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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How to use controversy to create a fan-base and to sell more of your stuff.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. This is Russell Brunson and I'm excited for today's podcast. I hope you all had an awesome weekend. I had a chance to go on a family trip down to a wedding, which was always fun. While I was driving, my thoughts were upon marketing.

I wanted to give you guys an eight hour podcast. That's how long I was in the car but I was dealing with a bunch of crazy kids and a beautiful wife, so was not able to do one but I was thinking a lot about it. I got some good topics for this week coming up. I want to go through a bunch of them.

Right now is the one that I was most excited about, and it's the topic of polarity. This is one of the keys in your marketing. If you learn how to master this, it will mean more traffic, more sales, and a lot more repeat sales and raving fans. The back story behind where this concept came from today, I got a Skype from one of my close marketing buddies who makes a lot of money but is very conservative, very neutral type personality.

He Skyped me and said, “Man, I can't believe how much drama you've been involved with in the last month.” At first, I was trying to remember, “What drama was he talking about?” Then I remembered all the drama we've been involved with in the last month. It's been really interesting.

One thing in the drama, some of you guys remember I was competing for a Ferrari which I won. I thrashed the guy who took number two, and the number two guy did not take that very happily. The last four days of the contest, he went out there and started this whole hate smear campaign against me which was kind of funny. It was like a two year old girl crying after getting beat up by a bigger kid. That's kind of what it reminded me of.

He was doing all this stuff, and there was all this controversy was caused, and there were people that were really upset at him, and people upset at me but what was interesting is the last day of the contest, I didn't really say much. He was the one out there ranting and raving, and posting stuff all over Facebook and trying to trash me, and tell everyone he was a better person than me.

We had three times the sales the last day than we had the entire prior last week combined, so it worked in our favor tremendously. In fact, I had a bunch of JV partners who were so annoyed at what he was doing, they actually went out there and were promoting, without me even asking, were promoting my bonus package just so that he wouldn't win which was kind of funny. It all kind of comes around.

Then we were in the middle of this launch of Rippln which I'm sure some of you guys have had a chance to see that. I was brought under to write the whole sales and marketing part of the company launch, help orchestrate all that stuff. It's been going amazing. We've gotten over half a million people to sign up in the first 30 days. It's been fun, but with that, there's been a lot of controversy written about it.

We had Tech Crunch, this big huge tech blog, go and write. They don't really write anti articles but they wrote a huge anti article about my video, the pre-launch video which made me proud. Then we got Salty Droid did a write-up on it, and some other guys who think they're cool wrote big write-ups about how we're scam artists, and all this stuff.

It kind of made me smile because all this fuel has just been great for our business, for our brand, for everything that we're doing. The controversy behind things has been awesome. Now, what I want to talk about today is the concept of polarity. Polarity is the opposite of neutrality. A lot of people in their marketing want to be very neutral. They don't want to offend anybody.

They are very careful not to step on anybody's toes but the problem with being neutral is when you're neutral, you're boring. Nobody listens to you. Nobody pays attention. As much fun as it is to make everybody happy, that's not the way to make money. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not in this business to make everybody happy. I'm in this business to make money.

The neutrality behind most people's marketing is what keeps them from really succeeding. It makes them irrelevant. It makes them so that people don't really talk about you. You may have some people that are interested but nobody talks about you. That's what causes your business and your brand to grow.

It was interesting, I was talking to Mike Filson about this awhile ago, and Mike said one of his biggest things he's always trying to do is figure out how can I stay relevant. He said, “You know, guys like me and him have been in this market for 10 years and so, and you look at how many people and personalities have come and gone in that time,” and he said, “most of them just aren't relevant anymore. What are we doing to stay relevant, to stay top of mind, to stay on people's radar?”

Because literally, in the internet world, if you're quiet for a week, you're pretty much gone. You've disappeared off the radar, which is a whole other story in of itself, why it's important to contact your audience more often, email at least daily. Daegan, one of my close buddies, he preaches emailing twice a day.

Staying relevant is a big thing. Back to the neutrality part of it, I was reading this thing awhile ago. This is a couple of years ago so I'm sure I don't know the stats but the concept, I remember. It was talking about Howard Stern and about people that watch his show. They did surveys.

They found the average person who liked his show listened for 35 or 40 minutes at a time, and the average person who hated his show listened for over an hour at a time. When they surveyed both audiences to find out why they listened, the reason was the same in both cases. It was, “We wanted to hear what he was going to say next.”

That's really a key here. You look at the great figureheads, you look at the people that have the big brands, just in the celebrity world. We just watched the finale of Celebrity Apprentice last night. Look at Donald Trump. When he was doing this whole campaign against Obama when he was going to run for president, this whole thing about Obama, trying to bring out his birth certificate, that for me, I don't care which side you’re on or anything like that, but it was interesting.

It got people talking and noise, and all this stuff. People hated Donald Trump for it, people loved him because of it but he caused polarity. What happens when you cause polarity is there will be a group of people who despise you and who hate you. Most people don't do that in their marketing because they're scared of that. They don't want that.

That was always really, really tough for me. It was really tough for me to see people talk bad about me. In fact, it's still hard for my employees when they see stuff like that. For me, it doesn't bother me anymore. It's been happening long enough, I get it. There are going to be people that don't like me. I'm okay with that.

The other interesting fact about polarity is when you create a group of people and make them dislike you, it also takes another group of people and makes them love you 10 times more. That's the power of polarity. When you switch from being in a neutral state where you're trying to please everybody to a polar state where you pick the things you want to do and not want to do, stuff like that, again, you get people who despise you and you'll get people who love you.

Those people who love you will spend so much more money with you because of that. They're attracted to that polarity. I look at all the people that I spend money with. I buy things in a lot of different niches. The people I buy from are always the kind of crazy people a little bit. I always joke the crazy people have the best ideas.

I always like to subscribe to what they're doing and they’re talking about. That's what I spend my money on because me and everybody, even if they won't admit it, you like the people on the fringes. You like the heretics. You like the people that are kind of pushing the envelope because it's more interesting. It's a more interesting conversation to talk about, to think about, to participate in, and people are attracted to that.

At the same time, like I said, there are going to be people who are not attracted to that but if that's happening, that's a good thing. Dan Kennedy, one of my mentors, he said, “If you haven't offended somebody by noon each day, then you're not marketing hard enough.” I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you guys but it's the key.

One thing I want to mention about polarity is there's a right and a wrong way to do this. The right way, at least the way that I subscribe to is I don't go out there trying to pick fights. I just do what I'm going to do, and then I stand behind it. For example, the whole Rippln thing, we did it and I stood behind it.

The launch for Pure Leverage that we won, we did our thing, I stood behind it but I wasn't going out there picking fights. I look at the guy who we thrashed in the contest, and I look at the way that he was trying to create polarity. I think it backfired on him. He went out there and started a hate smear campaign against me and made videos, and posted on Facebook every 30 seconds for two days about how much he hated me, and how he was going to steal my Ferrari, and all this stuff.

It was really distasteful, and maybe he got some audience from that. He probably did but all I know is that he was polar so far to the other opposite, to the other extreme, that the people in our market, our peers were so turned off by what he was doing that they started promoting my stuff without me even ever asking.

I think there's a level where you can go way too far and you outcast so many people that they don't want to become part of what you're doing. There's kind of a fine line there. With the two campaigns this month that caused all of our controversy, I wasn't doing anything really. I was just doing my thing.

Because we were doing it and we were doing it aggressively and we were doing it well, it caused people to become upset and it caused people to become huge fans. That's what I want to say about polarity. Don't go out there. You're not trying to be a thug. You're not trying to go cause fights and that kind of thing.

People can see through that. It's not the right way to do it. It's just coming out there and being yourself, not being nervous about who you are, and just doing it. It was interesting, two days ago, I was in our garage. I rented a power washer and power washed our whole driveway. It was super fun. If anyone hasn't done that, it's a fun project.

I power washed the whole driveway. Then I found these boxes that got wet. In some of the boxes, there was this tube. I pulled the tube out. I remember seeing when I was a kid. I pulled it out and there was a picture of my ninth grade graduating class inside of it. I opened it up and saw all of my friends, all these people that meant so much to me.

I looked at it, and there wasn't a single person in that picture that I've kept in contact with over the last, I guess ninth grade was probably 13 or 14 years ago now. There wasn't a single person that I kept in contact with. I remember sitting there looking. I remember being the shy, awkward ninth grader who was so concerned about what everybody else in that picture thought.

It's all I could think about, “What if they don't like me? What if they make fun of me? What if whatever?” Because of that, I didn't thrive in that environment. I was an awkward, shy teenager. For me, I didn't start thriving until I started wrestling in high school. That's when I found my thing. I just stopped caring about everybody else and focused on that thing.

