe files, desktop-based. I remember Armen Morne things like E-cover Generator, Header Generator, Sales Letter Generator, all these different products.

When I first got online, I saw all the things that Armen was doing, and I was like, “I want to do software too.” I did Zip Brander and Form Fortunes and all these other little software programs.

Back then, the cool thing to do was create these little downloadable software programs to download and run on a computer. That’s what we did. People would pay for it one time and we would end at that point.

I remember the very first software as a service we ever had was called Digital Repo Man. It was this really cool product where basically if you had an ebook or some product that you were selling, you would use Digital Repo Man to lock it down. Then you could give it to your customers and when your customers wanted a refund you could turn their license key off so they couldn’t give it to other people.

It was a cool thing. For whatever reason, it didn’t sell that well. I think it’s one of those things where it’s a prevention versus a cure. People don’t really want to buy a prevention. They want to buy a cure.

They wanted to buy something for after someone steals their book so they can go out there and beat up the customer that did it, but they’re not willing to pay money to lock it down ahead of time.

Anyway, it didn’t do that well, but it was the first time I had sold software as a service, where people log into a members area, they pay you monthly. It was kind of cool.

My favorite thing was that if I made an update to the software, it automatically made the update for everyone. Whereas with Zip Brander when I made an update I had to contact all my customers, give them something to download a new version.

90 percent of our support questions were because people hadn’t downloaded the newest version. It was kind of a nightmare. Software as a service became really big for a while, and we started doing some things in it, but I never really paid a lot of attention to it.

Then a little while later WordPress came out and we started building three or four different WordPress plugins and themes and stuff like that, because the WordPress is so big. I’ve got a friend who is probably listening to this podcast, Stu McClaren and he runs a site called WishlistMember where they sell membership plugins for WordPress.

They’re doing awesome. They’re making an insane amount of money with it. I was talking to him back when we were in Kenya and he told me one of the biggest issues with it is that their support is kind of a nightmare.

Everyone has different servers and different hosting and different version of WordPress, all these different things that can happen with WordPress. Then if you make an update, everyone with your software has to go download the update.

In January this year, we kind of mapped out this idea for a really cool plugin, and that’s what we were going to do. Then we found someone who had something kind of similar and they went and looked at it. The service we had created is a really cool thing that will go and backup your entire website.

It’s this really cool thing, but it’s kind of hard to explain. It’s awesome. The company saw they had something similar and they built a WordPress plugin. They had it for about six months and then they took it down.

We contacted them and said, “Why did you guys take down the WordPress plugin?”

They were like, “Our software doesn’t need the WordPress plugin. We just used it to get into the WordPress community. But it’s a nightmare. We have to support a billion different website. It got so support-intensive that we just couldn’t do it anymore. Now we’re back to our normal software as a service thing.”

I was like, “Isn’t that interesting?” A company like that had huge VC money and they couldn’t even support a WordPress plugin. Again, this year we were planning on building this WordPress thing out and we finally decided not to go that direction.

We’ve been focusing on three software project simultaneously, which probably isn’t the right way to do it, but they all go hand-in-hand so we did it that way.

One is a shopping cart that we are calling Backpack. One is an analytics and follow-up tool called Actionytics. Then one is this really cool front-end website creator, and we don’t have a name for it yet. Hopefully we’ll think of a name soon.

After these programs are finished, we’ll be excited to start rolling them out. My focus for next year is 100 percent this new software company and these three products we have. I think the potential is really big with it.

That’s kind of the direction that we’re focusing on. As we’re developing software programs, for any of you guys who are thinking about developing software, I wanted to give you some tips and tricks and ideas to think about that we have found helpful and might be useful for you guys if that’s the way you’re going.

By the way, if it’s not the way you’re going, you should look at it. If you get one really good software program, it will feed you for the rest of your life.

One of the big things is the first version of our landing page creator was actually an automated webinar site. It was called ClickFusion.com. I loved that domain name, I love the logo, I love everything. We built this automated webinar software which I think is the best out there by far.

I think the problem is we have way too many features. We can do anything for everyone. Because of that, no one ever adopted it. It was too much stuff.

A little while ago I read a book called Rework by 37 Signals. Of all my marketing books, it’s probably the one I’ve read the most times. Stu, who I was talking about earlier, actually recommended it at Pirate’s Cove.

Rework is a book written by the owner of 37 Signals, and they have Base Camp and a lot of other products like that. They’re all software as a service kind of things, and they were talking about their methodologies to create software.

One of the big takeaways I had is that they draw out their feature list, and they cut it in half. Then they cut it in half again and again, and they try to make the most bare-bones, simple thing as possible.

When customers come and ask for features, they say no. If people are looking for this or that, they tell them to go try their competitor. They basically say they try to keep things so simple and easy that you really can’t mess it up.

It’s a different mindset. Most software people I know look at software like Bill Gates and they want every feature in the world like Microsoft Word with a billion features that no one knows how to use except the bold, italics and underline.

I just kind of thought about that from our side. Let’s make things that are simple, easy, that everyone can use. As we’ve rebuilt this new automated webinar/landing page/funnel generator, this time around we’ve built it way differently, where it’s stripped-down, bare bones.

It does one or two core things really well, and that’s it. It’s turning out amazing. I’m excited to start marketing, because I think people are going to really jump on it, because of how easy it is to use.

That’s kind of what I’m doing right now. I’m at the hotel, going to grab Todd right now. I may do part two of this tomorrow or even tonight. I want you guys thinking about first off, creating some software, but second, creating it very simply, very easy.

If you’re thinking about that at all, I would go read Rework by Jason Fred. You should read that no matter what. Every mistake I’ve made in business, when I read that book I was like, “Crap, I made that mistake and that mistake.” I found tons of them.

That’s about it for today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I will talk to you all either later today on part two of this one, or tomorrow. Thanks everyone.

Oct 2, 2013

There’s no school like the old school. Start using the old marketing methods that still work.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

I am doing something exciting today. I am promoting a teleseminar. The last time I did a teleseminar was years ago. It’s been so long since I’ve done a teleseminar. Let me tell you why I decided to do a teleseminar instead of a webinar.

I’m lazy. I don’t know about you guys, but webinars take a lot of work to create and design and get the slides and all this kind of stuff. While I could do that, I don’t have enough time. I’m too busy right now to go and create another webinar.

I was thinking, “How do I do this a lot easier?” and I thought of teleseminars.

It was funny to me, and maybe this is just me, but I think a lot of us do this. We find something that works really well, and for some reason we stop doing it. I made my very first million online by doing teleseminars. Every single week I was doing teleseminars.

When I started creating the registration page for this teleseminar, I was looking at my old hard drive that had all my old websites and stuff on it. I found one that had every single one of my old teleseminars. I started looking at all these pages.

I remember seeing a teleseminar page with Marlon Sanders, Matt Basac, Vince James, all these people I used to do teleseminars with. We made so much money doing teleseminars, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult as doing a webinar.

We would get on a teleseminar, we’d start talking and hanging out and at the end of it we would sell something and we always did awesome with it. It makes me laugh because I haven’t done a teleseminar in years and years and years.

It’s this tool, a profitable tool that we have that we never use. I don’t know if you’re like me, but if you are, I want to challenge you guys to do a teleseminar for your list. Again, the prep time is about a thousandth of a percent what it takes to do a webinar.

Just see what happens. I’m doing one this Friday. My plan is, now that I’m back from winning the Ferrari and everything, is I want to just do a breakdown with my list going over the seven or eight steps of what they need to do in the next 30 days.

I’m going to show them that blueprint. At the end of it, I’m going to have an application for them where they can apply for our coaching program. It will be fun, it will be no stress, we’ll hang out, we’ll have a good time and I’m excited for it.

I want to throw that out there as another marketing tool for you guys to bring back into your arsenal. If you haven’t been doing them for years like me, we should try them out.

We talk about pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are huge. If we are doing webinars every single time, webinar, webinar, webinar, after a while our audience starts realizing there is going to be another webinar and this is how the process works.

You’ve got to interrupt the pattern every once in a while. That’s why I’m excited for teleseminars. I’m not positive, but I’m guessing that you’ll see me doing a lot more teleseminars over the next few months, just because it’s going to be fun to mix it up a little bit.

When everyone else is zigging, we’re going to zag. Same thing as right now: everyone is doing email and social media and we’re going old-school with direct mail and telephone.

Just have some fun mixing up your marketing messages, hitting people with different media, different ways. I think you’ll be surprised at the results. I know I’m excited for this, excited to see the results. Maybe I’ll share with you guys on a future podcast.

My recommendation for today is to start thinking about the telephone, start thinking about teleseminars. The service we use is www.InstantTeleseminars.com. It’s a really simple, easy system to use to do a teleseminar.

They probably have a trial, so go test one out, make a bunch of money with it and then pay the first month’s bill. That’s about all I’ve got today. I’m actually not heading to the office. I’m heading to the gym right now. This is Russell Brunson and I will talk to you guys all again soon.

Oct 1, 2013

Hear Russell’s story about their drive in the Ferrari from Las Vegas back home to Boise.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to a very special episode of the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. Today I am driving in my brand new Ferrari.

Well, it’s not brand new, but it’s brand new to me. I don’t know if you can hear that. Can you hear that? That is the engine. It is very loud.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you guys the story of the Ferrari, because we’re having a lot of fun. Give me one second and we’ll get started.

This will be less content and more entertainment; because I thought it was a fun weekend. We won this Ferrari in the Pure Leverage contest, which was pretty cool.

I’m driving and everyone is staring at me. It’s kind of fun. At the event, they called us onstage at the last day and said, “We’re taking a break. You can take a break if you want to, but we’re going to go down and give Russell a Ferrari.”

They took me and my wife outside and we had about 250 people following us down the hall, out into the lobby, out in front of the hotel. Then Joel who gave us the Ferrari pulled it up next to everybody, revved the engine.

Then we got in and literally our car got surrounded by 250 people, all with cameras and iPads and iPhones. It felt like paparazzi, like I was someone famous or something like that.

Then we got in the car and took off and sped around the corner just to kind of hide. When we got around the corner, it was just this dead-end parking lot, but they told us to wait until the crowd came back in. We sat there just waiting for the crowd to come back in.

When we got back, sure enough, there were some lingerers who came over and ambushed us and wanted pictures. It was kind of crazy. That was what we did that night. Then we took it to the valet and they parked it.

The next day we decided we were going to drive home, all the way from Las Vegas to Boise in it. We came back to the valet and they brought the car back to us.

It was funny because this sweet car pulls up and everybody is waiting to see who it’s for, and it’s my wife and I. I look like a little kid with my backpack, and we walk over, jump in and take off.

I’m not much of a car person, so I don’t really know how to drive a car like this. It’s kind of different. We’re driving away from Vegas and we need gas, so we pull into this gas station outside of Vegas.

As soon as we pull in, we get swarmed by people from in front, behind, all of them coming around taking pictures of the car and asking if they can look at the engine. I even had a guy ask me for money, which was really exciting.

It was kind of creepy though. We weren’t ready or used to that attention. After we filled up with gas, then all these people are swarming us. We were trying to start the car and leave.

The way you put it in reverse is weird. I was trying to put it in reverse to back up because there was a car in front of us filling up with gas and it wouldn’t go in reverse for anything I would try. I was like, “What in the world?”

Then another car pulls up behind us and we’re stuck here with all these people taking pictures, cars in front of us, cars in back of us and I can’t reverse the car. I start the car and then it dies. I’m like, “This is a nightmare.”

