After our latest startup, I realized that almost everything people are teaching online about startups online are DEAD wrong.
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Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing in Your Car. My name is Russell Brunson, and I am excited to be here with you today. Hey everyone. I am actually taking my wife’s car on a 25 minute drive to go get some stuff fixed. I have nothing else to do so you guys get to be entertained. I hope that’s alright. I am excited for this podcast. I have been thinking a lot. I have known for a little while, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people on Earth, called me out yesterday, and said, “Dude, when are you going to do another podcast?” I just wanted to do this one. This one may be a little longer since I have a little more of a drive.
I just wanted to talk to everybody at a different level than normal. Normally I am trying to share different tips and tricks and techniques to take whatever you are doing and make it a little better and make you start thinking different ways. I wanted to talk about what has been happening with some of my businesses over the last little bit. It is interesting. There are so many people that are teaching internet marketing. There’s very few people that I really trust anymore. The biggest reason is because, and I outgrew myself in this same category, a lot of times we assume that whatever worked for us, is what is going to work for everyone.
I’ve built my internet marketing business. We have launched product after product and I know a good formula that works. I know that market really well. Over the last year or so, we have been putting out all these different products and different niches. Every time it surprises me how much new stuff I have to learn to make each of those businesses actually work. It is frustrating for me because I know all this stuff. I should be able to make it work right away.
It always takes time. It takes more time than I ever think. I’ve definitely changed the way that I think about business, and the way I teach business because of that. I understand that it’s not all cookie cutter. It’s not 100%. There’s a lot you have to do, to figure out different markets. We are in the couponing niche. We have been doing well with it. Recently I brought on some of our friends. Initially they were students. They become really good friends. You guys probably heard of them if you have been following me for any amount of me, Xan and Jen Spencer.
We have this couponing site, and I didn’t have time to focus on it. I love the concept and the idea behind it. They just sold their hair bow site and made a ton of money selling it. They are looking for their next project. We brought them in to come work with us on this one. It has been interesting watching what they have been doing and how they are getting into the market and understanding what it is, and really trying to figure out that path and what we can do to make it successful.
Holy crap. Sorry guys. You are getting this live. I am at an intersection, and the light is red and I am stuck in the middle. Holy cow. That was embarrassing. Let me pause this for one second.
That disaster was averted. I was at a green light, and I was turning left and I was half way in the intersection turning left and all of a sudden all the cars stopped. I looked up and we were all stopped turning left. The street we were turning left onto was completely backed up probably about a mile and a half. Then, the light turned red and I was stuck in the middle of the intersection with two cars in front of me in the middle of the intersection and a car behind me in the middle of the intersection.
I am back, and I am alive. Things are good. I was talking about how different it is. Same with our supplement. We have been doing really well with our supplement. Almost a year now. It is doing well. It is exciting. It inspires me just how we put out a little business like that, and by traffic and it works. It just keeps working and working. Because of that we decided to put a lot more energy and effort into it. We actually spent time to write a really good sales video.
We are going back now and diving back into that business, which is a whole different market. It’s interesting to me to start looking at. Obviously I could talk a lot about the differences in the market. That’s not the point. The point is that there are differences. Used to be back in the day you could find a niche, put up a product, drive some traffic and make some money. I think those days are a lot different now. You have to understand there is a culture.
There’s stuff that is happening, and these markets. It’s important to find those things. What I want to talk about today is more like the path that I am seeing a lot of commonalities among all the niches that we’re in, and a lot of what I am going to be shifting dotcomsecrets over to in the new year. I wanted to throw some of this out to get you guys thinking and you can get some ideas for your business as well. We used to always think that we lead with a product, create a good product, drive some traffic and that’s how you lead.
I don’t think that’s the smartest way to lead anymore. I look at that with our weight loss offer. That is what we did. The problem was that we didn’t know the market well enough. We created what we thought was the best offer possible. We launched it and it didn’t do well. We are going back and doing the stuff we should have done first to really understand the market. I think we will do well this time around.
We could have saved almost a year worth of time had we gone this direction the first time. If I, and any business I am in, or getting in like dotcomsecrets, like the relaunch for the entire brand and company and really starting from the beginning where the goal is how much value can you provide. I think that the smartest way to begin in any niche, this is even ecommerce. I am not just talking infoproducts, but anything, is start with value can you give people.