I think that so many of us in our business, we're like that shy, awkward ninth grader in the picture who wants everybody to like them and because of that, they stop bringing their own personality into the game. They're so concerned about nobody making fun of them that they're just neutral and just sitting there.

Because of that, nobody knows who they are. I was so neutral and I was so boring in ninth grade, that I guarantee you if I showed that picture to everyone in that graduating class, most of them would have no idea who I was because I was that shy, awkward, neutral person who didn't want to offend or talk about anybody.

You look at the high school graduation, it was different because I had picked my thing. Wrestling was my thing. I focused on that, and people knew who I was because of that. It's the same way in your business, you guys. Quit worrying about what the haters, what the people who don't like you are thinking.

Quit worrying about everything else. Just be yourself. Who are you at your core? Just go out there and do that. Whatever it is that gets you excited in the morning, go and do that kind of stuff. The way you talk to your audience, listen, this podcast was me talking in my car. It makes me laugh because I did a news segment the other day on Huffington Post.

It was really cool. Our PR person afterwards messaged me and said, “Russell, you really need to learn how to clean up your ums and your ahs.” I thought, “You know what? Yeah, I could do that but then I’d be losing who I am.” I want to connect with you guys at a personal level because that's where you're coming to me.

You're coming to me with personal issues. You want your business to grow. I could give you the textbook answer or I could give you what actually works. That's my goal is to be real with you guys. I want you guys to do the same thing, to be real with yourself and not be scared of polarity. It is a good thing that's going to help you win this game.

Step off your neutral line. Quit trying to please everybody, and just be yourself. If you do that, like I said, you'll find a group of people that don't like you and they're going to be mean to you, and there are going to be hate blogs about you. Who knows how extreme it will get.

The more aggressive you get, the more exciting you are, the more people will come out of the wood works to write hate blogs about you. It makes me laugh nowadays when I see the ones that people write about me but at the same time, because of that polarity, just by the nature of how polar opposites work, while one group will move away from you, another bigger, larger group that's more passionate and more willing to spend money will move towards you. That is the key, you guys.

That is the key to this whole attraction marketing game. That's what I had for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm at the office now. I have a fun day. I'm going to try to ruffle some feathers, do some fun marketing, and hopefully it makes people angry and in the interim, makes some people really, really happy. If I can do that, I've succeeded.

If you can do that, you've succeeded as well. Thanks you guys. Again, if you had any good experiences with this podcast so far, please go to iTunes.com, go to the comment section, leave your comments, leave your feedback. I love it. Right now, it's my most exciting thing everyday to go look at the comments. Please leave comments, love to hear from you guys, and we'll talk to you all soon.

One little tweak, to increase the results of everything you do.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I wanted to thank everybody who left feedback and comments over the weekend on the podcast. I think it was like 174 people commenting which is awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. We even hit, I think we're at number fortieth top podcast last week which was pretty cool. Thank you guys all for that.

I got some funny comments in there I'm reading. One person said that because of me, it's the first time they ever subscribed to iTunes which was pretty cool, so Apple should be giving me a percentage of anything you buy in the future. I also saw somebody say that the loved the podcast because they have the ability to slow down my voice on their phone. That's a good thing I think.

I obviously have about a six minute commute to the office but I try to cram in about 15 minutes worth of content, just how fast I talk. That should give you guys the ability to slow me down if your commute is longer and get all the stuff out of it. Today, my podcast is going to be a little different than normal.

Usually, I'm sharing marketing tips or tricks, things like that but I want to talk about something that's a little different but some of you guys may even be like, “This has nothing to do with anything exciting for me,” but I promise you that it has everything to do with marketing in your business.

What I want to talk about is the word awesome. We've got this little guy, he's about 22 years old that lives by us. He's got, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, he has cerebral palsy so he's handicapped. His legs don't fully function. He can walk with braces on his legs but very, very slow.

In fact, every time I pick him up, he wants to walk from his doorstep to my car and he wants me to time him. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to walk that distance. He tries to talk but his speech is really hard for him to talk and get things out. I have to listen very, very hard to be able to understand what he's saying, just this cutest little kid.

We take him every week to church and hang out with him there. About once a week, we bring him over to our house for dinner. His name is Jesse. I just want to talk to you a little bit about Jesse because Jesse is someone who is amazing. Every time I call him, I say, “Hey Jesse, how is it going, man?” and his response is always, “Awesome.”

Everyday, every time I hang out with him, he says, in his broken language, he says, “Russell, I love my life.” It's really amazing to me because he's someone who has so many things against him, so many disabilities. He can barely walk, can barely talk yet any time I ask him about how he's doing, he's always doing awesome.

I think it's such a great lesson. I started working on my kids. I told my kids, “Look, most people live their lives everyday in a state of good. You ask them, 'Hey, how are you doing today?' 'Good.'” Have you noticed that? Every single person you do says, “Good.”

About three or four years ago, the first time I went to a Tony Robbins event, I made a conscious decision that any time somebody asked me how I was doing, I would never say good again. I would say awesome. I started doing that and I started saying awesome. It's so funny what happens.

When you're at the airport at five in the morning and the person is checking your ID, “How are you doing?” “I'm doing awesome,” and it always catches them off guard, “Wow, what happened to you today?” What was interesting is it just changes the whole entire dynamics of your day and about every situation you're in when somebody asks how you're doing.

Instead of saying good, you say, “I'm doing awesome.” I started training my kids that. I said, “Look guys, when someone asks how you're doing, you can't say good. Everyone else in the world is good. We don't want to be good. We want to be awesome.” I got all my kids doing that now.

It's funny when they hear somebody saying, “How are you doing?” “Good,” they say, “Daddy says we are awesome,” and they always tell everybody we're awesome. You may think that's such a little insignificant thing but what's interesting is I don't think it is.

I think it has to do with everything about how you produce, how you perform in life because everything we're doing, every situation we're in, we're bound by the state that we're in. If I, for example, when I was wrestling, if I would go in a wrestling match and if I was in a bad mood or if I thought I might lose, or if I wasn't excited and I walked down the mat, a lot of times, I would lose because the state that I was in.

What I found is it really correlates over into business, athletics, business, relationships, whatever it is. The state that you're experiencing whatever you're doing in has so much to do with your outcome.

If I got a hard day of work that day and I show up, “Oh man, I got a lot of work to do,” instantly, because of the state I put myself in, “Ugh,” I can't perform to my top level. It's just impossible. If I come back and I shift it where I wake up in the morning and I walk in the office and say, “Awesome, excited to be here today,” suddenly the state you're in is different and your performance level completely changes.

It's shocking. You'll notice how little of a thing that is but how huge of an impact and how big of a result it is. I remember when I was wrestling in high school, I had a coach. His name was Mark James. I remember I think it was my sophomore or maybe my junior year, we had a really hard practice.

Afterwards, he took everyone in the back hall. He was talking to us. He talked to us almost an hour. I don't remember a lot of what he said but there were a couple of things that really stuck out to me. One of them he said was just talking about the power of our attitude. He said that the attitude you have is going to drive everything one direction or the other direction.

He said, “Look, everyday we're coming here for practice, we're working out anyway.” He said, “You're going to be doing the work no matter what so you can either do it with a negative attitude and make the whole thing miserable or you can have a great attitude and everything feels positive.”

He's like, “You're going to be here for two hours a day anyway in the room working out hard. Just choose your attitude. Choose the right one because if you do, your results will be 10 times better because of it.” I remember taking that to heart.

For those of you who know much about wrestling, in wrestling, we used to cut a lot of weight. This was back when I was in high school, it was before, it was actually my senior year in high school, there were three kids that died cutting weights so they changed all the rules and made it a lot more difficult but prior to that, we used to cut a lot of weight. I was cutting about 30 pounds every single week of water weight.

That was a lot of work. It would take about three or four days to lose 30 pounds of water weight, and then we'd go weigh in, boom, we'd eat, and three hours later, we were back to the same weight we started but I was doing that every single week for an entire season. It was draining. It was hard.

I remember thinking about Coach James, what he told me about, “You're going to be here no matter what. Just have a good attitude and everything will be different.” I remember I used to put my plastic gear on. I’d put my sweats on, and I started jumping rope. I’d try it with a big smile on my face.

Everyone is like, “Why are you smiling? You're cutting weight.” I remember I used to tell people, “Look, I've never lost with a smile on my face.” I said, “When I lose a match, I'm depressed, I'm angry, I'm frustrated. I might be crying, whatever it might be but I've never lost a match with a smile on my face so I'm going to have a smile on my face while I'm doing this because I don't want to lose.”

That was the attitude that I had in wrestling. It took me very, very far in high school and also at a college level. It's also really helped me a lot in business as well. That's something I've tried to do when we've had ups and downs. What's interesting about my business is we've had some big, big ups and some big, big downs.

I know everybody out there struggles in business. Some of you guys are struggling to make your first dollar. Some of you are struggling to figure out what product to sell. Some of you guys are trying to struggle to figure out how to get to the next level but I've had some big wins and big losses.