Finally, the car in front of us started pulling forward so we started the car again and took off. We were kind of at a truck stop, so we were stuck behind all these trucks. We got out the owner’s manual and spent 30 minutes reading and trying to figure out how to put the car in reverse, how to put the top back up and all these things.

We finally figured out how to learn it. We jumped on the freeway and started driving. Three times, people would speed up next to us and take pictures of us while we were driving. It was kind of crazy.

We brought a Go-Pro camera and mounted it to the front of the car, so we’ve filmed the entire drive home. On our way home, we were going through Utah. I grew up in Utah, so we stopped in St. George and saw my sister and her family and took them all on rides. Then we stopped and took all my cousins on a ride.

We ended up stopping eight times in two days and gave everyone rides in the car and everything. It was fun. It was a long drive, though. It took us pretty much two days to get home.

Then when we got home, it was raining in Boise, so we got home in the rain. Then we picked up my kids and took each of them, one at a time, for a ride. We found this little place behind our house where there are no cars, and I took it there and I just floored it.

We took off and my youngest kept saying, “Daddy, I want to go in the racecar.” That’s what we’ve been doing and it’s been a ton of fun.

Anyway, there’s not much content today. I just wanted to tell you guys a story about the Ferrari. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m at the office now and I’m having a guy come to detail it today. We’ll get it all detailed up and I’ll have a nice car to drive around town, so that will be fun.

Anyway, that’s about it. I hope you have a great day today. This contest was interesting. Even though everyone was competing for it, there were a lot of people who had no chance. Why should they even try to win a Ferrari? Why should they even try to win it?

I just say, for you guys, think about 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was in the exact same situation you guys are in. I was looking at these contests and I never had a shot to win them, but I tried. By trying, I learned different things. I learned that if I give bonuses, more people will buy.

If I do webinars, more people will buy. I tried to figure out different ways to sell stuff. To win the Ferrari I had to basically do a blend of most of those things. We gave away bonuses, we did webinars, we did teleseminars. We did all sorts of things to do this.

It’s taken me 10 years to get to a point where I can win a prize like this. For some of you guys, I would start now. Look for contests that are happening online in your market. I guarantee most markets have some kind of online contest happening. Go enter and try to win them and see what happens.

We had a chance in Vegas to hang out with my buddy Dave Gardner. Dave is an interesting guy. He came to Kenya with us last year. He won a prize that we were doing to take one of our students to Kenya. He won that.

I was reading this book he wrote, and he was talking about how he won that prize and he won three or four prizes. I’m like, “How do you win all these prizes?”

He said, “I just enter them and do my best.”

A lot of people don’t enter because they don’t think they can win, so they don’t, whereas someone like Dave tries a lot of them and he wins a lot of them.

I guess that’s my motivation for today: go out there and try. You never know what’s going to happen a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Heck, one of you guys might win this Ferrari when I give it away in a year or so. Who knows?

Thanks, you guys. I will talk to you all tomorrow.

Sep 25, 2013

Most entrepreneurs get into business to create the perfect lifestyle, but within a year or so have created nothing more than an over-worked, underpaid job. How to structure the lifestyle of your dreams while you are building your business.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, guys and gals, this is Russell. Today is an exciting day. I am actually heading to Vegas to go pick up my Ferrari that I won, which is pretty exciting. Then we’re going to jump in the car and drive it all the way home.

I’m not sure if I told you guys this or not, but I had a really cool idea. I went and bought a Go-Pro camera. I’m going to mount the camera on the dashboard of the Ferrari looking out and I’m going to record the whole trip driving home.

After I get home, I’ll take the footage of that and make a time lapse video of the footage and use it as a background of a sales video. I thought that was kind of fun.

It’s interesting. I’m about to go do this really cool, exciting business thing. I actually went and dropped my three-year-old at pre-school. All that’s going through my head right now is a quote from a religious leader named David O. McKay.

He said, “No success can compensate for failure of the home.”

Today I want to talk about that, how important our families are. I’m as guilty as anyone, but we get in this business initially because we’re like, “If we do this, we’re going to have time freedom and we’re going to have money and we’re going to do all these things.”

We get into that with that goal. But what happens at first? We quickly find out that being entrepreneurs is not quite as easy as we thought it was going to be when we get signed up, which is a good thing. If it was super easy, then everyone would do it, right?

We go from doing the typical thing where people are working 8 hours a day to working 20 hours a day. The goal is, “After I make it, I’ll cut my hours back to a 4-hour work week or whatever.”

That’s kind of what our goal is. The problem is, there are a lot reasons, but I think we get addicted to the business. You get significance out of it. You get love and connection. All these needs you have are being met by your business.

Because of that, it starts growing, you start having success, and after a while you realize, I like this and I’m having a good time. I’ve been spending 20 hours a day building this business up to this point and I really enjoy it, I’m going to keep on doing it.

The next thing you know, one year turns into two, two turns into three and eventually it’s been 10 years and you’re just killing yourself over this business. The reason why you got in, to be able to have the time freedom and to be able to spend more time with your kids, what you get is the exact opposite of that.

You get basically a glorified job where you’re working more hours. You’re probably making more money, but not having the freedom that you got in this business for. I’ve been really recently thinking about that.

I was listening to this really cool course that I found on eBay. It’s actually J. Abraham, Chet Holmes and Jake Carter Livingston. They put this product together called Gorilla vs Gorilla. I found the cassette tapes on eBay. I couldn’t find the actual product anywhere, but I found the cassette tapes.

I was super excited because I love new marketing courses. All three of those guys are awesome. I was listening to it and Jake Carter Livingston said something interesting.

He said all of us get into a business thinking, “After I do this, I’m going to start working four days a week. After I do this, then I’m going to do this.”

He said the problem is we’re creating habits. Whatever habit you create right now, that habit is going to stick with you even after you’re successful. If you make a habit of working 20 hours a day, you’re going to continue to work 20 hours a day.

When I listened to that tape set, after I went and found a tape player to listen to it, it made me think about myself. What are the habits that I’m in? I realized that for probably five years I’ve been saying that myself: “I’m going to do this after this happens,” but that thing never comes.

I kind of made a conscious decision a little while ago. I said, “I’m going to start crafting my day the way I want it to be when I feel like I’ve achieved whatever dream I’m chasing.” I want to do that now because I want to create that habit.

I readjusted some of my life, and it’s bene really cool. You can probably tell my voice sounds kind of funny. It’s because part of it is I realized I missed my wrestling. It’s hard. There’s no one who really wants to wrestle a 33-year-old dude. It’s hard to find any wrestling partners.

But it turns out everyone in the world wants to be a cage fighter, so everyone wants to do Jujitsu and grappling and stuff like that. I was like, “This will be fun. I’ll find someone who’s really good and I’m going to start adding Jujitsu into my weekly routine.”

I hired a black belt and twice a week I go in and I get beat on by a black belt. I’m learning Jujitsu from him. That’s why my voice is so scratchy today. He brought in some other dudes to roll with me. I’m not a slouch. I was a top 15 in the country wrestler in college. I took second in the country in high school.

I can hold my own, but this new sport may be similar to wrestling, but it’s not the same. He brought in some brown belts who have been doing it for 15 years and we rolled yesterday. I did all right, considering all things. I hung with them well, but as a whole I got beat bad.

I jammed my ring finger and it’s swelling up to the size of a watermelon. I can’t fit my wedding ring on right now. I got chocked out probably eight or nine times. Typically you do a carotid artery choke, a blood choke. Those aren’t that bad. It cuts the blood off from your brain and everything goes dark and you pass out, or you tap out.

But he caught me on three front chokes, which are more like windpipe chokes, which cuts the oxygen off, and it thrashed my voice. It’s kind of crazy since I’m going to be speaking tomorrow at a seminar with 1,000 people. Hopefully my voice will last.

I made it a part of my day. I said, “When I’ve arrived and I’m happy with where I’m at, that’s what I want to do. I want to be wrestling and doing Jujitsu and lifting weights.” So I crafted my day to kind of do those things.

I said, “I want to spend more time with my kids,” so I changed the time I come home every night. I changed what I do when I get home. I started changing up my life to be what I want to be when I get to wherever I’m going.

I would encourage that for you guys. That quote from David O. McKay is powerful: “No success can compensate for failure of the home.”

I truly believe that. For all of you guys, I want you to take that to heart. Start today to create the lifestyle you want, because it’s going to be a habit, whatever you do.

Don’t get caught in the whole 20-hour workdays that most entrepreneurs do. Obviously, there are times you need to do that, especially when you’re first growing and first building, but really make sure that you structure your time and structure your life so it will be the way you want it to be when you get there.

Otherwise, you’ll get so addicted to this journey, because it’s fun, this whole entrepreneurial journey. If you get addicted to it, you’ll miss out on what it was you were actually going for to begin with.

That’s it for today. I’m going home, I’m packing up my bags and I’m about to jump out and head for the airport. All I have for you guys is remember, “No success can compensate for failure in the home.”

Thanks so much. This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Sep 24, 2013

Russell covers a fast way to learn anything you want in a condensed period of time, plus get paid while learning!

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, everyone, I am on my way to the office this morning. It’s really dark outside today. I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks like the seasons are changing. I hope you’re having a great day. I’ve got some cool things to talk to you about today.

I actually want to talk about the coolest strategy in the world to learn anything you want and make a whole bunch of money while you’re doing it. The reason why this was brought to my attention was I had done this two or three times when I got started in this business, and it’s how I learned a lot of my internet marketing stuff and it’s how I started making money.

For some reason that still makes no sense to me, we stopped doing them, which is always smart. One of my friends and mentor David Frye, he went on and took this concept and did two and a half years’ worth and made over a quarter million doing it.

The thing that I’m talking about is telesummits. You guys may have seen or heard of telesummits. I actually have two telesummits I’m planning on doing with the sole purpose of learning a whole bunch of stuff from really smart people, and I want to make money while I’m doing it.

This is an alternate route to going to college. I think it’s a lot better and will serve you way better. This is kind of like my college alternative. I think you should go to school, mostly because that’s where the girls are at if you’re a guy, and where the guys are at if you’re a girl. If you’re in sports, there are a lot of good reasons for college.

But I don’t think learning how to make money is one of the things on the list. This is the process. For example, two things I really want to learn more about right now: first is the Kindle. I want to learn how to publish better on the Kindle. Second, supplements. We’re doing well with our supplement business, but I really want to take it to the next level.

That’s the two businesses I want to grow. What I plan to do is basically do a telesummit. This is how it works: for example, in the supplement space I know maybe 10-15 people who are doing really well in supplements, anywhere from $100,000 a month up to $1 million a month and beyond.

My goal, my plan is to basically contact each of them and say, “I’m doing this really cool supplement telesummit where basically I’m going to pick the brains of people that are doing well in supplements and ask them a bunch of questions. I’m curious if you’d be willing to jump on and let me interview you for an hour.”

Usually, most people when you ask them something like that, will say yes. You’ll get some no’s, some people are very secretive, but for the most part they don’t really care. They don’t mind sharing their business because it’s fun for them and they like talking about it.

I say that the big famous gurus, when they go home at night, they go home to a wife who doesn’t really care what they do. They usually enjoy talking to people who actually care what they do. It’s fun for them.

We’re going to line up basically 10-15 interviews with the top supplement guys in the world. Again, I could just do it and have that be it, or I could do a telesummit where I can say, “This is a supplement telesummit. If you’re interested in supplements, come register. It’s free to register and you can listen in on these calls with me.”

