What I learned 10 years ago that still sends tens of thousands of visitors a day to my websites.
On this episode Russell explains how he learned that having affiliates is easier than being a ninja. He also explains why having affiliates can help your business grow faster.
Here are 4 cool things you will learn about in today’s episode:
So listen below to learn all about the importance of affiliates for Russell’s business and your own, and also hear about some exciting new launches happening today!
---Transcript---
Good morning everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I almost just got in a wreck, but because I survived I thought I’d jump on here real quick and hang out with you guys today on Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, good morning. I’m feeling horrible right now. We’ve got a lot of fun stuff happening. I don’t know if I mentioned on the podcast or somewhere, but we’re building out some sales funnels for Marcus Lemonis, so I had Wynter Jones, one of my favorite people and an amazing designer, I had him fly out to Boise this week to work on it. So we’ve been working funnel hacking out hours, so every night we get home at 1 or 2 in the morning. Today it’s Wednesday, so it’s been two nights in a row of super late nights.
This morning I have Frenectomy surgery. I think that’s what it’s called. This little thing in my mouth that I have to get snipped and I really am not looking forward to it, in fact I’ve been postponing it now for a year and a half. And today is the day of reckoning. I’ve got no choice, I’ve gotta do it. I think I had 4 hours of sleep last night, now I’m headed to the dentist, to go get my mouth chopped up. I was half asleep driving, and all the sudden traffic stopped and I was still going so I had to skid on my breaks, and then I thought hey if I survived that, I should definitely jump on with my friends and talk about something cool. So that’s what’s happening today. I hope you guys are having a good time.
We are working really hard on launching the new Clickfunnels affiliate center, which I’m really excited about. I remember when I first got started in this business, and I don’t know about you guys, but when I got started I was observing everybody doing stuff and talking about stuff and I was watching everybody making money and I didn’t know how to do it. I was so sold on the fact that it was happening and I was just amazed by what everyone was doing. I had been creating some little products; I was selling stuff here and there and doing all sorts of things. And I remember back in the day there was a forum, it used to be awesome, it’s super lame now, but it’s called the Warrior Forum. Back then all the best marketers in the world would hang out there all day and talk marketing strategy which is cool. You go there now and it’s this horrible place with a bunch of people that don’t know what they’re talking about complaining about things, so it’s no longer awesome. But there was a day and time when it was awesome.
So I’m hanging out in the warrior forum and there’s all these people talking and sharing and giving and it was so cool. I remember this one post this dude wrote, the question was, “What’s your favorite way, what’s the best way to get traffic?” and I was trying to learn how to do traffic at the time, this is pre-Facebook so that wasn’t even an option. It was just Google and SEO and all the different things, so I saw that question and I was like, oh man, this is going to be awesome. I’m going to hear all these legends and these giants and these marketers discuss the best way to get traffic and I’ll just figure out what the best one is and build on that. That was my thought when I saw the post.
I start reading it and one guy’s like, “Google PPC is the best because blah.” The next guy was like, “SEO the best because blah.” Then someone’s like, this was back in the day and there was this thing called cloaking, “Cloaking is the best.” “Safelist.” I’m trying to think of what back then was cool, there’s all sorts of stuff. Anyway, everyone’s posting their ideas and trying to justify why what they did was the best. So I’m going through all these things and then all the sudden there was this dude, his name was Allen Sais. He was the guy who owned the Warrior Forum, and he didn’t post a lot, but when he did, he would silently walk in, drop a bomb of gold and walk back out. That’s totally what happened with this. All these people giving their explanation of these things, and he came in and dropped on sentence. All he said was, “I rely on my own network of affiliates.” Boom. Mic drop. Bomb exploded.
