A short lesson Russell learned from his time at spam school…
On this episode Russell explains why he dabbled in being a spammer and how it went. He also talks about why he no longer makes decisions based on SEO stuff.
Here are 3 fun things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to find out why Russell used to be a spammer, but why he isn’t any more.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and welcome to another episode of Marketing In Your Car. Hey Everyone, so today is a cold, rainy day in Boise, Idaho. It's Friday so I got a couple big things trying to get done, and then I'm going to go see ... I'm really excited for this, Rand Fishkin, the CEO and the founder of SEOMoz is actually going to be coming to Boise and speaking which will be cool for a couple reasons. First off, last ... how many years ago? Five or six years ago, maybe longer, I spoke at ClickBank Exchange and Rand was speaking as well which was cool. I felt bad because I had the big stage and then Rand had this little, tiny room. I went in there, and that dude is brilliant, so smart, it was awesome to listen to him and loved it back then. Just been a big fan of their stuff for a long time. I'm excited to go hear him speak, and I'm not sure if he's speaking about SEO stuff or other things, but regardless, it'll be fun to go and get some cool stuff from him.
It's interesting ... He has a different philosophy on business than mine. I remember a little while ago, reading this huge article he wrote about how they raised all this crazy amounts of money, and all these things, that for me seem ludicrous, some of the worst business decisions in the world yet they're having success. There's different paths and different things. It'll be fun, I'm excited to hear what he's got to say and see what's going down in the SEO world nowadays because it's been a long time since I focused on it. I used to geek-out big time. For a while we had twenty, thirty people all in Peru doing SEO stuff for us and it was awesome. We were getting ranked for all these really difficult terms and it was amazing. We were very, very aggressive and so it was awesome because you could get really cool things to happen fast ... But then the problem was when Google got smarter than us then we started losing everything.
It was this thing where I always felt like I was chasing my own tail. We would go and we would be running, it felt like we were running away from the cops all the time. It felt like, we used to call it ... I'm not going to brag about this, but a little while ago, a few years back, we dabbled a little bit in spamming and trying to learn that game. It's the same kind of thing, it was hard to sleep at night because it felt like… we used to call it the “smash and grab”, where it felt like you were walking in, smashing a window, grabbing a TV and running down the road while the cops are chasing you. That's what it always felt like with SEO and with spam. We got away with it for a little bit, but eventually they always catch you, you can't always get away with it. I hated it, a little while ago, we quit the spamming thing really, really fast.
More so, I wanted to understand the psychology of it so I hired this dude, I was like, "How much would you charge me to teach me how to spam?" He's like, "Twenty-five grand," I'm like, "Done." I recorded all the sessions, and I remember I called it 'Spam School'. It was like eight calls or something like that. I'm like, "Okay, I got Spam School today," it was awesome. We got up and running, we had to buy all these servers, and these tunneling servers, and all this intense stuff. I know the process now, and I'm sure it's evolved since we kind of played with it, but back then we were totally geeking out on it and within two weeks of starting the process, I realized I hated it and so we stopped. I'm not a spammer, I was someone who was intrigued spam and dabble, but we gave up pretty quick after those feelings. In SEO we tried a lot longer, probably two or three years. We focused, we built it up, and we'd get these rankings for amazing words and the traffic started flowing, flowing, flowing, gone.
I remember we kept making all these huge business decisions based on SEO, and I remember one day, coming to the office and being fed up, and slamming my hand down and said, "We will never, from this point forward in this company, ever make a business decision based on SEO. Anything that happens from SEO is like a nice gift, but it will not ever be our focus again." That's been my philosophy for the last three years, and so it'll be fun though to hear what's happening. I think, if you guys have been listening, we hired Neil Patel a little while ago and flew him out for a day. Paid him twenty-five grand for a day, and learning from other people and I think there's going to be a time I'll get back into more and more SEO, just because mostly I think the SEO and social. There used to be a big divide between the two business models, but now that line is blurred or maybe even gone. That's why I'm excited, I'm hoping he's going to talk about that today because that's kind of my understanding and kind of the results we're starting to see from it, is that it's a blend of social and SEO.