Afterwards we can either sell the transcripts or the mp3 versions. There are a lot of different ways you can monetize it. There’s that, plus you get the chance to pick the brain of 10-15 people that are doing exactly what you want to be doing.

Same thing with Kindle. I really am intrigued by the Kindle stuff. I haven’t done any of it yet. But the way I look at it, it’s an easy way to publish products. It’s a really good way to do lead-generation and stuff like that. I really want to learn the ins and outs before I dive into it.

Instead of what most people do, which is try to just figure it out, I’m going to find the 10-15 best people in the world who each have their way they do Kindle stuff. I’m going to interview them all and pretty quick I’ll get a picture of how I want to go and attack that world.

If I was going to go into SEO, I would do the same thing: find 10-15 people who are the best in the SEO world, do a telesummit, make some money selling tickets to it, and I have a chance to learn from 10-15 of the smartest people in the world.

I learned this concept from Howard Berg. He’s the world’s fastest reader. We’ve done a lot of work with him. Some of you were in the course we did with him. What was interesting was he told me most people will go and buy a book and they get that author’s perspective on the topic.

Usually, after reading one book that becomes their truth. “I read a book and it said this.”

He said, “What I’ll do is I’ll go and read 10-15 books on the topic. I get 20 people’s opinions, and from there I can base and create my own opinion.”

I really thought that was a powerful thing. I really like that. That’s how I try to approach things: not to just read one dude’s thing and go out there and follow it, but to go out there and find 10-15 different people, different ideas on how something works.

Then, after learning from all of them, take that and figure out what my game plan is, what my strategy is, based on that kind of stuff.

If you haven’t done a telesummit yet, I recommend doing it. Again, I’m doing it for a couple reasons. One is to make a little extra money. Number two is just to have the ability to learn very, very quickly a topic that is very specific and learn directly from the horse’s mouth, directly from people who are actually making a ton of money doing it.

And it will be a lot of fun as well. If you haven’t had a telesummit yet, they’re very easy to execute and pull off, and they can be very profitable for you. Go and do a telesummit.

I could tell you stories and stories about how much money people made doing telesummits. David Frye just started doing over 100 telesummits, and now he’s selling off all his domains and telesummits.

I have a friend, Sonja Ricotti, she makes millions every year doing telesummits. It’s a very good business model. Worst case, you have the opportunity to pick the brains of some of the best people in the world. I really think that’s the power behind these telesummits.

Go out, try one, get some information, learn some stuff, and we’ll talk to you all again next time.

Sep 23, 2013

Russell maps out how he has structured his coaching programs to automatically ascend his customers to the next level of coaching!

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, everyone. I am driving to the office now this Monday morning. I am very excited for this week for a couple reasons. First off, I’ve got some fun projects I’m working on. Second off, I am actually this week flying to Vegas to go pick up a Ferrari I won.

I won it in a sales contest for Pure Leverage, a new auto-responder company that was launching. We sold 1,100-1,200 people to it within a month, which was enough to win a Ferrari. I’m going to go pick it up and we’re going to drive it all the way from Vegas back to Boise, which is going to be pretty fun.

In fact, I bought a Go-Pro camera and I’m going to mount it on the dashboard of the Ferrari looking out and record the entire drive home. Then I’m going to time lapse that drive and have it as the background of a sales video. I’m pretty excited. It’s going to be fun.

What I want to talk to you guys today is I want to give you guys an idea and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as we’ve been rebuilding our coaching programs. One of the last podcasts talked about how we have been dabbling with starting back up some of our coaching programs, selling high-ticket stuff but doing it much differently.

Instead of having 60 sales guys like I did back in an earlier version of Russell, we’ll do it pretty small where we pre-qualify and basically only call a few people who make the cut to work with us. So far, it’s been really good.

We’ve been learning a lot along the way and it’s exciting. One concept I wanted to talk to you guys about, since it’s something I’m implementing and anyone can implement it, is really focusing on your value ladder.

You’re bringing someone through some sort of chain of offers. Someone comes in initially at a smaller price and then you upgrade them to a higher price and you’re trying to get them up to your high-ticket things.

If you’re looking at the Dan Kennedy world, where I used to spend a lot of time with Dan Glazier and stuff, he calls it the ascension model, how to get your customers to ascend naturally.

As we’ve been building this whole program out, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that ascension strategy, how we get them to move from one to the next to the next.

When we create our packages, our first coaching package that we have is about $5,500. It’s really like a fast-start 30-day coaching program where they get 30 days working with me directly and with one of our coaches to get their business launched. I don’t think it takes more than 30 days to launch most businesses if you have some sort of product already. It’s just marketing and that kind of stuff.

That’s our initial offer. After that happens, my goal is to put people through a program called Decade in a Day. I you look at Tony Robbins, at his events he talks about how you can compress decades into days.

For example, you have someone who spent the last decade learning about the stock market or whatever their passion is, and they spent a decade learning that stuff and they wrote a book. You take that book and you can compress what they learned in a decade down into a few days.

I thought it was a cool concept, so we launched our second tier, which is called Decade in a Day. It’s not as expensive. We’re only charging $3,500 for it. Basically it’s a one-day program with me virtually, where you and the five or six or ten other people who signed up for Decade in a Day get on a virtual webinar with me.

For an entire day, I sit down and I rebuild your business, and then the next person’s business, then the next person’s business. You have a chance to have your own business re-tweaked and rebuilt on top of going and watching me critique and rebuild nine or ten others’ during that day.

The whole goal is to compress a decade of learning into a day. Basically, to kind of take you on whatever path you’re going, lift you up and shift in the right direction or make the tweaks or whatever it is. That’s our second program: a Decade in a Day.

The goal at the end of Decade in a Day is to upgrade people to our $25,000 a year mastermind group. That’s the progression we’re taking people down. What’s cool about it, if you look at what we’re doing, each program is designed to sell the next program.

It goes from quick-start, and after that 30 days their business should be done. The next offer is, “Now you need our Decade in a Day so Russell can go and critique your business. Now that we’ve built this thing, let’s put it on autopilot.”

We give them a voucher toward that so they get a discount on the second if they bought the first. Then after Decade in a Day it’s like, “Now that we’ve done this, let’s go over to this yearly program so we can do this more frequently with me meeting you in person, etc. etc.”

That’s the direction we’re going in. The takeaway I want you guys to have is positioning and creating your program so that each thing sells the next thing.

The first time I really saw this was with Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes’ business, the Business Breakthroughs. Basically they sell you into a webinar, and on that webinar they sell you into their coaching. In their coaching, they sell you into their high-ticket coaching.

Each one is created and structured to ascend you to the next one. I don’t think many of us think of our business that way. I know even when we had our call center of 60 people and we were doing crazy numbers, we were never trying to ascend anybody. That was the end of the value ladder. It ended there.

I think it’s important to look at something and say, “How can I help someone? How can I take them to the next step?” and really focus on how to ascend up and providing enough value that they want to and are able to.

Especially if you’re in a how to make money business, they should be able to make enough money during the first program to afford the second one and so on. If not, there’s probably something wrong.

That’s what I’m working on in my business. I think it’s interesting and I hope you guys found it interesting as well. Just think about how you can create your product line so that each offer makes someone want to ascend up to the next offer.

That’s about it for today. I’m at the office, ready to go have some fun. I’m actually going to be working with the first set of people who signed up for our quick-start 30-day coaching. If you’re listening to this, I will talk to you later today.

If not, you guys should get into the program. It’s really fun and exciting. It’s actually closed down right now, but we’ll probably open it up in a month or so now that we’ve taken this first test group through.

I appreciate you guys listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go to iTunes and search for Marketing In Your Car and give us a thumbs up, because it’s fun when people rate us. It gets me excited. It makes me want to keep on doing this. I appreciate you guys and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Sep 18, 2013

Lessons Russell learned from Tim Ferriss at Joe Polish’s 25K group.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. I am so excited to be with you today. Today I want to share with you guys a story of what happened to me a little while ago in New York. There was this group I wanted to check out and join. It’s Joe Polish’s $25,000 group.

There was an initiation meeting in New York where you pay $10,000 to go there for two days. If you like it, you pay the extra $15,000 to join the $25,000 group.

I wanted to go out there, but there were a couple issues. One, it was the same time as my anniversary. Two, it was in New York across the country. And three, I had to convince my wife that we should be in New York instead.

I pulled off an elaborate scheme to convince her that we needed to be in New York for our anniversary, me and her, then I could go to the meeting. Luckily for me, it all worked out and we were able to do that. We went like four or five days early to New York.

My wife and I got to hang out and have fun the first couple days. On Monday morning we went to the today show and we jumped around behind Natalie Mirales and the others. It was cool, we were on TV. Our kids thought we were rock stars.

That night, we went and saw Wicked the play, and that was really cool. I had never even heard that story before, so that was really fun. The next morning we went to the Kelly and Michael Show. Kelly was gone, but Michael was there, and the co-host was Rebecca Romaine, which was awesome.

The guest was Carrie Underwood, so we got to be two feet away from Carrie Underwood, which was cool. And once again, we were on TV and our kids saw us.

That night we went to a taping of America’s Got Talent, so that was really cool. That was the fun part of the trip for my wife and I. Then the next two days we had the mastermind meeting.

We were there and the mastermind was really good. At the end they had a guy who a lot of you guys have probably heard of. Tim Ferriss got up and spoke.

I really enjoy reading Tim’s stuff, but I don’t think he’s a very good presenter. When he speaks, he’s a little dry and boring for me. I remember he was talking about venture capitalists and stuff that doesn’t really interest me at all. I was zoning out a little bit.

At the end, he opened it up for Q&A, and one person got up and I’ve had people ask me this question before so I kind of almost rolled my eyes when they said it.

They said, “Tim, what question should we be asking you?”

Tim sat there and thought for a minute and said, “Ask me how come I will never let the media follow me around for a day, because they ask me all the time. They want to see a day in the life of Tim Ferriss.”

The guy was like, “All right, how come you never let the media follow you around for a day?”

He said, “Because if you look at my day, I wake up in the morning, I do some meditation, then I eat cereal, then I go on a walk. Then I read some books, then I surf on the internet. If you were to look at what I do every day, you’d think I didn’t do anything.”

He’s like, “I don’t work like most people. Most people have a to-do list of all their tasks for the day. They try to go knock out each to-do one at a time, and at the end of the day if they’ve knocked them all out, they feel accomplished.”

He said, “I work way differently. I like to sit back and look for the one big, huge domino that if I push that domino down, it will knock down and make every other domino obsolete. That’s how I can accomplish so much. I’m not racing and running into the next thing and the next thing. I sit back and I look for the big domino.”

That was his advice. It was interesting because I am very much the opposite. I am someone who sits there and just tries to get tasks done. It has served me well in life, just doing thing after thing after thing. But it also has gotten me in trouble multiple times.

One day I woke up and I had 100 employees working for me, and it was because of that: me running and running and running and not really sitting back and looking at the strategy behind things and waiting to find that one big domino.

I remember when I got back from New York I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic. After I got back from that, I came back and I told my team that. I spent the next three or four days sitting in front of a whiteboard.

We have a wall in our office that is just a big whiteboard, and there’s a couch in front of it. I sat in that couch for days, trying to figure out what is our big domino. What is the one thing we can do that makes everything else obsolete?

It was hard, because I wanted to go and check my email and check the next task. I’m always a hustler, trying to go on and speed to the next thing, and in this case I didn’t do that. I tried to sit back and look at it strategically. It was interesting.

