You’ve heard the #1 reason you succeed or fail in real estate is “Location, Location, Location,” but what is the #1 reason when you’re online…?
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Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson again, from the DotComSecrets.com “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. For me, the weekend just ended. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I’m rebounding from winter today, and I’m actually wearing shorts to work, so I’m excited.
I want to talk about something that’s on my mind a lot. We had Easter break this weekend, so my family and I went down to where my wife’s parents live. It’s interesting. We live in Boise, Idaho, which isn’t a huge town, but it’s a good-sized town. We drove down two and a half hours to a city called Burley, which is where my wife’s family is from. It’s a lot smaller town, and from there we drove out to a smaller city called Alpine, which has about five hundred people. From there we drove out to this city called Almo, which I think has about eight people in the whole city, and that’s not really exaggerating all that much – literally eight people.
I had some interesting thoughts along the way. First off, we were driving down to Burley, and on the side of the freeway, there’s this hill. I’ve seen this every time we drive by it, and I’ve always wondered what it is. It’s this huge hill, strangely huge, and it looks like something that just popped up out in the middle of nowhere. They have these two huge waterslides coming off of one side, and a zip line that comes off the other side. It’s on the side of the freeway, out in the middle of nowhere. There’s no city within fifteen miles of there – it’s just this random, weird thing. I keep thinking, “What is that?” I always want to stop and go water-sliding down it, but you’ve never see anyone there. It’s just this random thing.
That was the first thing we saw, and then we went out to Almo, which again, is this little podunk city, literally, with a population of eight or nine. We’re driving out there, and all of the sudden, there’s this huge hotel. That’s where we stayed. We called every night for an entire week before someone answered the phone. We were driving down there, literally, and someone finally answered the phone, and they go, “Oh yeah, we’ve got tons of rooms. Come stay.” We go and stay at this place. We’re the only people staying there. There’s nobody else. It’s just interesting.
My brother-in-law was down there with us. We were hanging out with him. His family owns one of the local banks, and he told me that both of those projects – the big huge hill on the side of the road – that the people had come in and tried to finance with them. They turned them down, because they said, “Look, nobody is going to go to a random water slide on the side of the freeway where there’re no exits close by [laughs]. There’s no city.” They turned the guy down. The guy was all excited. He was so passionate. He knew it would be huge, so he went and borrowed money from his friends and family, built this huge waterslide thing, and apparently it went bankrupt because nobody could even get to it. Literally, there’s not an exit close by. I don’t know how you’d even get to it.
The other one was this little hotel in the middle of the desert that the bank actually did finance. There’re probably twenty rooms or so. There’re more rooms in this hotel than there are people in the city, and it’s not like there’s a tourist spot close. It got me really thinking about how so many times, we get passionate about an idea, and we think it’s the greatest thing in the world, so we go and we dump all of this money and time and effort into something when there’s nobody around. In the real estate days, they used to always say that the most important thing about real estate is “location, location, location.” I remember hearing that from my dad when I was a kid. Now obviously for this, these guys built a waterslide hill on the side of the freeway – horrible location. Nobody shows up. Bankrupt. These other guys found this little city with a population of eight and decided it would be a great spot for a hotel. The spent probably a million bucks building this hotel, and guess what? Nobody shows up. Location, location, location.
So how does that relate to you guys? When we used to do our big high-end seminars – some of you guys probably came to them. We used to do seminars where we would charge between five and ten thousand dollars for people to come to our office in Boise. We’d spend three days working on their business, and I’d say half of the time, if not more, people would come to these businesses, that they weren’t businesses – there was no market. One guy I remember vividly. I felt bad for the guy. He spent ten grand to come. I tried to talk him out of it, but he kept telling me, “I want to create a product to sell to Boy Scout leaders, because there’re X amount of Boy Scout leaders across America, blah, blah, blah. Nobody else is tapping into this market,” and I said, “The reason no one taps into it is because there’s not a market there. Boy Scout leaders usually aren’t really getting paid for that. They’re volunteers. They’re not going to spend their own hard-earned money to go and buy more stuff to learn how to become a better Scout Master, unfortunately. I wish they would, but they just don’t. It doesn’t really go hand-in-hand.”