The simplest way to do that is blogging. Set up a blog and start sharing really cool stuff. That’s the first step. After your blog is set up I think you should start up a fan page. I have been fighting social media forever, but one of the other episodes you saw, you see I am starting to see the value of it. You can set up ads for five or ten dollars a day. It will add people to your page. Just set that up and let it run and get people adding to your fan page and watch this community grow from two people to 10 to 50 to 100 to 500 to1,000.
Consistently be doing that. When you are blogging, after you blog, the biggest thing you have to do is how do I promote this blog post now? There’s a lot of things you can do to promote it, but the best I think is Facebook. As soon as you make a post, you go to your fan page and boost that post and push it out there. You spend maybe five or ten dollars doing that.
The next day you make another blog post. You go to Facebook and post it and boost it. Just following that pattern. At first it will be super slow and aggravating and you probably won’t get a lot of traction from it. You will have the ads on there, and people are being added and just consistent. Months from now, three months from now, six months from now you are going to have five, six, ten, fifteen thousand people and it will start growing very quickly from there.
It is all about putting this value out first. Then, you start seeing what people are responding to. A little while ago I was watching a video that Jeff Walker put out there. I don’t typically watch Jeff’s stuff. I like him as a person, but I not particularly interested in product launches. The last thing I want to do is a product launch. I don’t look at that anymore. I was watching one of his videos, and one thing he said that really struck out to me, he was talking about how he said that the biggest thing for him is when he first got the publishing thing. He said, “I recommend all you guys just go publish something.” Put stuff out there. It wasn’t until I put stuff out there that I saw what people responded to.
What things do people like? What things do they share? What things do they talk about? What things do they not care about? What things cause no emotional response what so ever? For example, we know that on our couponing site the last two weeks, we have been posting the model in that market is different. It is how many offers can you get in front of people. We are posting tons over and over, 20, 30 offers a day.
Supposed to put those out there. Some of those get nothing. Other ones get some shares, some get tons of shares. This week had something interesting where Jessica posted on her blog this picture of these homemade dryer sheets that she makes. Unfortunately we didn’t put it on our Facebook page. We put it on our blog. Somebody came to our blog and saw it. The took the picture, they posted on their Facebook page and luckily they linked back to her site saying, “Check out this picture I found on livingonacoupon.com.” They posted it out there. Within four days that image had been shared 350,000 times.
Not liked, shared. 350,000 times. We found out about it from one of her friends. She said, “Look at this sharing your picture.” She saw it, and we missed it. We went back and over that two day period of time, the 350,000 shares, we had 50,000 people that came to our blog per day. Our revenue was over $400 each day, which is awesome.
We found out that was what something responded to. They wanted homemade stuff, like how to make homemade dryer sheets. I never would have launched a course on how to make homemade dryer sheets. Now we know that people are interested in that market and that type of a thing. Instantly now we know.
That is the thing Jeff was talking about. You need to start publishing something. Until you do, you have no idea what people are going to respond to. If you want to start leading with your sales message first then you spend so much time and energy before you know what people actually want, what they are listening to. I would start with that. Making cool blog posts, put it on Facebook page, boost them. Rinse and repeat over and over again. Have something in place where your fan base is growing, growing through paid ads. You are talking five bucks a day, ten bucks a day maybe to implement that strategy. That’s the first step. You are putting this stuff out there. Again, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your blog posts.
For simplicity sake that is where I would start at.
The second thing I would do, and it makes me laugh. This is my belief now. Six years ago podcasts were brought to my attention, maybe even seven or eight years ago, and I thought they were the dorkiest, nerdiest things in the world and they would never catch on, kind of like RSS feeds, and I was right.
Podcasts I was wrong. They are the thing right now. I keep hearing it. It’s funny because I used to be a faster adapter of things. Now I am more stubborn. I am an old man now. I am a little more stubborn in adapting things. I didn’t want to adapt this for a long time. Recently, one of my friends had a podcast that he wanted me to listen to. I downloaded the podcast app, and I downloaded the podcast and started listening to it, and I got hooked. I suddenly realized that podcasts are the radio of the future.
You can subscribe to the people’s stuff that you want, and you have a chance to listen to it. One of my friends, Stu, I mentioned him earlier. He was telling me one of his clients who works for him said that each podcast listener is worth more to them than an email subscriber, which is crazy to me, but instead of fighting that, let’s go with it, right? Who knows how long email is going to keep working efficiently.
Let’s have distribution channels…as many as we can. I started thinking more about that. This is a distribution channel, these podcasts. I remember about two years ago I had a guy that wanted to interview me for a radio show. We went down to the radio station, and it was the coolest thing in the world. I felt like Frasier Crane. I had a big microphone. He had a producer. I asked the producer if I could call her Roz. She said no.