It’s kind of cool if you think about it. I’ve been doing Jujitsu for the last little while, and Jujitsu is kind of a similar concept. In wrestling it’s very aggressive and you’re always going, going, going. But in Jujitsu it’s a lot different.

Jujitsu is a lot slower, a lot more methodical. You’re just looking for the next strategic thing. I enjoy it a lot, but its way different than wrestling in that way.

This kind of feels like the Jujitsu style, where you’re slowly looking for that move that will get them to tap out, as opposed to trying to score point after point after point.

It’s interesting, the different mindsets. I’m in the wrestler mindset, the to-do mindset, let’s knock things out as quick as we can and accomplish stuff fast. I’ve been trying over the last month or so now to focus on what is that one big domino that I’m going to knock down.

It’s been interesting. It’s been fun to look at my business from that standpoint. I just encourage you guys to slow down a little bit, sit back and think about what’s the one big domino you can knock down that makes all the other dominoes obsolete?

If you can find that, you can make a lot more money in a lot less time. That’s what I’ve got for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you do like these podcasts, please go to MarketingInYourCar.com or go to iTunes and give some feedback. I’d love to see it. It’s exciting for me. I appreciate you guys and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Sep 13, 2013

We’re testing a new backend selling system, and so far we’re loving it!  Get the details on today’s podcast!

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, guys and gals. It has been a little while since we’ve done a podcast, mostly because I’ve just been gone. We did some crazy trips, spent some time in New York. I went to the Dominican Republic. I was gone for all of August. It’s just been crazy.

I apologize, I’ve not been as faithful. But I am back now and ready to rock and roll. It’s been an interesting last couple of weeks or so. We’ve been trying to figure out ways to separate our businesses. I didn’t really think about my business very well when it got started.

We launched DotComSecrets.com and this other thing and this other thing, and now we have like five or six other brands under DotComSecrets.com: DotComSecretsLocal, DotComSecretsX, DotComSecretsLabs.

Every one of those really caters to a different market. DotComSecretsX is more for beginners and internet marketers, whereas DotComSecrets is more for startups. We’re trying to think about how to separate everything and still keep it together.

We finally figured out a way. I’m excited. Over the next month or so you’ll see us roll out this new model I am really excited about. That’s cool.

Another thing I want to talk about today because I’ve been in the middle of it for the last little while: some of you know we had a call center that we built up to about 60 sales guys with about 12 coaches fulfilling what the sales guys were selling.

It was a big operation. It was kind of a nightmare, not going to lie. But it was fun and we had a good time with it. About three years ago we shut it down. There were a lot of reasons why we shut it down. Liability was one of them. It was interesting.

For the last two and a half or three years, we haven’t sold really high-ticket back-end stuff. I always missed that money. I’ve been trying to figure out what is the best way to do it. I tried selling high-ticket stuff off of webinars. It didn’t work so well.

One of the nice things about the phone is you can sell really high-ticket stuff, but I do not want to sentence myself into having 60 sales guys.

I’ve been watching a lot of different people and a lot of different markets. I’m one of those guys who buys from everybody and watches what they’re doing and listens in to see what is working right now.

I’ve seen people in a bunch of different industries who are doing call centers and doing similar revenue numbers to what we were doing when we had 60 people, but they’re doing it with one or two people.

It’s really interesting. Basically it comes down to just a couple little things. The first one, and this is the big key, is laser targeting who it is you want to sell to.

When we were doing the call center with 60 sales guys, we made our offer so low-barrier that it opened up the world to everybody. Everybody would want it.

We called every single person in the world trying to sell this coaching. The hard thing about that is we had 60 guys to call every single lead and filter and find out who these people were, whereas most people are doing it very small-scale.

They are laser targeting their audience, primarily through Facebook and direct mail and things like that. When we had our call center, I had to get between 5,000-8,000 buyer leads a month to keep the floor open, which is crazy.

With this new model, you only have to get about 60 applications a month to make similar numbers. In laser marketing you’re not trying to sell to everybody in the world. You’re trying to figure out who is your perfect ideal client who would really want this. That’s who you go and you target. That was the first thing that was interesting.

The next thing is that, instead of trying to sell them something, when we would call them blindly and try to upsell them to coaching, you switch around and you make them apply for it.

You make them fill out this huge application. The more questions, the better, because you want them to actually think about it. Again, it’s just another filtering technique that pulls out more and more people.

Then we do the call. The call is a lot easier, because at that point they know they’re going to be sold something. They are interested in the topic anyway and it becomes really easy.

We launched our first new call center yesterday and it’s been interesting. We sent out some messages and we got about 100 and something applications back so far. We are calling those and the conversation is really different.

It’s not us trying to convince them to buy something. It’s about just trying to see if it’s a good fit. It’s been interesting.

I’m really enjoying it so far. I’m sure over the next few weeks and months I’ll report back as we sort of master this thing. So far, that’s where it’s at. Anyway, if you’re looking at selling high-ticket stuff, it’s interesting for me to look at these models and play with them a little bit.

Look at that. Look at putting up an application for some high-ticket thing you have. Send an email to your list or go on Facebook and target the perfect, ideal buyer for yourself, and then have that application for them to call on the phone and have that happen.

It’s been working pretty good for us so far. I just got here to the office. I’m hoping we’re going to close a whole bunch of deals today and change people’s lives with the stuff we do for them. It’s going to be exciting. Anyway, I appreciate you guys. I hope you enjoy this podcast and I dare, you I double dare you, to go out and test some of these strategies. Thanks, everybody, and I will talk to you soon.

Jul 8, 2013

How you can use your online influence to make money from advertisers.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Today I’m heading to the office and actually my son Dallan is coming with me today. You guys heard about Dallan on yesterday’s podcast. Dallan has been saving up money for the WiiU. He asked this week if I would hire him, the day after the 4th of July, which is today. I just hired Dallan and he is coming to the office with me today. He’s got his chalkboard with him and his crayons and his whiteboard and he is going to make some money. He’s excited.

The other thing I wanted to talk to you today about is, yesterday we had our 4th of July parade and there were some lessons that were really fun with it. I remember as a little kid going to parades, and they were insanely awesome. There were big ole floats and all kinds of crazy stuff. Yesterday we went to the Boise parade. The Boise parade was a little disappointing, not going to lie. It was mostly cars with banner ads stuck to the side of them. I realized very quickly that all a parade really is, at least the kind of parade we went to yesterday, is a marketing tool. They talk about getting excited and hyped up.

A whole bunch of people show up in this one spot and these cars with banner ads come by that basically tell you to go do things. We saw banner ads for all sorts of things. Every float had some kind of advertisement on it, and there was no purpose for a float other than they were trying to advertise for whatever their thing was.

I thought it was interesting. Then what was kind of cool was at the end we saw the Costa Vita car drive by and we were hungry and said, “Hey, let’s go to Costa Vita.” We thought the only one was far away, but we saw on the car an address for one that was about a block from where we were at. We walked over and had lunch at Costa Vita. It actually worked. The advertising worked on us. It made me think about, there’s a lot of ways to make money online. There’s a thousand different ways to make money online.

One of them that works really efficiently and really effectively is to get a website that has tons and tons of visitors just like a parade, and have good content or good floats or things that are there that get people’s eyeballs there. Then on the sides and middle and all over the place you just sell banner ads. It’s kind of interesting. That is an amazing business model. That’s how parades work. That’s how a lot of businesses offline work. It’s the same thing online.

For a lot of you guys, if you think about it that way, for you to make money online is kind of a two-step process. The first thing, just like the parade, you’ve got to get a whole bunch of eyeballs there. If you get a whole bunch of eyeballs there, the advertisers will come.

There’s a really cool book that I read recently. It’s called Trust Me, I’m Lying. I highly recommend it, you guys should read it. It just talks about how media is passed through online, back to the traditional media outlets. It’s a pretty controversial book, very interesting to read. One of the things he talked about is how bloggers make their money. They write unique, interesting stories that get a lot of attention and get a lot of views, because bloggers make money for every view that comes to their site, or if they work for a company it’s the same thing.

They get their base salary, but they get a penny for every person who comes and looks at it. They are not incentivized by sharing true stories; they are incentivized by sharing controversial stories to get people talking. That’s why the media channels are so messed up these days. It’s kind of interesting. I’m saying that because for you, if you want to start getting eyeballs, you can start selling advertising on your site. You’ve just got to be exciting or controversial or whatever.

That’s the biggest key. If you put out that content and put out videos and start blogging and all those things, that’s when you start getting eyeballs. It’s like a parade, and at that point you can go and sell advertising, either your own products or other people’s products. That is the key.

We are now at the office. Dallan and I are here and we are ready to work hard. I hope you guys are as well. That’s about it for today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go to iTunes.com and look for the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. We would love to hear from you. That’s about it. Thanks, everybody. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Jul 2, 2013

Lessons in entrepreneurship from my 7 year old son.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone! Welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast. This is Russell Brunson, and I’m going to welcome you to today.

Okay, so today’s a beautiful day. Yesterday it was 108° here in Boise, which in insane, and it’s supposed to be 108° again today. It’s going to be hot, but I woke up this morning to a really funny experience.

About 7:30 the phone rang, and I picked up and answered it and it was a lady asking for Dallin. Dallin is one of my twins, he’s seven-years-old, and I said, “Well, Dallin is one of my seven-year-old sons. Can I help you?”

She said, “Oh, sorry. Somebody had filled out an application for a job for him, and I was just calling to return the call. I’ll take him off our list.”

And I was like, “What in the world? Someone filled out a job application for my seven-year-old son?” and so then my wife stumbles out of bed to come find out, who it was that called, and I told her.

She starts laughing hysterically, and anyway… So here, let me tell you the backstory to this story because it’s actually pretty awesome. So Dallin, actually both my kids, Dallin and Bowen, both my twins.

A little while ago, whenever I’m like dad, my wife’s out of town where she gone wherever, I like to take the kids treasure hunting. Which basically means we go to pawn shops, and I try to find silver coins and then they try to find treasures too, so it’s really fun.

So anyway, one of the pawnshops we were at, probably six months ago, they found Super Mario Brothers U, which I thought that meant Super Mario Brothers University.

And anyway, it turns out all it means is it’s Super Mario Brothers for the Wii U, and the Wii U turns out to be a whole separate console, so I bought this game at a pawnshop, take it home. We can't play it, and we find out we have to spend another $350 to get the console.

Now, I already think my kids play way too many video games, and I’m not really into having them go and have another console. So I said, “Hey, well, if you want this money, you’ve got to earn it.”

So I went and got a jar and on the front of it we wrote “Wii U $350,” and they’ve been saving all their pennies and their coins and their money in this jar to try to earn enough money for the Wii U.

And it turns out one of my sons, Dallin, is a lot more entrepreneurial than the rest, and is just trying all sorts of things to figure out how to make money. For example, we went down to St. George, and we found this gypsum mine, and we found these gypsum rocks. We collected all these rocks, and he’s been trying to sell these really cool looking rocks to everybody he sees, to get money for the Wii U.

In fact, he sold one of our neighbors a rock for $10, which was amazing. So he’s out there closing sales, and hustling and doing deals. He keeps telling me like, “Let’s just go to the store, and we’ll just give them all these rocks. They’ll trade me for a Wii U.”

But he can't quite understand that, so we keep trying to do stuff. So on Sunday night, this was two days ago, he wanted to figure out how he could make the money, and so my wife put together a chore chart for him.