And I read that and I was like, “What?” At first it didn’t make sense to me. I read it and I read it again and kept reading it. And I knew that Allen was probably one of the better marketers, one of the more rich guys in that forum, and I was thinking of that and I was like, “There’s something to this. I gotta figure this out.” My brain was thinking, “I could learn PPC like that guy said, but what if I had 5 or 6 affiliates who are really good at PPC and they just did that. And I give them a percentage of the money, but they just did it and I don’t have to learn that. Maybe I’m not as good as one guy, but if I had 5 people doing it, or 10 people, who knows? What about SEO, I could do SEO or what if I find people who are already amazing at SEO and they become affiliates of mine.” Now instead of me doing SEO I’ve got 10, 20, 30 people doing SEO for me. What if instead of building a list, I found other people who have lists? And I realized that there was this power and this leverage of having affiliates, because I can build lists of a million people, which is awesome. But if I had 30 people each with lists of a million people, it’s so much more powerful. I could even rank number one on Google for my number one keyword, but what if I had 20 people all ranked. And I started thinking that, and that’s gotta be my focus, is less on me becoming a ninja at any one traffic source, and more of me building a really good affiliate program and attracting people that already have those things. People who are already doing those things and are already amazing at those things. That was kind of the thought process.
So back then, man this back 10-12 years ago, I launched my first affiliate program. And that became my focus. We trained affiliates and had an affiliate center and we had all sorts of things and that was my focus and because of that, my companies grew dramatically. During that time I became good at these other things, I learned how to drive traffic, I learned how to do stuff so I was able to do that. But we made 90% of our income from affiliates, and I think it’s really powerful.
With Clickfunnels when we launched it, we drove a lot of our traffic, but we had a lot of affiliates and that’s how we grew so quickly, is leveraging my network with affiliates I’ve been building up over the last ten years. But even with that, we’ve never had a good affiliate center. We’ve never done a lot of the core things we used to do back in the day to build and promote our affiliate program. We just haven’t ever done that. So that’s one of the big focuses, while Wynter’s been designing Marcus’ funnels, me and Dave Woodward, who runs the Clickfunnels affiliate program, have been focusing on building out an affiliate center and having new offers and just creating a bunch of cool things that will get people the ability to win cars from us and to make money, and all the other cool things we’re doing inside our affiliate program. So that’s what we’re working on and I think today, unless we had a couple little hiccups along the way, so unless something crazy happens, we’ll be launching the Clickfunnels affiliate program. We’re also going to be launching Funnel University. Which I think I mentioned 3 or 4 times in the last month or two that we were going to launch Funnel University, but we just had some external things that I don’t even want to talk about, because it makes me so mad why we haven’t been able to launch it.
Today should be the day unless there’s something crazy that comes up, we had one last hiccup happen last night at 2 in the morning, so we were trying to get that cleaned up, and then we should be ready to rock and roll. So those of you guys who have been paying attention and watching, we should have Funnel University live today, which is exciting. You should all buy it because it’s going to be amazing. I’m really proud of it. The content is second to none. So that’s really cool. So the content’s amazing and then…..my brain’s blanking out. Oh the software. There’s 3 software tools and they’re just insane. We’ve got a survey generator, a video image uploader, and a Webinar Chat app which are awesome tools. Anyway, there’s so much cool stuff.
The sales funnel we’re using to sell, I’m really proud. We put a lot of time and energy and thought in that one, so it’ll be fun to finally let the world see that, which is cool. What else, what else? And then the Affiliate Center. The new Clickfunnels affiliate center is going live too. Anyway, I’m excited. If you’re spying on me you should be able to see some of those things. The biggest message I wanted to share with you guys today is just that that’s where my focus is at. Is building our network of affiliates and I hope that that resonates with you guys. It comes back to all the stuff we talked about, dream 100, creating cool affiliate programs, and then there’s so much stuff that goes into it, but it is the key. So I hope all you guys focus on that in your businesses. I hope that little piece gives you guys the same aha that I had all those years ago when I heard Allen Sais say it the very first time. That’s it for today you guys. I’m at the dentist, I’m about to walk in there and get my mouth chopped open. I’m freaking out, but hopefully it will be good. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.