I felt like Frasier Crane. After I did that, I wanted my own radio show. That was my entire goal for the next 6 months was my own radio show. If I do a radio show locally and it goes good then we could try to pitch it and get syndicated nationally. I had this whole strategy. You got a big, famous radio show. You can sell ads, you can make money, you can push your products, books and make a fortune. For years I kept thinking about that and wanting to do it. After I got the podcast thing, I was like, “This is the radio of the future.” Radio will be dead soon if it’s not already. I don’t listen to radio. I hook up my podcasts that I want, and I am driving and I listen to them. I think again, that’s the direction that we are all going. I have been studying a lot. I am going to keep doing the Marketing in Your Car Podcast because I love it, and it’s fun. It is low maintenance for me to fulfill on. I am going to keep doing that. I am also going to launch another podcast underneath the dotcomsecrets brand.
It is more of an actual radio show where I have people that I interview and I am sharing things. I have to do my first interview for my first one this coming Tuesday. Mark Joiner is my first mentor and Mark is going to come on and be my first guest so I am kind of excited for that. Because I have been setting podcasts to what people are doing and it’s really intriguing. I was listening to the guy who runs the entrepreneur on fire podcast.
He basically interviews an entrepreneur every single day, seven days a week. He was sharing some of his stats, and what I didn’t get it until he went to this. He said, “I ran the show for free for a long time and got a big following.” Now he gets 10 or 20 or 30 thousand downloads each episode. You basically get paid on CPM so every download, every 1,000 downloads, you make whatever. Ten bucks or thirty bucks. Showing the math, each of my episodes, I have three sponsors. This guy, this guy and this guy. He is paying this. He is paying this.
That means, every single day that I do my podcast, because I know I’ll get 20,000 downloads because people are subscribed to it and they are waiting for it, because of that, every single day just to do my podcast, I make $1,200 in advertising revenue, $1,200 just by the fact that he is podcasting. I was doing the math, and $1,200 a day times 30 days, I can’t do right now in my head, but $1,000 a day times 30 days is 30 grand a month, 30 grand a month, and all he is doing is interviewing awesome people.
He launched this less than a year ago. Okay? Start thinking the blog obviously is a great platform. The blog is a great platform to get people who are on Facebook and reading and those types of things, but there is also this huge, untapped market of podcasting. You get these people to download and you are sharing content and ideas. You are building a following and you have your own radio show. People actually pay to sponsor the radio show when you get a following.
You start just like we talked about before. You start out by giving content, putting stuff out there and seeing what things people attach to. What concepts, what ideas you share, what things get other people interested. Only way to know that is to publish stuff. Put it out there like Jeff Walker was saying, seeing what gets people to respond.
That’s the first step, and trying to build your audience like that. I think any market I get in the future, that will be my first two steps before we ever create an offer and see if we can get enough of an audience based on that, then we can go and start getting sponsors for our podcasts and promote products as an affiliate on our blog and get sponsors for our blog.
You know over the last three, six, nine months, what people have been responding to, what things they are interested in, what things get shared, what things get passed around. You find out what doesn’t. As soon as you know that, now you can go back and create the right offer. The offer than people actually want. The thing they want to give you money for. I think that’s the right way to make a business. That’s the right way to start a business. Again, because every market is different, you won’t know what that is until you are in there.
You see the responses. The flip is people will love you because you are giving your best stuff every single day and when you come back and decide to monetize it, there’s different relationship level there. They are going to trust you over someone else because they have been listening to, they have been reading you or seeing you on Facebook. You have established yourself as someone who is credible and cares and someone who is trying to provide value in the world.
That is what I have for you guys today. I hope that gives you some things to think about. Those are things that I have been thinking about a lot. We are relaunching dotcomsecrets. The podcast, we are also launching, a new blog. A new blog you guys will be shocked. My goal is every blog post is for every post to be more valuable than a $97 product. We are going to change some stuff. It will be good.
That is our game plan. I am at the car dealership. I am getting my wife’s car fixed. I have to jump off. I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you like it, please come and comment, but also please share it. If you like it, go on your Facebook account and check out Russell’s latest podcast. It was awesome. I would appreciate getting it in the hands of more people. That’s about all I ask for. Appreciate you guys. Thanks everyone who is listening and paying attention. Good luck with your business and we will talk to you guys all soon.