So he’s been waking up early every single morning and scrubbing the toilets, folding the blankets, making his bed, dusting the house, everything in the world he can do to figure out how to make money.

And so, he’s working, you know, all day yesterday and he earned a dollar from all his work, and he’s all excited. Then he realized like, “Man, it takes a long time to earn a dollar. I’ve got $350 I’ve got to make.”

So he’s talking about doing garage sales. He asked me if I had any work, he could come and work for me, and he says he’s really good doing drawings so he can draw for me.

But every morning he’s been begging me to come to the office so he can make money. And anyway, it’s just fun seeing this little entrepreneur.

So I guess yesterday, he was on the computer and he went to Google. He typed in “jobs for kids.” He clicked on some link, and a form came up, and he went and told my wife, and just said, “Hey, I need…”

You know “what’s our address,” “what’s our phone number,” and just asked all this stuff, and she didn’t really know why, but right now they’re at the age where they’re learning how to spell and how to do stuff.

So they always come and ask us like, “Dad, how do you spell roses?” “How do you spell this?” “What’s my phone number?” so didn’t really don’t think too much about it.

He wrote down all this, you know, then the address or the phone number and wrote down everything. Went back into the computer on this form, and actually filled out a “Help Wanted” for online, and that was the phone call, was them following up with his call.

My guess, it was probably some kind of call center trying to sell him a business opportunity, but it made me kind of laugh. So that was my young son’s entrepreneurial journey, so far today.

It’s two days into his thing, and he’s trying to make money for this Wii, and it just made me smile, because it reminded me of me when I was his age.

I was doing everything I could think of to hustle for money, because I just had these dreams of all the stuff I wanted to buy, and what I wanted to do and be in life, and I knew I needed the money to do that.

And it kind of makes me smile because I know that’s how I got to where I’m at today, is because of those types of things, and I just want to encourage all of us right now, depending on where you are in your life.

Look at my son, Dallin, look at his example, and I want you guys to emulate that. I want everyone to be out there hustling and striving, and trying to figure out ways to start businesses, and make money and work extra hours and things like that.

Because that’s how you get ahead in life, that’s how great things start happening. It’s always interesting to me how many people tell me that they don’t have time to start a business because they don’t have, you know, the resources or things like that.

Where I’ve got a seven-year-old out there scrubbing toilets to try to earn money so that he can get what he’s looking for, and I think too many people -- too many of us -- use copouts and use excuses like, “I don’t have time” or money or resources or whatever it is to start a business.

Whereas, if you just go out there and do it and hustle and try and stay up late, and work a second job and do extra work for, whatever it is, to be able to get to whatever it is your dream goal is at the end of the rainbow.

So I just want to kind of leave off with that, and the other thing is I was writing a sales letter yesterday. One of the things I wrote in there was about how good is the enemy to great, and I just want to kind of touch on that as well.

You know, like a lot of us, if you’re not where you want to be in life in whatever aspect, it could be business, it could be personal life, it could be religious life, whatever it is, the reason why most of us don’t live great lives, the reason why most people don’t have great marriages is because they have good marriages.

The reason why most people have great business because they have good business, and if you’ve ever read the book Good to Great, that’s what it talks about is just how good is the enemy to great, and it keeps us a lot of times from achieving what we want.

And I just wanted to let everyone know that you shouldn’t settle for “good.” There’s too much amazing stuff that this life has to offer, and good really is the enemy to great. So set your goals high and work like crazy. Do whatever it takes.

If you’re a kid who can't even type yet, figure out how to get online, get your address from your parents, whatever it takes. But do what Dallin is doing and go out there and hustle, and if you do, good things can happen.

So that’s where I leave it off today. I appreciate you guys listening to my podcasts. If you go to DotComSecrets.com, you’ll notice that I started getting these images designed.

I found this really cool guy in the Philippines. He’s making these little podcast images, and he’s doing a great job so far, so there’s going to be a whole bunch of little podcast images all over our site for each one.

Like there’s, for Mary Poppins, the last steps, I talked about Mary Poppins. He’s got a picture of me holding an umbrella and just kind of some fun stuff.

So come check out our blog! Come say “hey “over there, if you like the podcast. I appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you again soon!

Jun 20, 2013

Cool lessons learned while watching Mary Poppins with my kids.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to today's episode of Marketing in Your Car. I want to talk about something kind of fun. Last weekend, my family and I had a chance to go down to St. George, Utah which was fun. We had a great time.

While we were down there, there's a place called the Tuacahn Theater where they do plays every single year. This year, they had four or five different plays they were doing. While we were there, the play they were doing was Mary Poppins. I got to admit, I was kind of disappointed.

I heard last year, they had Aladdin, and Princess Jasmine flying through the air and all sorts of stuff. The year before was Little Mermaid, and they flooded the stage and water came down. I was like, “What can you do cool with Mary Poppins?”

I wasn't really excited to go see it outside of the fact that it was fun to go to an outdoor theater and be with my family, my kids came, and everything. We went to it and it was actually – the production was amazing but just the story of Mary Poppins, I hadn't heard that story for a long, long time since I was a kid. This one was based more off of the book so there were a lot of things that were in that that weren't in the movie.

Just a couple of really cool things that popped out to me that I wanted to share with you guys, I think they relate to us. They relate to business. They relate to your personal life. They relate to whatever it is you're dealing with. The first one that was fun was when they sang the song, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” when I was a kid, the only meaning I got from that when I was a kid was if you have medicine and you put some sugar in it, it will taste better going down.

As I saw the song and the play and everything like that, I realized that there's so many more meanings to that, just talking about any kind of work you do that if you can add in the element of fun, if you can add in that sugar into it, it changes it from being work to fun. It talked about how a spoonful of sugar changes toast and water to cake and juice or whatever it was.

I started thinking about that. How many things in our life, if we look at it and it's miserable but we go back and add in a spoonful of sugar, how do we make that now a fun activity? I think that we've had three or four people that have come and done internships in our office. That's one thing they consistently say.

I had a call with one of them the other day. I was talking to him after he left. He just said, “Your office environment is so much fun. It's fun to come to work, it's fun to be there. Just the environment, the atmosphere you've created has been a lot of fun.” I thought that was kind of cool.

That's one lesson I learned from Mary Poppins. The next lesson I learned from her, this is actually more from Bert, just talking about the chimney sweeps, when he was doing the whole chim-chimney, chim-chim chiroo song, and them on top of London dancing around made me really think about you look at somebody like a chimney sweep.

 

You're like, “Oh, he's in dirt, he's in mud all day. It's horrible.” Then for him, he's looking at it like, “I have the best view in the world. Chimney sweeps are happy as happy can be.” I just thought about that in our lives. Wherever we're at, you can look at a chimney sweep and it seems like a miserable thing but if you look at the positive parts of it, how cool and how exciting, how fun is that.

I thought that was kind of cool too. Then the last big one, this one really had an impact on me in that I don't remember it from the movie. It may have been in the movie but it was part of the play, where the kids, Michael Banks and I can't remember the daughter's name. They went to the bank to go see their dad.

The dad was all flustered because he didn't want them to show up. He was there with a client trying to get a loan. The client was there trying to get a loan from the bank or whatever it might be. The client, the guy who was in there, walked over to the kids and said, “Here, I'm going to give you guys sixpence. I want you to have your first money.”

Michael said, “I know what that is. That's worth sixpence.” He said, “No, no.” He said, “It may be worth sixpence but the value is what you do with it.” I thought that was really cool, not just money financially but any part of our life. It may be worth this but the value is what you do with it. The value is how you help someone.

What are you going to do with that money? Are you going to give it to go feed the birds? Are you going to give it to go start a charity? Are you going to give it to help your dad? We know what it's worth but its value can be completely different. I thought that was a profound thing if you think about it.

Just a couple of fun things from Mary Poppins; if you guys haven't watched that movie yet, we went out and bought the movie. I'm going to watch the movie again. It was really a cool thing. Everywhere you look around in life, there's always these cool little lessons you can learn that you can relate back to your business and back into your life.

I hope you enjoyed that. I'm at the office now you guys. Have a great day and we'll talk to you all tomorrow.

Jun 19, 2013

You may have heard the first part of Russell’s Olympic journey, would you like to hear the “behind the scene” story?…

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I'm Russell Brunson. I'm excited to talk to you guys today. I just got back from the Boise State football stadium today. We picked out our season tickets. We were planning, last year, we got season tickets that were clear on the very back row of the stadium.

Because we got season tickets last year, we were able to go in earlier this year and pick some and we got third row tickets, so we have six seats on the third row about the 35, 40 yard line, and it's going to be awesome so if anyone wants to come visit Boise, let me know, and we'll take you to a game. Just kidding.

Today, what I want to talk about, I got up early this morning and started working out and just thinking about life and about things. I was thinking about what I should talk to you guys about today on the podcast. I thought I would talk about something that I have no idea if it's going to relate to you or not but I thought it would be kind of fun.

It's kind of something I'm nervous to talk about because I haven't talked about this publicly too much, mostly just people that I know that have asked me. A lot of you guys, if you've been following me for the last four or five years, you know some of my back stories but I was a wrestler. I wrestled in high school.

I was a state champ in high school, and then went to the high school nationals, took second place in the country there, got a scholarship to BYU and I wrestled for a year at BYU. Then they cut their wrestling program and I transferred to Boise State and wrestled my last four years at Boise State.

One of the sad things for me was I had some big goals. I wanted to be an All American in college like I was in high school, and ended up not making it. In fact, my senior year before the Pack 10 Tournament which is where you qualify for nationals, I lost and it was one of those things where I wasn't ready to be done yet.

I was planning on going to nationals, planning on doing well. I had my last match and I lost. That was the end. My dream just got taken away from me. There was nothing else I could do. It was over. Something I didn't know was going to be my last match was suddenly my last match.

For anyone who has ever gone through something like that, it's hard. You've focused 10, 12 years of your life on a goal, and then all of a sudden, it disappears overnight. It was hard. For me, I think my release, my outlet was business. I jumped into business and started trying to build a business like crazy.

That's how I got my mind off of the pain from losing and being done with wrestling. I did that and jumped into business. Luckily, I had a lot of success. Just like anything in life, I didn't just dabble. I jumped in a million percent and just went crazy with it.

That's how I think I became successful in the business world. I built the business and got to the point where our company was really big. We had about 100 employees. We had a big sales team. We had everything. It was fun. Everything was going really well.

About that time, I started thinking about wrestling and thought, “I really miss wrestling a lot.” One of my buddies had been competing for the Olympics. Three different cycles, he had tried or two cycles at the time. The last thing, he was favored to win American and go to the Olympics and in the Olympic trials, he lost to a guy that he had beaten very easily multiple times.

He ended up not qualifying for the Olympics, so the other guy got to go. I didn't really know what had happened to him. He kind of disappeared and I hadn't heard much from him. Then one day, I went to his blog. On his blog, it had been about a year since the trials. On the blog, he was saying that after the trials, he was really depressed.

He left. He moved to Wyoming and started doing some work there. One night, he came home from work. He went on YouTube and he was looking for stuff. He saw a video of the match that he had lost. He said he watched that match, and afterwards he said he started crying uncontrollably for hours. He couldn't stop.

He said, “I've got to try to do this Olympic thing one more time.” He said, “Basically I'm trying to figure out a way to do it so if anyone has ideas or can help support me, whatever, let me know and I want to try to compete again.” I read that blog post and was really touched by it.

Because he's a close friend, I was like, “Man, what can I do to help?” Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I was at a movie with my brother who is another wrestler. We were talking about how cool it would be to start wrestling again and how much we missed it and stuff.