We were at the point with our company, we were doing a million dollars in sales a month and all of our merchant accounts got frozen. If you can imagine making a million dollars in sales a month with over 100 employees, that's a lot of overhead. I think our overhead at the time was about $700,000 to $800,000 a month.

When suddenly your merchant accounts get shut down, you have no ability to collect cash, man, that's a scary situation. There are different ways to look at it. One is depressed, frustrated, and the world is picking on me type thing but what happens when you put on that attitude? As soon as you do, everything shuts down and you can't produce, or you can step up and wake up in the morning and say, “Today is awesome, I'm going to go attack this thing and figure out how to beat this thing,” and you walk in.

Suddenly, the state you're in is a little different. Because of that, you can produce, the ideas come faster, the energy of the people that are around you changes, and it just changes the whole dynamic. For all you guys out there, I guess my point of today's podcast is I want you guys to be like Jesse.

I want you guys waking up every morning and when somebody asks you how you're doing, don't be good. Good is the enemy of greatness. Don't be good. You be awesome. Next time somebody today asks you, “How are you doing today?” just see what happens. Tell them you're doing awesome, and look at the strange looks you'll get on their face.

A couple of things will happen. First off, you'll put yourself and keep yourself in a peak state of performance that you need to be in in order to be able to produce in whatever you're doing. Second off, you'll start raising the level of people around you, whether it be your employees, the people you're interacting with but as soon as you tell somebody you're doing awesome, it puts a smile on their face and changes that person's attitude as well.

You'll start affecting other people and kind of like a bee that flies around from flower to flower, all they're doing is trying to get their nectar, trying to get their pollen but because they're doing that and they're spreading the stuff around, that's what makes all the other flowers blossom and bloom, and makes it all possible. Do that for yourself. Do it for the people around you but give yourself that gift of awesomeness.

Just be excited. Be happy. I don't care how depressed you are or what situation you're in, whatever it might be.

If you can just change your state, instead of being good, be awesome, just like Jesse, I don't care what situation you're in and how tough life could possibly be, you can weather those storms and come out victorious and on top. Also remember, you can't lose with a smile on your face. That's what I got for today, you guys. I'm at the office.

I hope you guys have an awesome day today. Again, make sure you let other people know about this podcast if you're enjoying it at all, and if you got any feedback or comments, we'd love to see them on iTunes. Thanks everybody, and I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

On this episode, Russell discusses how to properly use preframing in every step of your online sales sequence.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I actually just got out of the gym and I'm driving back to the office and had something really exciting happen today that I wanted to share with everybody, actually, a bunch of exciting things.

First off, we had almost 100 of you guys comment on the podcast yesterday which is exciting because I asked everyone to give some feedback. I appreciate it. Keep the good comments coming. It's fun, it's exciting, and hopefully we'll get more people to learn about our podcast because I'm sharing all this cool stuff and we should share it with everyone. I want to see everybody's businesses grow. That's my passion in life.

With that said, if anyone has been studying my stuff for awhile, I did a really cool talk at StomperNet four or five years ago. I did another one kind of similar at Dan Kennedy's event about two years ago, not so much talking about internet marketing but talking about the sales process and the psychology behind it. There's something that happened in our business today that was really exciting that re-reminded me of that.

If you guys saw that presentation, and if you go to YouTube I think, at least Google, if you type in “Russell Brunson StomperNet presentation,” you can hear the whole 90 minute presentation. I was talking about just all the different things that happened, the lifeline of your customer. Somebody comes to your website and what website do they come through to get to your website?

When they’re there, what do they see? What's the next step, and the next step? I talked about all the pieces that you need to have in place to maximize your customer value. One of the big things I talked about was the concept that if you've ever studied NLP before, neuro-linguistic programming, you learn about a topic called framing which is basically the frame that somebody enters a situation will have a huge determining factor on the response they have on the next site, the next page.

For example, if I'm going to frame you to my friends, introduce you to my friend, I'll introduce you through a frame, “Hey, this is Joe. He's a really cool guy. I think you're going to like him.” The frame that I introduced you to my friend through, now he's going to think, “Oh yeah, Joe is a cool guy.” If I say, “Hey, this is Joe, he's a total jerk. He stole money from me. I want to introduce you to him,” that frame is going to be different and their whole experience with you is going to be different.

In fact, there's a really cool book. I can see the cover in my head but I can’t remember it right now, but in that book, they shared a case study of a teacher that was tested in a college classroom. They had a substitute teacher for the day. Before the substitute teacher came in, the principal or whatever came in and said, “Hey, we have a substitute teacher. Before I introduce him, I’d like you guys to read his bio really quick. Then I'm going to have him come in.”

They handed out the bio to all the students in the class, in a class of 900 people or so. The surveys were exactly the same of the bios except for each of them had one word different. Half of the bios said, “Mr. So-and-so is a very warm teacher,” and the other half said, “Mr. So-and-so is a very cold teacher.”

That was the only difference between the frame that these guys had to meet the teacher. The teacher came in. He gave the entire class, and at the end of it, they surveyed all the students. What was interesting was that, again, all the students heard the exact same lecture, all of them read the exact same bio.

The only difference was that half the bios said he was a warm teacher, and half said he was a cold teacher. When they surveyed the students, the students that the paper said he was a warm teacher, the vast majority said, “He was an amazing teacher, he was great, I learned a lot.” The people whose paper said he was a cold teacher didn't like him, thought he was talking down to him, he was a rude person.

It was interesting how that little tiny shift of a frame, how much it affected the reality of that class afterwards. I'm always talking about and I always teach and do, when you're sending somebody to your website, what's the frame they're coming through. The ad that they click on is a frame they're going to your website through.

If you land them on a review site before they come to your site, that was a frame you were taking them through. There's a lot to do with different frames that you're taking someone through and how it affects the outcome on the other side. We did this test just in the last two or three days. It was really interesting.

We have this squeeze page. On the squeeze page, it's kind of like a multi-step squeeze page where they first land on it, and it has a headline and it says, “Step number one, where did you learn about us?” There's radio buttons they can choose, “Did you learn from this source, this source, or this source?”

They click on the button. Then boom, it says, “Step number two, give us your email address.” Then step number three said finish. That was the way that this squeeze page worked. Step one, two, three, and step three was finish.

The only test we changed was we changed the word finish to “Get Instant Access.” That was the entire test. What was interesting, and I almost got this wrong, we ran the test. What was interesting was that when it said “Finish” at the end, we had 40% bump in opt-ins because the last step is when they actually give you their email address, and then it says, “Click here to finish.”

We're like, “Wow, this is a great test. We found out we increased our opt-in rates by 40 percent.” I was even telling my guys, “We should change all of our opt-in buttons that said, 'Submit here,' to, 'Click here to finish.'” We were really excited, but then after they opt-in, then we take them to the next page which takes them to a video sales letter where then we sell them the product we were trying to sell them. Then they land on that page.

What was interesting was when we looked at the data between the two, we had a 40% increase in people who opted in clicking the finish button, but then we had almost a 40% decrease in sales across the board, dramatically. It actually more than, the sales more than cut in half percentage wise, the people who clicked on finish versus the people that clicked on “Get Instant Access.”

You never really know why that works but psychology teaches me, what I believe is that the frame I was taking somebody through with the finish button was saying, “Hey, this process is finished. You're done.” In their mind, it's saying, “Okay, it's complete, I'm finished,” and then off comes this page trying to sell them something, and I've closed that loop. I've closed that gap.

Now they're not in a buying position because just that little tiny, just the word on the button closed the gap on their mind which decreased sales by 50% whereas the “Get Instant Access Now,” then took them to a page where the loop was still open, they were trying to see what the next step was, and they were more in a state of mind where they could purchase.

It was a very interesting test. Just think about how you guys can apply that into your business. It's all about pre-framing, opening and closing loops, a whole bunch of really cool NLP stuff that I wrap into one little five minute lesson but just think about that, guys, on your sales processes. What are you doing? Are you keeping the loop open? Are you keeping them excited, or are you shutting them off and keeping them from making the sale you want?

I remember on a one-time offer before we did a test awhile ago, similar type concept where they purchased the product and a one-time offer came up. It said, “Thank you so much for ordering. Your product is in the mail. By the way, we have this other special offer.” We tested that versus, “Wait, your order is not finished yet. Finish order customization, step one of three.”

The “Wait, your order is not over yet, order customization,” that text dramatically thrashed the other one. It's all about keeping that loop open, keeping the frame you're taking someone through in the correct way that keeps them in the buying mood. Anyway, I thought it was really interesting. That little tweak is going to make me a lot of money this year.

I hope you guys apply that into different sales funnels, squeeze pages, sales processes. Whatever you're doing, think about the frame that someone is entering your website through and you can manipulate that. When you do that, you will manipulate and affect the outcome dramatically. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. If you do, please tell your friends. Tell anybody that likes marketing. It's a lot of fun.