The way I look at this is, in the real estate world, its location, location, location. In our world, it’s, “You’ve got to find a hot market ahead of time.” I luckily learned this lesson early on when I bought a product from Frank Kern and Ed Dale called “The Underachiever Method”. In fact, two years ago I bought that whole company, and I bought that brand from them because I was so passionate about it. I still am. We’re going to be publishing it as a book and a bunch of other really cool stuff here in the near future.
One of the core things they taught in The Underachievers Method was that there’re basically three steps. Step number one is to find a hot market. Step number two is to ask them what they want. Step number three is to give it to them. So many of us go around and do it backwards, where we will have an idea for a product. We go and create the product. We spend time and energy and money and effort creating the product, and then we go and try to sell it, and ninety percent of the time, there’s no market there.
In my business, we’ve been really trying to reverse engineer it, and go the other way. Find the hot market first, find out what they want, and then create it. That’s how we found our diabetic supplement. We went out there – and I don’t know anything about diabetes. In fact, ours is a niche within diabetes. It’s neuropathy. I don’t know anything about neuropathy, but we were able to find out that there’s a market there. People are buying stuff, and so we went, and we found out what they wanted. They wanted a natural supplement, and so, “Boom,” we created it.
We did it the correct way. Find a hot market. Ask them what they want, and then give it to them, as opposed to what most of us do, which is have a product idea, create it, and then go try and shove it down people’s throats. For people that are doing that, you’re just like that dude on the side of the road with the huge waterslide, and nobody’s around. It’s important to sell stuff you’re passionate about, but that’s not the first step. The first step is to find that market. Find the group of rabid, hungry buyers first, and after you’ve found it, then, again, it’s not like you go and create something. Find out what they want. Ask them questions.
If you find that existing traffic stream, you can put up what we used to call fly catcher pages. We’d put up a little page, and say, “What’s your number one question about this topic? What’s the most important thing? What’s the number one thing you’re trying to do? The number one struggle with your diabetes?” or whatever it might be. You ask people that, and they let you know, and then you create the product. Just like in real estate, it’s location, location, location. In Internet marketing world, it’s find a hot market – the market, the market, the market.
So I just want to encourage you guys that wherever you are in your path right now, if you haven’t started yet, make sure that you’re doing it the right way. Find the hot market first. If you already have a business, and you’re trying to grow it, go out there and start looking for those markets. Go and find the place that there’re already people at and set up shop there.
Another thing – we were in Albion, and these guys were building this beautiful bed and breakfast, out in Albion, Idaho, population, again, three hundred or something like that. I was like, “Why? You’ve got to spend the same amount of money building a bed and breakfast in Albion as you would in Boise. Why wouldn’t you build in Boise where people are actually at, and people are visiting and traveling to?” I think the only visitors to Albion each year are my wife and I, because we have family there, but most people aren’t going to Albion. It’s going to be very difficult to keep that bed and breakfast busy all year round, but for whatever reason, people fall so in love with the idea, they fall in love with the location, that they do crazy things that just don’t make sense logically from a business standpoint.
For you, I want you guys to be thinking logically. I don’t want you to fall in love with a product. You can fall in love with a market, because you know that there’s so much traffic, there’s so much business, and so many people there, and if you do that, then you’re going to be fine, but if you go about it the other way around, and you spend all of your effort building the most perfect product in the world and hope that there’s a market later, you’re going to be sorely disappointed when you find out that you’ve spend a lot of time and a lot of energy.
That is my rant for today. I’m now at my office. I’m planning to have a really exciting day today, so I hope you guys enjoyed this and I hope that you got some value out of it, and we will talk to you guys all soon.