That night, I went home. I was looking and said, “What would it take for me to be able to compete in the Olympics?” I went to the freestyle Olympic stuff and looked at everything. The Olympic list was really big. The weight class was deep, how good people were.

I was looking at people who were three and four time national champs who were tenth string in freestyle. I was like, “Wow, that's going to be tough.” Then I went over and looked at the Greco. Traditionally, Greco is a much harder and actually a much more fun type of wrestling but in America, a lot of people don't wrestle Greco.

I looked at the lineups in Greco, and the weights were not nearly as deep in America which was interesting. I knew a lot of the guys who were ranked in the top two or three, and I thought, “Wow, this is kind of cool. I could do Greco.” What else was cool was I actually knew the Olympic Greco coach.

We were good friends. He used to coach my little brother. I just thought, “You know what, I'm going to try to compete for the Olympics. I'm going to do it in Greco. I think it will be really fun.” The next day, I called up the Olympic Greco coach. His name is Ivan Ivanov. I hadn't talked to him in like 10 years.

I was like, “Hey Vaughn, I want to start wrestling again. I want to hire you to have you move to Boise and train me.” He kind of laughed and said, “Russell, I'm training the Olympic team. Everything is really good. I get paid a lot of money. I'm not interested.”

He said, “Maybe if you had a team or something or there was more than just you. I don't want to get involved and six months later, you decide you're not going to do the Olympics and I'm out of a job.” I said, “Okay, that makes sense.” Instead of giving up, I hung up the phone and then I started thinking.

I said, “You know what? I should. If I'm going to really do this, I should go get a team of people.” The first person I called up was Justin, my friend who had lost in the Olympic trials. I called and left a message for him. He called me back a few hours later.

I said, “Justin, I have a crazy idea. You're not going to believe but I want to compete for Olympics and I want you to move out here to Boise and train with me, and I think we should get a gym and bring up a bunch of guys. If we have a bunch of guys, I think we can convince Ivan to come out here and coach us. What do you think?”

He smiled on the phone and said, “I'm in, let's do it.” I don't think I had even told my wife at this time what was happening. This was on a Friday. Justin and his wife jump in the car from Montana or Wyoming, wherever they were at, drove eight or nine hours. The next day, they're at our house.

My wife is sitting there like, “You told me this six hours ago and now these guys are in our house talking about starting an Olympic club. Are you really doing this?” I said, “Let's do it. I'm in 100 percent.” Justin moved up here. We launched the club. He called a bunch of people he knew. They moved up as well.

We created some jobs for these guys so they could make money while they were here. After we had a bunch of people, we called Ivan up, flew him up. He saw everything, made him an offer. He moved to Boise, and that was where we were going.

For about seven or eight months, it was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever been through. We had our own Olympic team here in Idaho. We had our own facility, we had our own mats. We were training everyday. It was so much fun. I was having the greatest time in my life.

I think I was getting to the point where I was doing really well. I remember in December time, I was wrestling a guy who actually ended up taking second place in Olympic trials. I wrestled him and actually beat him for the first time. I was like, “This is amazing, I'm not that far away from the goal, and we still have two more years before the Olympics.”

That was in December. I was just fired up, really excited for this whole thing. Then what happened after that was kind of crazy. It was a whirlwind of events. In January, again, I haven't told this story publicly but here it is. In January, about the 15th of January, one day we're at the office.

Everything is cranking and all of a sudden, one of my programmers comes in and says, “Hey, all of our sales are failing.” I said, “What?” A few minutes later, the call center guys run up, “Hey, we're trying to bill people's credit cards. All of our credit cards are failing.” We looked and I couldn't figure out what had happened.

Our merchant accounts weren't working so I called our merchant account provider. We had 16 different merchant accounts with them and they had shut down every single one of them without any kind of warning. If you can imagine, at the time, we had 100 employees. Our overhead was north of $600,000 a month which means I had to make $600,000 before we broke even.

All of a sudden, we had no ability to process money. People wanted to give us money. People wanted to buy our stuff but we couldn't process their money. It took two days before I could get someone on the phone to actually tell me what was wrong. Basically what had happened, this is the time, for those of you who are familiar with what happened, anybody who was doing any kind of continuity trial, continuity based offers all got shut down.

I think PowerPay shut down 300 or 400 merchants overnight without any kind of warning. It took us three days to find out what happened. After that, they turned our merchant accounts back on but they put us on 100% reserve. We were scrambling.

In the next seven days, we made $200,000 and PowerPay had 100% reserve which means they wouldn't give us any of that money. We kept calling them and begging them. Finally, after about seven to 10 days, they said, “Okay, we'll take you off reserve and put you back on normal 10% reserve because you've proven you're a legitimate vendor.”

They did that but they said, “But we're going to keep your $200,000 you just processed in reserve,” which means that $200,000 we had made, I couldn't use to pay salaries or anything. It was just thing after thing after thing like that. For the next year, it was just a nightmare. Costs were so high. We had no money.

We had money coming in but we had no money to process. Because there was money coming in and we didn't get the money, we couldn't pay salaries so sales guys were quitting, we lost programmers, we lost designers, we lost coaches, and it was a nightmare. For a year, we tried to keep everything open.

I paid every penny out of my own pocket to keep things open. It was really the toughest year and a half to two years of my life. It was crazy. Eventually it ended with us shutting down the call center completely. The wrestling team, basically, I was paying for it out of my pocket, my personal pocket because the business couldn't support it at that time.

I was paying about $30,000 a month to keep it open. After about a year of that, it had depleted my personal accounts. I couldn't keep supporting it anymore. I still remember by far the most depressing day of my life, worst than when I lost my wrestling match was me calling up Justin and the coach and saying, “I can't support this anymore. I have no more money. We have to shut down the wrestling program.”

That's all from one December to the next December. It was December when I wrestled that guy and beat him, and it was a year later that I had to call and shut down the whole program. It was really tough. Then after that, we came back and we had to leave our office. We shut down the call center. We fired most of our staff.

We moved to a small office and had to start rebuilding. It was about another year of rebuilding before we were back to where we were really doing well but it was the most stressful time of my life. It was hard but we were able to keep pushing through that. We restarted our business, relaunched it, and now we're at a spot where it's kind of fun.

We're actually with six employees, we're doing the same volume we were doing with 100 employees before. It's been amazing. Now, I'm a thousand times happier than I ever could have dreamed about being before but the reason why I think I wanted to tell you guys this story, and surely there's different messages you can get out of it.

One of them is don't hire a bunch of staff. Another one is being diverse with your merchant accounts; make sure for any product you have, make sure you have at least two different merchant accounts and two different banks. I can't tell you how many people I know that have gotten merchant accounts shut down.

There are so many lessons I could talk about and share with you guys along the way about hiring and the people that stick beside you, and those that walk away when adversity comes. The main lesson I really want to share was when all is said and done, as horrible and tough of an experience that was, the fruits of what happened have been amazing.

I think that the reason why I've had ups and downs in my life, the ups and downs are interesting because ups and downs are the things that define you and the things that make you who you are. The reason I've had the big ups and downs is when I get into something, I go in 100 percent. When I was wrestling in high school and college, I was in 100 percent.

When I started my business, I was in 100 percent. When I wanted to do the Olympic thing, I was in 100 percent. I didn't say, “I'm going to wrestle for the Olympics,” and then go and sit down and watch TV. I went out and within a day, I had hired the Olympic Greco coach, I had built the team, I had gotten a facility. I had done everything.

Again, sometimes it bites you in the butt but that's the nature of life. Those who risk a lot are the ones who reward a lot. I just want to encourage you guys, whatever it is in your life you're doing, and this could be in everything, in your relationships, in your family, in your religion, in your business, whatever it is, if you decide you're going to do it, do it.

Don't just dabble. Nothing drives me more crazy than people that dabble. We had an event a little while ago and I had someone come that had been dabbling in internet marketing for as long as I've been doing this stuff, and they're still not successful. It's because they dabble.

I want you guys to commit to yourselves to whatever you want to do, whatever you're passionate about, be all in. I don't care if it's business. I don't care if it's weight loss. Whatever it is, don't just dabble. Commit yourself and be all in.

Do what I did and go in, hire coaches, do whatever it is, just commit and go 100% in. If you do that, you'll be amazed at what happens. The journey you go along is so much more exciting. I had someone tell me the other day, “Man Russell, you're only 33 years old and look at how much stuff you've experienced, seen, and been able to do in your life.”

I really think it's because when I get into something, I go all in. Most people, they don't. They dabble and they sit on the sidelines, and they don't want to get hurt, and they don't want to screw up, and they don't want the pain that can be associated with things but I promise you guys that that pain is there for a reason.

It's there because it makes the other stuff so much better and so much happier. Don't be afraid of it. Embrace it. Go all in with whatever you're doing, and quit dabbling. That's my message for today. It's a little longer than normal but I hope you guys got some good ideas, and we appreciate you guys.

Everything we do in our Dot Com Secrets business and our other businesses is because we care about our customers. As scary as it is for me to share stories like that, I'm hoping that it will get you guys some thoughts and insights, and some things that you can apply in your life and in your business.

Let's go from there. Again, if you guys like this podcast, please share it with others. I'm doing it for free just because I enjoy it and I want to help people, and if you guys are enjoying it, please blog about it, leave a comment about it, whatever it is. Thanks so much and we'll talk to you guys all again tomorrow.

Jun 18, 2013

Are you curious what Russell’s doing today to double his business? If so, listen to this episode and copy exactly what he’s doing.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about a thing called KPIs. In the theme of my podcast from yesterday, I know it was a short one, but just talking about taking stock of where you are in your life right now and making a whole new list of what you need to be happy, and then going and just getting it, and not letting anything get in your way.

I hope a lot of you guys took that to heart yesterday and did that. I know I'm having a ton of fun with mine today. I got a bunch of things on my list I'm doing today, just because I wanted to to be happy, and now I'm going to go do them. I hope you guys do the same thing as well.

Today, what I want to talk about though is now tying that back into business a little bit and I want to tell you basically what I'm doing today. You guys should copy me because it's going to work and make me a lot of money.

One of the things that I've noticed in my business is when I have something that I'm tracking and I'm looking at, and I'm watching the numbers on, it tends to grow. When I just forget about them and I don't have those things, then it tends to not grow. I've always looked at things from month to month, our numbers and our profit and loss, stuff like that.

In fact, that's what the accountants were at my office yesterday showing us. They come once a month and go over all those things but recently, we hired these guys to do some traffic generation stuff for us. Every Friday, they send us what they call a Friday report. It shows us how many clicks, how much money was spent.

It shows a really detailed report of how many sales came in. It was really exciting to get that. I thought, “You know what? We have a lot of divisions in our company and a lot of different offers we're running, and things like that yet we never really, I don't have numbers like that in front of me all the time.”

What we decided to do and what our task for today is to kind of sit down and figure out what our KPIs are for each of our different sub-companies. A KPI is a key performance indicator. For example, in most of our businesses, the key performance indicators are similar. One of them we're looking at very heavily obviously is traffic, how much traffic are we getting in, from what source.

A KPI could be we need 500 visitors a day from search, 500 visitors a day from Facebook, whatever that number is. That's a key performance indicator. As soon as we started tracking that, then we can help improve it, making it go up and down.