Again, if you like this, please leave feedback. Again, this is Russell Brunson with Marketing in Your Car podcast.

After you have an offer that’s working in one channel, how do you scale it fast? Russell shows you how to use other marketing channels to scale any offer fast.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I'm excited for today. It's a beautiful day here in Boise. I am excited about everything that's happening. I hope you guys are having a good time in your business as well. Yesterday, I shot a trailer video for the Marketing in Your Car podcast which is kind of fun so hopefully I'll get a lot more subscribers coming in which will be fun. We appreciate all you guys.

Today, I want to talk about what we've been working on the last few days which is not so much what we've been working on but what we've been focusing on. We've been working on our supplement but what's been fun about it is we've been over this past two or three days, we've been really focusing on shifting the channels that we're marketing through.

We found that, just in my business as a whole, there are a couple of channels that I'm really, really good at. By channels, I mean like a distribution channel, a different type of traffic. For example, a channel could be TV, newspaper could be a channel, radio could be a channel, things like that.

Obviously we're online. Most people just lump the internet together as one big huge, it's the internet but it's obviously not. There are a lot of channels on the internet, almost more than you can even count. There are three or four channels that I personally am really, really good at. One is the joint venture affiliate channel. I'm really good at that channel.

The next one is email media buying. We're really good at that channel. Direct mail, we're pretty good at that channel. Those are channels we're good at. We've focused primarily as we've rolled out our supplement on those channels. So far, it's doing really, really good.

We keep adding in more pieces to that. For example, with email media buying, we found some lists that are converting, their offers are converting really well to. What we do because we want to make our offer evergreen is instead of sending out just one solo ad that goes out to the entire list once and then moving onto the next list, we set it up so that our solo ad goes out to a portion of that list every single week.

For example, we have an ad running with World Net Daily right now, and I think their list is like a million people or something like that, so right now, our ad goes out to one seventh of the list every Monday, which is cool because every time it goes out, we make 50, 60, 100 sales, and it's just consistent though as opposed to we could send out one email, get a whole bunch of sales and then it ends.

This way, we can do that and it rotates through it every seven or eight weeks, we've hit the entire list and then it starts over and keeps going. It's an evergreen type thing. We have something similar with our Dot Com Secrets local offer. We have a couple of people that mail to a percentage of their list every single day, it just rotates through their list.

That way, it's more of an evergreen thing as opposed to just a one-time strategy. We've been doing those, studying the lists for it, finding joint venture partners, a bunch of stuff like that and it's been going really, really good but now that we're getting these channels dialed in and the numbers are working good, and they're consistent, what other channels can we add to this?

It's been really fun looking at that because there are so many different ways to drive traffic. You have Facebook, we have Google, we have the other ad networks. We have PPV stuff, CPV, there's so many different channels and ways to do it. It can get overwhelming.

What we've been doing is just really strategically looking at the ones that we want to test first. Some of them, again, that we're really good at doing and some we're really bad at doing so we're finding partners in each of those spaces like someone who is a lot better than me at Facebook because I don't think I’ll ever be good at Facebook just because I can't stand logging into Facebook, so finding somebody who is good at that and let them run it, test it, and try a bunch of things, and maybe invest $1000 or $2000 in that source trying to see if we can make it work, testing it, trying it, and just perfecting it until we can get that channel to work.

If we can't get that channel to work, that's fine too. That's one thing that a lot of people don't understand is that just because it works in one channel doesn't mean it's going to work in another channel. If we can’t get it to work, then move on, try another channel and keep going through but it's just kind of fun.

The reason I wanted to talk about this today is because about a year ago, I had a really interesting conversation with Perry Belcher who is one of the smartest marketers I've ever met, and a really cool guy too but he was talking about they had hired Mary Ellen Tribby to be their CEO for a year, year and a half, something like that.

I remember when they first hired her, I said, “What was the reason why you brought her in to be your CEO?” He said, “Mary Ellen always says that us internet marketers, that we're crazy because we go out there and we spend all this time, effort, and money creating an offer, getting it out there. We launch it, make a bunch of sales, and then the next day, we're onto the next project.”

He said, “The way Mary Ellen looks at business is more like a play. How crazy would it be if you were to make a big play, you go to hire the actors, the directors, and you guys practice for six months, and you go on, you go in Boise, Idaho, and you put on this play. It's a smashing success and everybody loves it, and then you just go home.”

He said, “No, if that works, and you're making a ton of money off it, then you take that play on the road. You take that show on the road and you go to Chicago, and then Dallas, and Denver. You take it across the country and across the world. You turn that success into tens of millions of dollars.”

He said, “That's the way that she looks at internet marketing is you create a good offer, and then you got to take it on the road.” That's what we've been really focusing on with our supplement is we created the good offer. Now we're taking it on the road and we’re focusing on taking it to Dallas, Denver, and Chicago, and all these different channels.

We've got direct mail going forward now. We have all these different things. We're just adding channel after channel after channel and taking that from an idea that right now is doing good money to by the time this year is out, it should be doing insane amounts of money just because we're really dialing in channel by channel, and perfecting each of those.

Just something to think about in your own business and your own marketing is after you've got something working is taking that and changing the channel, and focusing on different areas, and really scaling it, taking your show on the road. I'm at the office. I hope you guys enjoyed that. If you like the Marketing in Your Car podcast, please go into iTunes and rate us. I would really appreciate it. I appreciate you guys. We'll talk to you all soon.

We spent 2 hours today looking at ways we could improve our sales funnel and were able to almost double how much money we make on every single new customer. This episode reveals ideas you can use to strengthen your funnel.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I want to welcome you guys to today. I don't know about you, but it's a beautiful day today and I'm having a good time. Yesterday was one of the most fun days I've had at the office in a long, long time. I want to talk to you about what we did because it's really exciting. It's something that everybody else should be doing in their business as well.

We've got a supplement that we've been selling for the last six months or so, and it's been doing really well but we're always trying to figure out ways to increase how much money we make per customer so that we can spend more on advertising because as you know, whoever can spend the most money on advertising wins in this game.

Right now, we're spending about $30 to $40 to get somebody to sign up for a free trial, which is good and right now, what we're doing is the trial is 14 days long so after about 14 days, actually at day 14, we're a little bit above break even right now. It's working good but it's still kind of scary because we have that two week float that we're waiting before we make our money back.

That's where we're at right now. We've been trying to figure out how do you, what can we add to make it so that we can make money for every single customer. We started looking at our entire sales process, and that turned into something where I was actually at the office last night until one working on it because we had so much fun with it.

We looked first at our sales process. We looked at people coming to our site, they see the offer, step one, we ask for the shipping, step two, we ask for the credit card. Now, what are things we're missing? What happens about people that come to page one but they leave? We're not following up with them.

We put banner retargeting on that page so that when somebody comes and then they leave, we follow them around with banners everywhere. That was the first thing. Then we said, they come, they opt in, but they don't buy, what do we do? We built out a whole email follow-up sequence to try to close them.

Then if they do buy, what do we do? Some of us were thinking, “What else could we sell them?” Right now, we've got our supplement and we're trying to figure out what other products we could sell. We're looking out on the market trying to find all different things that other people were already selling to our customers.

Finally, we found a skin cream that actually related really well to it. We called the company up and within about five minutes, they agreed to private label it for us. Boom, suddenly we had our own skin cream to go with our front end supplements. Now we had an upsell. Then we went out there and tried to find some other products.

We found a website that had ten different products for people in our target market, and we called them up. Sure enough, they agreed to let us sell every one of the products that are on their website, and we get like a 75% profit margin on all these products. Then we found a couple other things we could add in the funnel.

Anyway, pretty quickly, within two or three hours of us just asking that question of what else can we do? When we look at our sales funnel, somebody comes in, what pages are they going to, what are they doing? Then we try to think, how do we maximize, how do we make each of these steps better?

What can we add here to get more people, to close more people, to convert them or to get people who leave, to get them to come back, and people who buy, how to get them to buy again, at what price points, and stuff like that? Within a couple of hours of asking those questions, we were able to change our funnel.

Obviously we haven't had a chance to drive traffic to it yet. We just finished six or seven hours ago, but now, you look at our funnel and it's much more robust. I think right now, we're looking at if we get 20% of the people to take our upsell for our skin cream, our front end profit doubles. That means we could spend $60 to $70 to acquire a customer, and we'd still be okay.

It's just interesting and it's been so much fun. For all you guys, I want you to take a look at your sales funnels, your products that are already doing well, that are already converting, and just think, “What else could we add here? What kind of upsell could we add? What kind of downsell could we add? What kind of exit pop-up could we put in here? If we follow these people with banners if they leave, what's our follow-up sequence look like? Do we add more messages to our follow-up sequence?”