I think if it's not happening now, logically, the only thing that makes sense for SEO is no longer to base stuff on linking because we can spam linking. The only thing it's smart to base it off of is social interaction because that's harder to fake. Anyway, I'm excited for that. I hope you guys got something out of that, and hopefully the only thing you got out wasn't that Russell's a spammer. In fact, the lesson I hope you got out of that, and this is really, really important, is... this is key, and I hope you guys all get this, is that you can learn a lot from someone in a really short, finite period of time. I remember a couple times I hired some employees because they were amazing, on paper, and they'd done these amazing things so we hire them, pay them a ton of money and salary, and all these things. What was interesting is they come, in the first thirty to sixty days, they would have all these amazing things that would transform things, and after that they were kind of useless. They use up their bag of tricks and they were gone.
I feel like everyone's got that. I've got that. For some reason, they come in… I've got my bag of tricks and things I know how to do to grow a company really, really quickly, but then after that, I don't have as many things. I think my skill set's a little deeper than most people, but for most consultants, they've got a one-trick-pony. They got that thing, and so we learned a while ago, instead of hiring employees who are really good at something, hire the dude who's the best, but for a short period of time. Have him come and teach you because you'll get ninety percent of the value out of him immediately. That's kind of my philosophy, it's like Neil Patel or I'm like, "Hey, we're going to start blogging. Who's the best blogging dude?" Boom, Neil Patel, twenty-five K, sucked everything we need out of him, now we've got a game plan to go run with. Things like that, it's finding out who's the best and then just buying an hour or a day, or whatever the time.
Last night I was hanging out with one of my buddies, BJ Wright, and we were talking about a site called clarity.fm, and if you haven't ever heard that site, you should, it's awesome. It's all these dudes and ladies who are amazing, who you can buy time with them per minute. He was talking about this app he was going to build, and he was like, "Hey, this is the dude that launched," what was it? That mafia game on Facebook, and the dude's like two bucks a minute to call, and he's like, "If you invest a hundred bucks you get thirty minutes of this dude's time. You can pick his brain on whatever you want." It's just interesting. So, I think my Christmas gift to myself this year is going to be… I'm going to look at the three or four things I'm really focused on in my business.
Obviously we're a SAS company, so that's one. We're doing growth hacking and stuff like that, so three or four things that I'm focusing on and then go to clarity.fm and find the best one or two people in each of those categories and buy thirty minutes, an hour of their time and just get all their info. Get it all in a condensed, quick, fast period of time, and that's how you can press decades into days, days into minutes, and it's really, really cool.
That's how I learn, people always ask me, "Russell, how do you learn now?" It's honestly getting harder and harder. The more you progress in this or any business, the harder it is to get new things. It gets harder. The way that I'm progressing myself, my knowledge base, outside of funnel hacking the crap out of everyone I can because I love watching what they do, even worse than what they say, but number two is that. I hope that is a value to you guys. Give yourself a Christmas present, go to clarity.fm and find someone you want to learn from and buy an hour, and just suck their brain and I think you'll get addicted to it. You'll find that, again, it's way better than reading a book, just hire the author and be like, "Hey, just tell me what I should do. Based on all this stuff you got, like, what would you do in this situation?" You can get there a lot quicker.
I hope that helps, that's what I'm going to be doing a lot more of, this upcoming year. It's pretty amazing how inexpensive you can get some of these people's advice and ideas which is cool. That's what I got for you guys today. Hopefully you got some good out of it besides Russell used to be a spammer, other than that, I appreciate you guys. Oh man, this is going to be transcribed, so I better be careful what I say. **Note: Russell is not a spammer.
If you want to see the transcripts of this show, or any of our shows, go to marketinginyourcar.com and I think I got an outro thing, we added this cool little music outro now. I think the music outro after this is also going to push you there, so go there, check it out, and if you're not part of the Marketing Quickies Show, go to marketingquickiesshow.com, install the periscope app on your phone and we can be hanging out live every single day. I do quick, five to ten minute periscopes once a day, sharing marketing quickies and they are awesome so if you are not on that yet, go to marketingquickiesshow.com and come hang out with us there as well. That's it for today guys, appreciate you all, and we will talk soon. Bye!