Another one would be how many subscribers we get each day. Are we getting 100 a day, 1000 a day, 5000 a day, whatever it is? The next one is how many sales we're making, and not just random sales but what is the front end product we have. I don't know about you guys but we always have for each of our businesses, Dot Com Secrets X, Dot Com Secrets Local, Dot Com Secrets Second Up-line, Girlfriend in a Week, all of our websites, all of our properties, whatever you want to call them, they each have a front end product that we're trying to put people into.

Usually for us, it's a dollar trial type product. That's one of our key performance indicators is how many dollar trials did we give away today. Is it 10, 100, 1000? That's a big thing we look at. That is a key performance indicator.

The next one is how many active members. If we have 3000 active members right now, or 2000, whatever that number is, and then how much we sold other back end products, those are the KPIs that we have for basically each of our companies. What I'm doing today is making a little template that basically has those KPIs, and each person in our office is in charge of different sections.

Basically each Friday, I'm going to have it where everyone on my team goes and puts together their Friday KPI reports and send them in. That way, we can see week by week how we're improving, what's going up, what's going down, and those types of things. That's what we're doing.

I'm really excited for it. What I've noticed is that any time we track something, it tends to get bigger because we see it and our brain automatically starts thinking about, “Man, I got 100 visitors yesterday. How can I get 120 tomorrow? How can I get 150? How can I get 200?”

Just the fact that we're tracking it, I guarantee we'll see numbers go up. I want to recommend the same thing for you guys. If you aren't tracking stuff yet like that, it's time to sit back and start looking at what those key performance indicators are in your business, and everyone's businesses are different.

Figure out what those things are, and then track them and plot them. Look at it so you can see day by day what's happening, has it gone up, has it gone down, and things like that. Another fun thing that you can start doing is after you do this for like a year or so, and we're doing this with our revenues, profit and losses and stuff, is looking year by year.

Last May, we did X amount of dollars. This May, we did this amount of dollars. We increased from month to month, year by year which is fun. The biggest thing I think is having the tracking ability so you can see it and improve it every single day.

There is your homework assignment for today, you guys. Figure out your KPIs. Figure out your tracking system, and start watching those numbers because when you watch them, then they can improve. That's about it, you guys. I'm at the office today. I'm going to go start making some KPI sheets. It's going to be a ton of fun.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please tell other people. Go ahead and blog about it. I won't mind, or just go into iTunes and leave a review. I love seeing the reviews. It makes me happy. I would appreciate that. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you all soon.

Jun 17, 2013

Russell just got back from vacation and wants to challenge all of us to radically change at least one pattern in your life and see what happens.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Hey everyone, this is Russell. I know it's been a little while since you guys have heard from me but I was actually on a vacation with my family down in St. George and had an awesome time. I'm back now, ready to get back to work.

I don't know about you guys, but when I leave for a little bit and I come back to get back into working, it gets me so excited and fired up, and today, I'm pumped to be here. A couple of things, I'm actually late for a meeting with the accountants. I completely blanked it.

Going to the accountants for me is like going to the dentist. It's the most painful process of the day so I'm heading there right now, but just wanted to talk to you about a couple of things I've been thinking about this weekend, or actually this whole week. It's been a lot of really fun stuff.

One of them is just at the beginning of the year, we always set New Year's resolutions, and then we never keep them. About two years ago, I remember one day I put together a list. I was like, “What I needed to do to be really happy in my life,” and I listed everything I could possibly think of. Then I made a conscious effort to go out and get all of those things.

It was amazing what I was able to accomplish during the next month or so afterwards. It was all sorts of things like I want to whiten my teeth, I want to lose some weight, I wanted to go to an acupuncturist, everything I thought of that I thought would be cool to do, I listed all those things out and then went and actually did them. It was fun.

I haven't done that for about two years, so I actually just this weekend did the same thing. I said, “I'm going to go back through and figure out everything that I wanted to do to be a little bit happier in life.” One of them was juicing. This morning, I woke up, cranked out the old juicer which I haven't used in years, and juiced some stuff.

It turned out really nasty. I put way too much of something in there but I did that. We just got a Whole Foods here in Boise, and went to Whole Foods. I bought some quinoa because one time, I had that and it's a really good grain with lots of protein, so I bought that. This morning, I woke up at five o'clock in the morning.

I remember going to Tony Robbins' event. He talked about jumping on a trampoline every morning, so I woke up, jumped on a trampoline, and he talked about trying to be grateful every morning. I sat there for about 10 minutes while I jumped on the trampoline, thinking about my kids, my wife, and everything I could be thankful for which was really cool.

Then I did some studying this morning, both from a religious standpoint and also from a marketing standpoint, and resetting my whole life. It feels amazing. It's 8:41 right now. I've been up for almost four hours already and I just feel fantastic. I feel fresh, I feel like I have a ton of energy, and it's awesome.

I want to give you guys that same gift that I gave myself. Right now, we're about the middle of the year. Use this as your New Year's resolution or your midyear resolution, and go home tonight or today, whenever it is, and sit down and write a list of the 10, 20, or 30 things you want to do to make yourself happier right now.

It could be dumb things like I said juicing sounded like fun and jumping on the tramp in the morning, and just things like that. Then go and start doing them. Give yourself permission to do it. It's amazing what you'll feel like.

Just some recommendations for you guys, one recommendation is I recommend trying something different with your eating, just totally radically different. If you're a hard core meat eater, become a vegetarian. If you're a vegetarian, become a meat eater.

I don't care what it is, just something radical, shift what it is what you've been doing, and see what happens. See how your body feels by the change. I recommend waking up earlier, and using that time, not so much to check your email or to work but use it as a time to sharpen your saw.

What I mean by that is focusing on learning something, either for your business, for your religious life, whatever it is. Just focus in the morning on doing more of that, doing some exercises early in the morning. If you need to get a gym membership, just do something to radically change your physiology, to change your mindset, change your eating behaviors, your patterns, and just see what happens.

I promise you, if it's at all like what I'm feeling like this morning, it's going to be amazing for you as well. That's the gift I want to give you guys today. Just make some radical changes, and if you do that, I promise you you're going to feel a lot better.

I'm at the office now. I'm late for my meeting with the accountants. I'm going to go talk to those guys. I'm going to do a lot more podcasts this week because I got some really cool stuff to share with you guys but that is your task for today, to radically change the patterns that you're doing in your life right now for the better, and test it out and see what happens. Thanks everybody.

Jun 5, 2013

Are you using a sales video, a sales letter, or a webinar to sell your product? We suggest testing out a few of these unique options to increase your conversion rates.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Today, I want to talk about a topic that I think is really fascinating. I've never really seen anyone else talk about it before but it's been a big part of our business. The basic concept is people learn and consume information in different ways.

I'm not talking so much like the products that you sell but more so about how you sell them. For example, what we found is there are some people who love to watch webinars. That's their favorite thing in the world. They'll sit on webinars all day long. They get on every webinar that happens. They buy off webinars. They love webinars.

There are other people who can't stand webinars. No matter how much benefit is going to be on a webinar, they're not going to get on it. That's kind of like me. I think webinars are cool. I love selling through webinars but I don't like getting on webinars. I can't take an hour, two hours, three hours of my time usually during the day to watch a webinar, so I don't typically like that.

That's one sales style. Another sales style is sales videos. Some people love watching sales videos, and they'll watch them all the way through, and that's how they prefer to consume the information. Me on the other hand, I normally can't sit down and just watch a sales video. It drives me crazy.

The third modality is reading. Some people like to actually read a sales letter. That's the way that they consume and are more likely to purchase the product. There's other things as well. There's phone calls. There's a lot of different things you can do.

What I want to talk about is just the importance of selling your clients in multiple different modalities, meaning for example, we're tomorrow launching a product in the weight loss industry, and we're also launching a product in the internet marketing industry. Both of those products, we're leading with a sales video.

We've found that traditionally, a sales video will make us more money than a sales letter or things like that so we're leading the front end of both of those offers as a sales video, which is kind of cool but a lot of people, like I said, aren't going to actually watch a sales video for whatever reason. It's too long, they drive them crazy. Maybe they're at work and they can't have the volume up. There are a million different reasons why someone may not.

What we've found is that we'll lead with what we think is our strongest modality, the version of the page that's going to be the best, and we'll put it out there, and then what we'll do is if somebody doesn't purchase from that, we'll have an exit pop-up. The exit pop-up will pop-up the sales letter version for those people who don't want to sit through a video.

Boom, it will pop it up, and they can read the whole, it's basically the transcript of the sales video. We've found by doing that, we've seen huge, huge increases in response rates. I think it's because, like I said, people like to consume things in different ways. When we first launched our Dot Com Secrets local webinar about two years ago, the way we launched initially was an automated webinar.

That did really good. After I think 10 days, maybe seven days, something like that, if they hadn't purchased from the webinar, then we sent a sequence of emails pushing to a sales letter version of the webinar which is basically the same message but in sales letter format. That dramatically increased our sales from people who just didn't watch the webinar, didn't have time to watch the webinar, whatever the reason was.

Then boom, they saw the sales letter, and that gave it to them in a format and a fashion they could actually consume. We also for a little while there, we stopped doing it mostly because it was a hassle but it worked. It's one of those things we probably should have kept doing but when people would opt into the webinar, we'd have a small upsell for five dollars.

If they bought that upsell, we would actually ship them out a DVD of the webinar which was kind of cool so they could watch the webinar through DVD, and we'd give them a printed out version of the sales letter of the webinar, just a couple little cool things like that just to get our message in people's hands in multiple different ways because you have no idea what the person that clicked on your ad, what type of person they are, what type of way they like to learn, what form of communication is going to be the most likely to close and sell something like that.

I guess my message for today is just have a little fun with your sales stuff. Don't just have a sales video, just a sales letter, just a webinar.  Take those elements and make other versions of it. Traditionally, our sales letter is just the transcribed version of our sales video or our sales webinar so it's the same message, just in a written out format so they can actually see it.

We've even done it before where we had people pay for the transcripts of a webinar and it was amazing, people pay for the transcripts. They would get that and they would basically be reading the whole sales letter, and boom, those people were more likely to purchase as well. That's just my message for today.

I'm at the office now and ready to have some fun today with our two product launches we're working on, but again, both of those, we're using different modalities, and you should as well. Have some fun with it, you guys, and we'll talk to you all soon.

May 24, 2013

What is the secret message I’m trying to get to you?…

---Transcript---

Hey, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing in Your Car podcast today. It is a beautiful day. Hey everyone, this is Russell again. It's Friday today and I'm excited because we're heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend. We're going to have some fun out at the lake with my family, so I'm excited for that today but on my drive in to get some stuff done this morning before we head out of town, I want to give you guys a quick message.

This message has to do with becoming a student of marketing. There's this guy I got some text messages from yesterday. He's someone who I met in the last six months or so and someone who I think is a really cool guy, who wants to be an entrepreneur. He's trying to learn this stuff. He's got his first app he's been creating, and I've been helping him, steering him the right way.

When Rippln came out, which obviously a lot of you guys probably know what Rippln is. It's a new viral app that we're helping launch and stuff like that. I showed him that. He got excited and signed up, and started talking about it to some people, and started doing some stuff. Then last night, he texted me and said, “Hey, can you take me and my wife off of Rippln?”

I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “I'm tired of getting all the text messages and emails, and it's not for me,” all this stuff, “please cancel it.” So I wrote him back and said, “Yeah, just go contact support@rippln.com. They can take care of it.” I sat there. It really bugged me. I wanted to write him back but I didn't because I knew if I did, it would be kind of out of me being upset a little bit.