These are all the questions you should be asking. When you start asking those kinds of questions, it makes a good sales process very quickly become a great sales process. It's really been exciting for me and for everybody here on our team. I woke up early again this morning. I haven't slept very much but I'm excited to get back in the office and keep on cranking it out, and doing some more because it's just so much fun right now.

Anyway, I just got to the office. I hope you guys enjoy that. My goal for all you guys though right now is to look at your funnel and figure out how to strengthen it, and what things you can add. If you do that, that will be some money you'll find today, and you'll do what I tell you guys to do a lot of times. Give yourself a raise everyday.

You do that by these little tweaks, little changes  that are going to change your business. Thanks to you guys. It's Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com and the Marketing in Your Car podcast. If you're enjoying these podcasts, please, please go to iTunes or all you got to do is go to MarketingInYourCar.com and it will redirect you to iTunes where you can go and leave your feedback. We would really appreciate it, and we'll talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks.

The forgotten power of adding Scarcity to your offers and Segmenting your lists.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson with DotComSecrets.com and the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I want to welcome you guys to today. It's a beautiful day here in Boise, Idaho. I'm excited to drive to the office but I want to share with you guys something that happened yesterday.

I've been involved, the last 30 days have been kind of crazy in my businesses. On top of everything else, we were in a contest for this one network marketing company that we're involved with for a Ferrari, and it's been crazy trying to win that. Then we also launched a network marketing company called Rippln which has been going crazy, which has right now growing faster than Facebook did.

It's been a crazy 30 days, and the month just ended for us so I'm excited to get back and start focusing on some other projects as well. Today, we're focusing on our supplement which will be fun, but I wanted to share with you one interesting thing that I remembered last night. Back in the day, we used to do a lot of product launches.

We haven't done a product launch in a couple of years because of the stress behind them and all the stuff that goes with a product launch, so we just kind of haven't done them recently but I forgot that when we used to do product launches, we do the big launch. Usually they would be a seven day launch. What was interesting is we would normally sell as much product on the last day of the launch as we would on the first day.

If you looked at the graph, it's almost like a big smiley face, tons of sales, and then it slowly dropped down in the middle of the week, and then the last day would spike back up. For the Ferrari contest, I was beating the other guys pretty well until yesterday. I think we had sold 750 copies of the product, which is pretty dang good.

That's a lot of sales for a 30 day period of time, especially thinking in the middle of it, we spent two and a half weeks launching a network marketing company so I only had basically two weeks to even compete at the contest. Basically, we had sold a lot. I was proud. We were doing really good.

Then yesterday, the contest was ending at midnight Eastern time so the owner of the affiliate program that we're promoting, he basically told me, “Russell, if you can get 40 more sales today, you got a pretty good shot of just winning it pretty easily.” I'm like, “Alright, we'll try to do 40 more sales.”

We started promoting the last day. We had some scarcity obviously because the bonuses we were offering and stuff were going to disappear at midnight. We did a couple of things that were strategic that I think worked out really well for us, but when all was said and done, we sold 188 copies yesterday, yesterday alone, which still blows my mind that we sold that many.

We sold more on that by far than we did on the first day, almost first week. Scarcity played such a huge role in it, 188 copies, just blows my mind. The way we did it is basically a couple of things. I had done webinars leading up to the launch and stuff like that. I've been replaying those webinars.

Yesterday morning, we send an email to the entire list basically saying, “There's 12 hours left. You got to hurry,” then we went through and started making segments of our list. We looked at the webinar. We had about 4300 people that registered for the webinar. We took that list and scrubbed out everybody who had already purchased.

That dropped it down to 3500 people, whatever it was. Then we looked at those who had attended the webinar but didn't buy it, and those who had not attended and didn't buy. I went through and actually made a personal video for each of those segments saying, “Hey, this is Russell and I noticed you registered for the webinar but for some reason, you didn't show up,” and then made one that said, “I saw you registered for the webinar, you were even on it, but for some reason, you didn't buy.”

I made these personal videos. Then I sent it to each of those segments with about six hours left, saying, “There's six hours left. I made a personal video that's important for you to go watch, so go watch it.” Boom, that video went through again that aspect of it to help close people. We used that.

Then I did a two-hour warning just to everybody who had registered for the webinar. I knew that I didn't want to email my whole list again but those 4200 people were the people that were the most interested out of everybody. We sent our two-hour warning right before, and said, “Two hours left, you got to hurry.”

That last two hours, we sold 80 just in the last two hours alone. Then it closed down. It was just a shock to me how, we always talk about having scarcity in your offers but having scarcity when you orchestrate it correctly and you do it right can sell so much product so quickly, that fear of loss people have is such a big thing. Fear of loss, I talked about this before, not on a podcast but a seminar, talking about my kids, how when I try to get my kids to come to dinner.

I'm like, “Come to dinner,” and they just lay there, and nothing you can do to get them off the floor, get them from whatever activity they're doing to come and eat dinner except for one thing. If I come back and I tell my kids like Bowen, “Bowen, Ellie is eating your dinner,” boom, he jumps up and sprints and runs in because that fear of loss is the biggest driving force for little kids. It is for us too.

My message for today is just to think about that. Think about fear of loss and scarcity, and how you could add that to your business. I almost think it's intelligent to pull your products off the market once a month just so you could have a fear of loss. With the Rippln launch, I talked to Brian the owner about this.

I said, right now, they're in this NDA phase. It's all this prelaunch stuff but I was like, “If we, a week before launch, if we shut it down and just said nobody gets any NDAs for seven days, and let them know that a week in advance or two days in advance, 'Hey, we're going to shut this down and you're not going to get any NDAs until actual launch day,' that two day prior, I guarantee will be 50% of the growth of the entire company because of that fear of loss, again, I need to get this now, because in two days from now, I won't be able to lock anybody in.”

It's just interesting. Think about different ways you can use that, whether it be sales, whether it be bonuses or value adds, or upsells, or whatever it is. If you can think about different ways to increase that fear of loss in what you're doing, it will do big things for you. That is my message for today. I'm at the office now. I hope you guys have an awesome day today. Have fun working on your businesses.

If you are enjoying these podcasts at all, please go to the iTunes store. If you just go to MarketingInYourCar.com, it will redirect you to the iTunes place. Please leave us some feedback. We'd love to get some more ratings and reviews in there. It would be fun. I appreciate you guys, and we'll talk to you all tomorrow.

This is the #1 secret to breaking free from the fear that is keeping you from the success you want.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Today, I actually just got my haircut and I'm driving back home. It was kind of fun, before my haircut, I had somebody call me and they're writing a book, and they want to interview me about success and about stuff like that for the book.

One of the questions that they asked me sparked a thought that I wanted to pass on this podcast. Any of you guys thinking about it as well, basically, the question had to do with why do most people not succeed. What's the reason behind it? Is it fear of success? Is it fear of failure? What is it that causes most people not to succeed? What do you do different that has made it possible for you to have great success?

I started thinking about that. It reminded me of one night, one of my close friends, he's a chiropractor. He just started his chiropractic clinic. It was kind of struggling. He called me one night and asked if I could talk, so we went over to his clinic and sat down and just started talking for a couple of hours.

I could see he was in a really bad place. He was just very concerned and freaking out, and all sorts of stuff. He was just very scared of all the stuff that could happen. Because of that, he didn't know what to do and he couldn't move. He was kind of stuck in this really bad spot. I remember I sat there and thought for a minute.

Then I asked him, I said, “For you to be successful, you got to do what I do. You need to look at what is the worst case scenario.” He said, “Worst case scenario, I go bankrupt.” I'm like, “What does that mean?” “If I go bankrupt, then this, this, this.”

I'm like, “You got to dig deeper. What are your real fears? If bankruptcy is the worst case scenario, what are your fears about that?” “Well, if that happened, that means I would probably lose my house, and if I did that, I would lose this, and this would happen.” I made him sit down and we actually mapped out what was the worst case scenario.

What was that thing? He listed it out. I said, “Look, if you're going to be successful in this venture, you have to be okay with the worst case scenario. Until you are completely okay with the worst case scenario,” I said, “you will be so scared, you won't be willing to gamble the dice and do what you need to do in order to be successful in this business.”

After awhile, he said, “You know what, you're right. I'm okay with that. If that's the worst case scenario, I can live with that. If that's what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen.” As soon as he was able to accept that, then he was able to start producing and start getting out there and actually doing what he needed to do to be successful in the game.

I think that that's a lesson for people in any area of life. In wrestling, I had the same thing. In business, I've had the same thing multiple times where if I don't know what the worst case scenario is, I can’t be successful. A little while ago, we had our merchant account shut down. We had 100 employees that had almost a million dollars a month in payroll, overhead, and expenses, and we lost our merchant accounts.

I remember I went to this paralyzing fear. I didn't know what to do and I didn't know how to move or how to react. I was just stuck. I remember sitting there thinking, “Man, I'm kind of in a bad spot.” It wasn't until I sat down and did this same exercise myself and I said, “What is the worst case scenario?” I said, “Worst case, I've got to shut down our company or I kick out people. I got to file for bankruptcy,” whatever it might be.

I listed those things out and I had to become okay with that. The second I was okay with that, saying, “Look, if that's the worst thing that's going to happen, I can deal with that,” suddenly, that paralyzing fear disappeared and I was able to step up and to produce and do what I needed to do to break through and create something better than the worst case scenario.

That's I think where leadership really comes from. As leaders, we have to have a vision of where we want to go, and then we have to be willing and able to guide ourselves and our team and get there, and be willing to act and move but if we're scared of the worst case scenario, and we keep pushing it to the back of our mind because we don't want to think about it, that will paralyze you and keep you from taking the action you need.

Step number one for any of you guys is list out what's the worst case scenario in the situation. Then become okay with that, and then build a vision to make something better than the worst case. Make something as great and amazing as you can but realize that the worst thing that could possibly happen is that, and if I'm okay with that, then I've got the ability to move and to really shine.

I look at my wrestling. When I was all the way through high school and all the way through college, I was the kind of wrestler I was good in practice but I was much better on the mat. I think part of it was because of my attitude where it was kind of like if I lost, I didn't really care because there's always the next match and the next tournament.

I just competed at a higher level than I think my skill set was. I would always, if you look back at high school and college, I always upset people that I shouldn't have beat because I stepped on the mat and I would just go out there. I think the reason is because a lot of times, people didn't want to lose so bad that I was able to beat them.

For me, my senior year in college was the first time I ever experienced that. I knew people had this problem but I never experienced it until my senior year. My senior year, my very first match, I wrestled a kid who ended up winning the NCAs and was a two-time NCA champ, three time or four time finalist.

I wrestled in this match. I lose to him by one point. I was frustrated but I was like, “Man, I'm at that level. I'm close enough that I should be in the All American this year.” That was my goals. After that match, everything started going downhill. I ended up losing insane amount of matches afterward.

It was so embarrassing to me. I realized later on in the season, luckily I was able to pull myself out of it about halfway through the season, but I realized that my fear of the worst case, because this was my last year, I had to prove it. Everything in my entire career was on the line for this and I had to prove that I could do it.

Because of that, I wasn't able to produce. I wasn't able to succeed and I didn't wrestle as well as I should. I think my senior year is probably my worst year because of that, because I was so afraid, “This is my last shot.” I just want you guys to think about that, if you're in athletics, if you're in business, and in your personal life, your marriage, your family.

Whatever it is, you've got to become okay with the worst case scenario because as soon as you do, it's the most freeing experience you will experience. It gives you the ability to step up and produce, and do what you need to do to get your job done. That is my words of wisdom for today. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope that you got some value out of it.

If you like this, if you like our podcast at all, please go to iTunes and rate us. I would love to see some feedback. It's kind of fun to see some of the reviews coming in. We appreciate you guys. I hope that you get a lot of value out of this, and I will talk to you all tomorrow on our next podcast. Thanks, everybody.

Learn a few strategies for making a ton of $$$ by using Google hangouts. This will work for any business to double your sales immediately and increase long term sales.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson again from DotComSecrets.com and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about a tool that we've been using like crazy. I would say this year, I bet you this tool makes me more money than anything else that we've had. That tool is called Google Hangouts.

Google Hangouts are like this cool new thing. They're awesome for a lot of reasons. If you haven't been on one yet, Google Hangout is basically, you jump on your webcam and you can have four or five, I think you can have up to ten other people jump on as well. You see all their little webcams. Whoever talks, it shows their video up top and little head shots of the people down below. Then when they talk, it jumps them up. It's pretty cool.

Last night, I was actually interviewed by the Huffington Post through a live Google Hangout. It was me and three other experts who are on there, along with a host. It was a really fun experience because it was just like I was in the studio getting interviewed for the news, except for I was sitting in my bedroom with my laptop, and it was really cool. I saw how they were using it.

They're using it on a big scale. They're actually publishing a live 24 hour a day news show using Google Hangouts. They had a producer and people. It was really exciting, really cool actually. First of all, I want to say anyone who wants to start your own news channel, you can do it with Google Hangouts. These guys, obviously Huffington Post is a huge company but they were able to do it.

They have the same technology we all have. Google Hangouts is completely free so it was pretty cool, but then we're using it in our business in a lot of other ways. Right now, some of you guys know with Rippln we're going to be rolling out, we've been doing tons of Google Hangouts. Everyday, I do a Google Hangout and have everyone on our team bring their teams to the Google Hangout, kind of like back in the day with network marketing companies, they were grown through hotel meetings.

This is kind of like a hotel meeting that we do every single day at noon for 30 minutes. We get people on, get excited, we sign them up, and then the next day, they bring back their friends. We just keep doing this process over and over again. Our team is growing. We're at 26,000 plus this morning and growing like wildfire. It's pretty exciting.

Now, some of the other interesting things, we've been using Google Hangouts also to sell product, a lot of product. In fact, we had this friend and they did a webinar. They put it on for a week ahead of time. They did the webinar, and then on the webinar, they sold $70,000 worth of product. They did pretty well.

Then the next day, they did a Google Hangout. The Hangout was basically just with everybody who had been on the webinar, and it was to answer questions. They sat on there for three or four hours just answering questions, talking to people about it, getting them excited, and ended up almost doubling the sales during the Google Hangout which is pretty amazing.

Then the other exciting thing is Google Hangouts are run like they stream live on YouTube so as soon as the Hangout was over, it was kind of cool because people during the Hangout can ask questions and all that kind of stuff. People were asking questions and they were responding. As soon as they're done, all those questions, all those comments instantly turn into YouTube comments.

The second the video was live, there's 1000 comments that pop in there. It's just amazing that because of the comments, because it's YouTube and because Google wants to award people for doing Google Hangouts right now, they're ranking those videos very, very high. This guy, he had done $70,000 on the live webinar. I think he did a $60,000 on the Google Hangout but that Google Hangout was archived on Google and he was ranked number one for the product name, for what he was selling.

For the next three or four months, people kept searching for that product name and he told me he sold over $50,000 more in stuff from people who would just stumble upon his Google Hangout that is now there and archived for the rest of time and all eternity. It's kind of interesting because he did that work once, and that sales presentation he made will continue to sell for him forever.

Really, that's one of the magical, powerful things about Google Hangouts. After you're done, those things are archived forever and they'll keep closing sales for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week for forever. When you're dead and when your kids are dead, and your grandkids are dead, those things will still be closing sales for you.

It's exciting. For those who have not tried Google Hangouts yet, they're completely free. Just go into your Google Plus account. On the right-hand side, there's a big button that says Hangout. You click on it, boom, you invite some friends to it, you name it, you stream it live, and you can do it. I just recommend jumping in and doing one.

Just do one for fun. I'm going to do one today with just myself on it just to create the video that I can then use in a promotional video. That's the other thing is you make quick promotional videos by making Hangouts. There are a lot of really cool ways to use it but it's by far one of the most powerful tools we've ever used for converting customers, for driving traffic, for sustaining your sales message, and it's a super powerful tool.

If you haven't done a Google Hangout yet, go and do it. I'm at the office right now. I'm going to be doing three or four Hangouts on queue for myself to do today so I'm going to go jump on one right now, and make some money. You guys should be doing it as well. Thanks everybody.

I hate when people give their opinion on what is good and bad.  The only thing that matters is what works in an actual test.  The writers at TechCrunch need to understand that the only thing that matters in a new company is results… Not what they think is cool.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson with DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. This is the first podcast where I haven’t actually been in my car. I’m actually at my office right now, because today I’m going to go on a little bit of a rant. The title of this rant is “Your Opinion is Irrelevant” [laughs]. The reason why I’m doing this, and you may think I’m upset, but I’m actually really, really excited.

Rippln got written up in “TechCrunch”. TechCrunch is a huge tech blog, and most people dream about having their company, their startup, talked about in TechCrunch. So that was an exciting thing, except for the fact that the TechCrunch articles says, “What Not to Do in Your Startup Promo Video”. Now this made me smile, because I was the one who created the startup promo video. I wrote the copy for it. We got it animated, and we’ve used it to roll out. Now I’m going to read you this article first. I’m going to bleep out the curse words, because he uses a lot of them, but this is what it says.

It says,

“Thanks to my job, I get to see a lot of stupid B.S., most gets filtered out, but every now and then, something just rises up that’s so ridiculously stupid, it’s just begging to be called out. That’s the case with this promotional video from the kind folks at Rippln , which is more or less a two-minute case study for how not to pitch your soon to be ultra-viral app to the general public, or to the press, or to potential employees, or investors.