It just makes me sad because I know someone like him, he's trying to learn this internet marketing thing and trying to learn apps, trying to learn how to launch his own app. I gave him behind the scenes access to the fastest growing social network app launch in the history of the world. He got behind the scenes access to watch it going live.

He's getting all the marketing material texted and emailed to him every single day, and instead of looking at that and saying, “Wow, this is a really good case study about how to launch an app,” he got annoyed with it and asked to leave and to cancel it. It just blows my mind how many times people who are trying to learn marketing get upset at marketing.

It drives me crazy. I can't tell you how many emails we send out doing cool marketing, showing cool marketing, and actually marketing to people, and instead of people looking at that and saying, “Wow, that's a good idea. I'm going to go and implement that in my business,” people come back a lot of the times and just get upset and say, “Oh, I can’t believe you keep emailing me. I can't believe this.”

They're upset about whatever it might be, and it just makes me laugh because the reason why they joined my list, the reason why they listen to this podcast, the reason why you come to my teleseminars is to learn how to make money. Sure, I'm going to be selling you stuff along the way but watching the process is worth as much if not more money than the actual thing we're selling every single time.

For example, yesterday, we did a webinar that in the first 90 minutes or whatever, in the 90 minute webinar, we did $80,000 in sales. Now, a lot of people were on that webinar and they got excited by the product and they bought it, but if you were just to have watched the process about how we got people on the call, what happened on the webinar, the words we said, the slides we used, the process, the close, the takeaway, the offer, I would have paid $1000 just to have seen behind the scenes of that webinar, what I did.

Everybody had a front stage pass. Everyone is on my email list. They all got the emails. They all sat there on the webinar. They're watching the replay cycle right now. From this webinar, we'll probably make a quarter million dollars and there will be people unsubscribing from my list because they're annoying I'm marketing to them.

Why did you get on my list in the first place? You're trying to learn marketing from me. Watch what I'm doing. Anyway, I just wanted to stress that because so many times, I think that we're looking for something and we're missing what's right in front of our eyes. If you want to learn marketing, you cannot be annoyed by people marketing to you.

You need to watch that and study it. With my friend, I started texting this back but then I deleted it but I wanted to tell him, “Look, if you want to be passionate about this career, you should be throw away all your marketing books, quit going to college, whatever it is but every one of those emails that Rippln is sending out or that I'm sending out, you should print those out, put them in a binder, and study them every single day because that will make you more money than anything you'll ever learn in college.”

I feel bad because he missed the mark. He's so focused on trying to launch his app that he missed the marketing lesson I was trying to give him about how to launch his app. It's a shame and a tragedy but that's what happens with so many people. Please you guys, be students of this game, the marketing game.

If you do, you will succeed. You've got to become passionate about it. Daegan Smith and I talk about this a lot. Until you become obsessed about marketing, and obsessed with how we drive traffic and how we do conversions, and cool sales processes, and that kind of stuff, until you become obsessed with that part of it, you're not going to become successful online, at least not to the level you want to be.

Everything else is just going to be a chore. It's going to be a headache. It's going to be whatever it's going to be but if you really focus on that part and make it a passion and a love, then you can be successful. On a Hangout I did the other day, I was on a Hangout with Anthony Morrison who had one of the best running infomercials for four or five years straight.

I told everybody, “Look, Anthony's infomercials are awesome, so awesome that I recorded them, I had them transcribed, and I've read the script over and over again to learn what he said and why he said it.” There's so much value for me in watching the infomercial. You can ask my wife. It drives my wife insane but when we're watching TV, guess what? My favorite part is the commercials.

She always wants to fast forward. I'm like, “No, this is why we're watching the show, so I can watch the commercials.” When we listen to the radio and the commercial comes on, she wants to change it. I'm like, “No, you know this is the part of the show I'm here for, to listen to the commercials.” That's where I learn, that's where I grow.

It's because I've become a student of this marketing game, and you need to become a student too. Quit getting annoyed when people market to you and look at it as saying, “Wow, that's a cool idea. That's a cool way I can implement something in my business.” When you start doing that and your perspective changes to that, you guys can become even more successful, but it really takes that leap from I'm trying to figure out how to make money to I'm becoming a student of marketing.

When you do that, like I said, everything else will change. For all you guys who are out there, for every email list you're on, don't get annoyed anymore. Please start printing out the emails, putting them in a binder, studying them. That is your homework. If you do that, I promise you guys you'll be more successful.

That's it for today. I hope you guys all have an awesome Memorial Day weekend. Maybe, if my wife and kids pass out in the car, I’ll give you guys a four hour long podcast while I'm in the car driving. If not, I'll talk to you guys when we all get back.

If you're enjoying the show at all, please go to ITunes.com and leave your comments, leave your feedback. I love seeing it. It's probably the most exciting thing of the day for me right now so go back and look at the comments. If you're having a good time with this, please leave feedback and let everybody else you know know about the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Thanks you guys, and we'll talk to you soon.

May 22, 2013

Are you an A level marketer in a B level opportunity?  Let me show you how to change!

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and we are on my way to work today. This is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. In today's podcast, we're going to be talking about what type of opportunity are you in right now. Today, I want to talk about types of opportunities that we're in. this is something that I've never really thought about.

When I first got in the business, I just started moving forward. I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't know what was happening. I had an idea for this software, so I made that and I started selling it. Then I had this idea for potato gun DVDs so I made that. Then I had an idea.

I started having ideas, and then just making that stuff and trying to sell it. I had no real plan or purpose or anything. It was just things started happening. We started moving forward. I think that a lot of times happens with a lot of us in our businesses.

Last summer, my wife and I had a chance to go to Kenya for about 10 days. We were doing a project with World Teacher Trade which is a really cool charity that two of my friends, Stu and Amy McLaren started. We had a chance to go out there. It's one of the most amazing experiences while we were out there, helping build schools. It was a really cool thing.

While we were out there, there were probably I think 10 or 15 other high end internet marketers who had all donated money to build these classrooms that were all there with us. We were building schools and hanging out with the kids, and having a great time together. I remember one day, I was sitting next to Bill Harrison.

If you guys don't know Bill, he's a brilliant marketer, one of the coolest guys from a marketing standpoint. He and I sat and talked for 20 hours straight without even a break because the guy has read more books on marketing than anyone I ever met, a really cool guy. I really enjoy my time with him every time I have a chance to talk with him.

When we were in Kenya, he started talking about the type of opportunity he was in. He said, “It's kind of frustrating me. I feel like I have A level skills but I feel like I'm at a B level opportunity.” He said, “I have these friends who have B or C level skills who aren't that good at marketing or business, yet they somehow got plugged into an A level opportunity, and a couple of them just sold their businesses for $100 million.”

He's like, “Our company does well. We do $10 to $12 million a year but that's kind of the peak. We maxed out everything that's possible in our business because it's a B level opportunity. We can't really get outside of that.” He's like, “Also, the other issue is that I built a company that was based off of,” actually his brother's brand so it's based on his brother's.

He's like, “It's a business that's very difficult if not impossible to sell. The problem with that, when you build a company completely off of your face and your name, at first, it's a lot easier to get traction and make sales, and to grow a business but long term, it's harder to sell because you sell it, then the personality dies behind the business.”

He said, “I always felt like our business is like a rental. No matter what, we'll never own it to the point where we could sell it. It's like a rental home. We could make good income on it, have good cash flow but it's not something that we own and could sell someday.” Between those two things, talking about the opportunity and talking about basically we're in a rental business if it's that type of business, I really took that to heart.

I thought a lot about it. That was last summer. In January, I was at the traffic conversion event and I saw Bill again. We started talking. I told him, “What you talked about really had a big impact on me with the whole level, what type of opportunity are you in.” He asked me, “What are you doing about that?”

I said, “You know, I'm not sure yet.” I remember I had this conversation with the guys on my team. We were all there at the event together, and kind of said it looked like we're in a good business. We're at a I feel a B level opportunity.

First off, our business does well. Our best year ever, we did over $10 million so it's a really good business but I feel like our skill set, what we bring to the table is a lot more than that. I really feel like we were in the same situation as Bill where we had a B level opportunity with A level skills, and we wanted to figure out a way to increase that.

We strategically sat down and figured out with what we have right now, how could we change our business to actually make it an A level opportunity where we could apply our A level skills, and really make what we think what we're worth in what we can do. Because of that, we basically took a business that was doing $10 million a year and completely transformed it and changed it.

Some of you guys probably on the outside can see a few of the changes happening but you'll see more and more over the next six months or so, and where Dot Com Secrets is not the focus of our business. Again, I think Dot Com Secrets is a B level opportunity. Sure, it makes us $10 million a year but I think that there are bigger opportunities. That's what we're pursuing right now.

You'll start seeing these transitions and changes as we're trying to shift away from a B level opportunity into an A level opportunity where we can really start scaling it. My thought process for this podcast I wanted you guys to think about is what type of opportunity are you in right now? Just because you're in the business you're in right now doesn't mean you have to be in that.

You can change it or you can sell it, or you can move onto something different, but make sure that you're in an opportunity that can reward you sufficiently for your level of skill. If you're in a business, maybe you're doing a million bucks a year and you feel really good about that. Just by tweaking the business you're in could completely tweak how much money you're making, just by shifting the opportunity.

I want you to be aware of that because until last summer, I wasn't even aware of that. I was just moving forward in the opportunity that I'd fallen into and didn't even think much about it. I was good at making money but now that we've made a shift and we’re focusing on an A level opportunity, it gets me more excited because I can see the big vision, my team can see the vision, and we get more excited because what we’re building is ten times bigger.

Again, that's my focus for you guys. Just look at the opportunity you're in now and realize that if you're not happy or it's not what you think it could be, or it's not big enough, whatever it is, you can change. I remember two years ago on New Year's Eve, Tony Robbins put out this video. It was very inspirational for me, and it was actually the catalyst for me firing a ton of employees, shifting my whole business model around, and moving my offices, and shifting.

He basically said, “As New Year's is coming up, this is the time when people can make changes and do whatever they want.” He said, “Look, if you're not happy in your relationships, change them. If you're not happy with your weight, change it. If you're not happy with your business, change it.”

It really gave me permission, saying, “You know what, why do I have to keep doing this? If I'm not happy, I can change.” I think that that's something that a lot of people, as simple as it is, you don't give yourself permission to do that. Look at your life right now, all aspects of it.

Look at the opportunities in everything, not just business, but your relationship opportunities, your spiritual opportunities, things like that. Just look at are you at an A level opportunity in all areas of your life? If not, then change it. I'm giving you guys all permission right now to make that change because I know it's a scary thing but you have my permission to do it and my encouragement to go do that as well, and seek after the A level opportunities.

Guess what? It takes the exact same amount of effort as the B level opportunities. That's what's interesting. When Bill was talking to me, his buddy that sold his company for $100 million, he didn't work as hard as Bill is, he didn't work as hard as I'm working but the opportunity he was in allowed that.

Just realize that the conscious choosing of your opportunity is huge because most of us don't consciously choose it. Most of us just go out there, and whatever we stumble upon, that's what we start running with. I'm giving you permission right now to consciously choose the opportunities in your life, again, from relationships to business to personal life to spiritual life, whatever it is.

Consciously make the choice and then I also give you permission to make those changes because I know that a lot of times, we just need that permission. You have my permission. Go and do it. I hope you enjoy this podcast. I hope it gives you guys some inspiration.

I know that this little concept has changed our business, the direction of our business substantially and it's made what we’re doing a million times more fun and more fulfilling. I hope it will do the same for you. Thanks, everybody.

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