So, here’s the step-by-step of what not to do in your video. First, don’t tell us your app is going to be viral before it’s even friggin’ released. Second, don’t expect the press to cover your stupid app before it’s been released, except for maybe in posts parodying it. Number three, don’t assume your friends or family members will be talking about it. Likewise, don’t assume strangers will be coming up to you on the friggin’ streets to talk about it. Number four, don’t say your stupid app is going to change the way we communicate, or call it “the biggest breakthrough since e-mail”. Next, don’t promise that your app will change how commerce, either online or off line, is happening – definitely not both. Don’t promise again that your stupid app is going to go viral. Don’t compare its growth to Facebook or Twitter. Don’t pretend to know how people were talking to Mark Zuckerberg in the cafeteria at Harvard or how he would respond. Please don’t bring Adam D’Angelo into this. Also, if you must, don’t say he looks like a thirteen-year old. Don’t try to impress me with Adam D’Angelo’s net worth. Wait, why are we talking about Adam D’Angelo again? Don’t make your stupid app sound like some sort of exclusive club with an inner circle, and talk about how lucky we are to be able to be invited in and “curse word”. VELVET ROPE? INNER CIRCLE? F*, NO. INVITE FIVE LEADERS? WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU? Don’t say there’s a brief window for me to join, but please, if there is, let’s hope this abominable window closes soon, because this startup sucks. Don’t pretend to have trade secrets. Trade secrets? Don’t refer to an NDA when you really mean personal information collecting form to use in our B.S. marketing. Also, who signs an NDA on YouTube? And don’t participate in the general douchebaggery which pretty much describes this entire video.”

When I read that, at first I was kind of upset about it. Then I started thinking about it. I want to show you guys some of the stats, because if you haven’t seen what’s been happening behind the scenes in Rippln, it’s going crazy.

In the first seven days, we had over 150,000 people register for this site by filling out an NDA. Now this is through a manual process. No one has been able to mass-promote it, so it’s kind of cumbersome to even have happen, yet, holy cow, it’s working. Right now, it is growing faster than Facebook or Twitter. Right now, it is going viral. The press is covering it, including TechCrunch [laughs], whether they like it or not. Most people’s friends or family members have talked to them about it, and total strangers have been contacting us about it, as well. Right now, the app is changing how we communicate, so it’s kind of funny that all of these things that he’s angry about have all been prophetic. Every one of these things is happening and has happened.

The fact that there’s this huge divide means that the copy on the video worked perfectly. The goal with copy and with a video is never to unite everyone into your cause. It’s to split people in half. When you split people in half, there is polarity, and polarity is a good thing. It creates an “us versus them” situation, and it’s good, so when all is said and done, he’s giving his opinions about why he does not like the video, yet the video is working. It’s working like crazy. It’s helping this grow out faster than any other tech company, any other startup that I’ve ever seen. Based on our current numbers, projections for month number one, when Rippln goes live, are $100,000,000 in month number one, which is interesting, considering most startups that are featured on TechCrunch don’t make any money. In fact, there’s one guy’s comment down here that I really appreciated, and so I’m going to read them to you guys, too.

He says,

“One of the biggest problems you have in the tech scene is lack of marketing ability. You have people who have amazing products, apps, software, et cetera, but nobody ever hears about them. One of the big reasons behind it is the aversion that people in the Valley seem to have to effective direct marketing. People see that firms like Google and Apple hate direct marketing, so they figure they should, too. Well, Google and Apple both have billions of dollars at hand. They can afford to hate the most cost-effective form of advertising in the world. People are afraid to sell, because they don’t want to look like jerks or douchebags. Well, personally, I feel like more of a douchebag if I couldn’t make the mortgage than I would by aggressively selling to people. Amazing products go undiscovered and companies go broke in the Valley every single year because people are afraid to push the envelope a little bit with marketing. There are billions-of-dollars companies in the Valley that could have an amazing impact on people’s lives, but they will never get the chance, because people in the Valley are afraid to sell.

Anyway, back to my starting point here. In my original post, I acted like a jerk towards the author, and I apologize for that.”

And he goes on about how he’s not a part of Rippln, and blah, blah, blah. Again, I want to come back to how someone can write an article about why something doesn’t work, which this guy’s trying to do, but it’s working. He says, “What Not to Do in Your Startup Promo Video”, and this happens to be the most successful startup promo video in the history of the Internet, and he’s telling us that it’s a bad case study. Yet it’s working perfectly, so I think it’s ironic, and it makes me smile and makes me laugh.

I just want everyone to understand that your opinion does not matter. Right now we’re finishing up our first issue of the new “Dot Com Secrets” lab’s newsletter, which has been all about the split test we ran. In ninety percent of the split tests we ran, I assumed that the other version would win, and I was wrong. Our opinions do not matter. The only thing that matters in the marketing world is what works, and this obviously is working. Today we should pass 200,000 people in Rippln, and again, we are eight days into this thing, so I’d like to see TechCrunch or any of the other companies featured in TechCrunch do something that’s even close to that with their startup videos. Yeah, it’s not going to happen.

So if you want an example of good copy and what’s working, and you don’t care about your opinion, you just care about what actually works in this world, check out the Rippln NDA video, or just go to TechCrunch and read their article, and tell them your opinion about the fact that, “Your opinion doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is results, and, holy crap, this is getting results.”

So there’s my rant, you guys. Don’t be shy about your marketing. You’re right. They’re wrong. Do whatever works. That’s how you’re going to change the world. You don’t change the world by being scared of selling and by hiding behind fancy company names and a bunch of other crap like that. There’s my opinion. I hope you agree with it. If not, I don’t really care, because, again, your opinion doesn’t matter in this situation. The only thing that matters is what works, and this is working like crazy.

I appreciate you guys. If you liked this podcast, please tell your friends about it, and also, I’d love if you would leave any feedback on our channel. We’re trying to get some more feedback, because we’re a brand-new podcast, but we’re having fun so far, and we’ll talk soon. Thanks, everybody.

Want an idea for a business reality show that would actually be worth watching?

---Transcript---

Hello, everyone. This is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing from Your Car” podcast. I’m on my way to the office right now, and I wanted to make you guys a podcast. I guess this is a bit of a rant, a little bit.

Recently I’ve been watching TIVO’d episodes of my favorite shows [laughs], and I’m sure you guys know how it is. You record them all, and when you actually have the time then you watch one and knock it out. I just watched one of the most recent “Celebrity Apprentice” episodes. My first rant is that I wish they’d get rid of Celebrity Apprentice and go back to the real “Apprentice”, because that show was a lot better.

But even with that, this is my real frustration with that show. If you guys ever watch it, each week they have two different teams. The teams get different tasks, and what’s interesting is that the way they choose the winners is, basically Donald Trump – or they’ll get a company, like they had Australian Gold Suntan Lotion on this the last one I was watching. They each get to make a commercial for the company, and then they pick the winner based on whose commercial they like more. As a direct response marketer, that drives me crazy, because it’s not based on what converts more, or what makes you more money, it’s based on one person’s opinion.

It makes me laugh, because we’ve been doing a lot of testing lately in our company, and most of the times, the test that I think is going to win, loses. It’s really interesting. In fact, there’s a site called WhichTestWon.com. It’s really a fascinating site. Every day they give out different tests, and they show the “A” and the “B” – the split tests, and you get to vote on which one you think is going to win. Ninety percent of the time, we pick the wrong one. I’m somebody who’s been in this business for a long time. I’ve had my head in this more than most people, and we still don’t pick it right. What drives me crazy is that they base those tasks not on performance or on anything, it’s based on which one we like better.

If we were going to make a show that was actually legit and actually was a good show, they should do it like “Pitchman”. I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen Pitchman before. I believe Billy Mays passed away. That show was awesome. What they would do at the beginning of the show would be to pick five or six different products that they wanted to make infomercials for, and they’d narrow it down to two or three. They would show the process of making an infomercial and filming it and all that kind of stuff.

Then what they did, and this is the cool part, is they’d actually take that infomercial, and they’d air it live. They’d air all of them. They’d give them a $20,000 test budget, and they’d test all three of them. Then they’d come back afterwards, and they would show the results. They would call each person. It was cool. They would call each person up on the phone and say, “Hey, we ran your show and [pauses] unfortunately the numbers didn’t back it up. It’s not going to be a winner,” or they’d call them up and say, “Hey, just so you know, we went three times over on the front end. You’ve got a winner. Congratulations, you’ll be a millionaire within six months,” that kind of thing. It was, “That’s awesome. That’s exciting.”

That’s something to get motivated by versus, “Hey, Gary Busey made a commercial and he didn’t have a hero shot in it, so he lost.” –“Seriously? Who says a hero shot is going to get anything to convert better or make more money at all?” It just fascinates me, and so I just want all of us to be thinking about that.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m addicted to ads. I’m addicted to watching what’s happening on TV and on the radio. It’s fun for me to watch, not because I care about the creative part of it, but because I care about what’s going to work. What can I pull from that and use in my own advertising? We need to become accountable to our ads. If we’re not, and we want to pull them and make a Donald Trump and just throw crap out there, we have no idea what’s actually going to happen.

I had a chance to go to a Super Conference, one of Dan Kennedy’s Super Conferences, and they had a guy named – I think his name was Lenny Liebermann. He’s one of the owners or the founders or partners – I’m not sure which, in – what’s that company? They have the skincare stuff for night. That’s funny. I’m going to blank out right now. It’s a billion dollar brand. I can't remember what it is now. Anyway, it's all of this skincare. You can wash your face, and you get rid of acne and zits, and all of that kind of stuff, and I respect that company so much. But what's interesting about that is they are $1 billion brand, and he said, “We never will run any type of advertising where we can't track the ROI. Believe me, it's been so tempting at times, where in the playoffs they want you to rent the backboard and things like that, or they want you to buy an ad here and there. If we can't track the results, we will not spend money on it,” and that's why they've grown to a billion-dollar brand.

They're one of the few brands that I actually respect, because they're doing it the right way. They are not like a lot of the brands out there that you see that have, "Here're our advertising budgets. We have $4 million for the year. Blow it on whatever you want," which is how most of these guys’ budgets work. That's how Burger King, McDonald's, all of those are. There's no accountability whatsoever. It's just, "Hey, let's spend some money on ads," and that's just fascinating to me.

I just want us all to realize that as direct response marketers, that's what matters – what converts better or not. It’s not, “What do you like better, or what's prettier, or what does your mom or dad think is cool, or what Donald Trump thinks looks the best?” It's what actually is going to convert better when you put it out there in the marketplace.

I think it would be a lot better show if that's how it ran – where everyone makes their ad. They run it, see who wins, and go from there. In fact, that's a good idea for a reality show. If any of you guys want to do that, that's the game plan – basically make an infomercial. Do the whole concept of getting two teams and having them each build an infomercial, run some media, and see which one wins. That would actually be a fascinating show. It would be fun to watch, because then you could dissect it. –“Why did this one win? Why is this one better?” As opposed to, "Oh, the executives thought this was cooler [laughs].”

Anyway, that's my thoughts on it. If anyone wants to make that reality show, let me know. I'll be part of it. It would be awesome. It would be a lot of fun.

That's it for today, guys. I'm at the office. I hope you guys enjoyed this, and please leave comments down below. We'd love to hear back if you like the show, or if you have any ideas or topics you want me to discuss on my drive in. We'll talk to you all soon.

On this episode, Russell talks about his 8 hour marathon hangout and the ONLY thing you need to get your business to 7 figures a year.

---Transcript---

Hey, everybody. This is Russell Brunson from the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast at DotComSecrets.com. Right now, I’m actually headed to the gym, because I don’t want to go the gym this afternoon, so I’m going this morning [laughs]. This is actually the “Marketing on Your Way to the Gym” podcast this morning. It’s been a couple of day since I did a podcast, mostly – oh, I just hit a squirrel. Oh, he survived. Good, he missed me [laughs]. That was close.

I’ve been gone. I was out of town, in Dallas, because there’s a new network marketing company launching. I’ve spent the last seven months or so building out all of their sales processes, and scripting their videos, and all of that kind of fun stuff with it. They actually went live on Saturday, so it’s been kind of a whirlwind nightmare and exciting all at the same time. I’m sure that if you were on Facebook or on Twitter that you have been pounded by it, which is probably kind of annoying to some people, but it’s a good thing from my standpoint, because the word is out, it’s growing fast. It’s on the first leg. This is Tuesday morning, so it’s been live basically two and a half days. We’ve had over 35,000 people sign the NDA to find out what it is, and it's been exciting watching it. It's just growing like wildfire. I’ve had messages from people trying to get close to me. My voice is on all of the videos, so it kind of makes me laugh.

What was interesting, and what I want to talk about today is that there is a really good book written by Michael Masterson called “Ready, Fire, Aim”. In that book he talks about the skill sets and the things that you need for a business going from zero to a million dollars in a year, from a million to ten, from ten to fifty, and from fifty to a hundred. For most of us, we are not going to get past the ten million dollar mark. You might, but for me, I don't even want to. We got to ten million dollars once, and it was kind of a nightmare to manage.

But anyway, it was interesting – the skill set to go from zero to a million dollars – the whole book is funny. Most people will be focusing on getting the website perfect, getting their office set up, hiring the right staff and all of this stuff. He’s like, “The only thing that matters, if you want to go from zero to a million dollars, is sales. Sales are the only thing that matters. Getting in there, and cutting your teeth, and just selling, selling, selling, selling.” If you're going to read that book, it brings you back to that, because in all of our businesses, we make money when we sell. Most of us, when we start our businesses, if we’re entrepreneurs, that's how we get our start. It’s us out there selling and doing our best, and then somewhere when we start growing, we get away from that. I know for me, we always come back to that. When everything starts getting going down a little bit, you can come back and sell, and, “Boom,” it brings it back up.

Selling obviously is happening in a lot of different formats. You’ve sales letters, webinars, tele-seminars, videos. There are so many fun ways to sell online. Yesterday I did a kind of a fun experiment. Because this whole new company is launching, and we want to get a bunch of market share as quickly as we can to get a lot of people on our team, we decided to do a big huge Google hangout yesterday. We ended up doing Google Hangout for six or seven hours long. I can't remember. I was beat up by the end of it, but basically we got me and four or five other people on it, and we put it out to our list. For six or seven hours, we did this huge long hangout, closing people one at a time on why they should sign the NDA. It was actually really fun. It felt almost like we were on PBS – one of those telethons, because we'd be on there and get people to text us their information. We'd go and we'd fill out the form, and say, "congratulations, Mike. You just made it in. Go sign the NDA. Okay, so and so, I just got your text. We're doing you next."

Everyone was going back and forth, and there was a lot of energy in our office. It was really fun. But it reminded me about getting back to the roots of selling. We put everything else on hold the entire day, and did nothing but have our entire team all selling for the entire day. I look at – you know most days in the office, I'm working on a project. They're working on their little thing, and things slowly move forward, but the times we make huge jumps is when everybody’s selling. The energy in the room is from when all of that stuff is happening at once.

I think that in my company, we're going to do another telethon today, which is going to be fun. I would really set it up at least once a month where you get everyone on your team selling – something in place where that's the mindset and the culture of everyone – that selling is the most important thing. It's the lifeblood of our team. Whether it is, if you have an e-mail list, you sending an e-mail out to your list and having people calling in, or something that causes that to happen. You can get everyone on your team doing that. When you do it, it brings your team closer. Everyone understands that the way that they make money and get paid is by selling, and it just changes the culture a little bit.

Yesterday was such a neat, magical day. By the end of it, we were all tired and beat up, and we all just wanted to go home and crash, but that experience bonded us altogether, and I think it was really neat. That's what I recommend.

Again, first off, I'd go read Michael Masterson's book, "Ready, Fire, Aim", and even if you just read the chapters, the beginning two or three chapters, where it talks about going from zero to million dollars a year, that stuff is powerful, and it will get you back into the mindset of selling, selling, selling. Then do that with your team. Do that if it's just you. If you're a one person team, figure out a way you can just sit down and sell all day long, because when you start selling, you’re going to see what works, what doesn't work and it's by far the best way to start growing. If you have an existing business relationship, it will really expand if you just get back into the sales mindset.

That's about it for today. I just wanted to mention all of that stuff. That's what's going on in my life and at the top of my mind right now. I'm at my gym now, so I'm going to go. I appreciate you guys. If you enjoyed this podcast at all, please comment on it. I think I need a couple of more comments, and then I can actually get some stars showing on this thing which would be exciting. All right, talk to ya soon guys.

“If you haven’t offended someone by noon each day, then you aren’t marketing hard enough…” -Dan Kennedy

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. I’m actually heading to the office right now. It’s a little early today, because I’ve got a fun project I’m working on, and I wanted to get started before anyone else showed up.

Today I wanted to talk about something that hit me last night. The title of this podcast would be what we call “Dealing with the Haters.” If you guys watch “The Office,” which is wrapping up its last season, this week they had an episode where, they’ve been filming The Office for the last ten years as a being kind of like a reality show, and they released the trailer of that reality show on YouTube.

It was funny, because after they released it, all of these comments started coming in. One of the people mentions Andy Bernard and says, “Andy, are you the guy playing the banjo at minute 6:31? That guy is awesome.” He gets all excited and starts commenting back to people, and then when he does, someone comes back and says, “No, he’s not. He’s not cool. He’s stupid. We hate him,” and Andy takes this so personally. He’s like, “Arg!” and he starts responding back, and then the guy’s responding back to him, and there’s a big huge fight that’s going back and forth. Andy makes all of these personal response videos, and the people that hate him are going back and forth with him. It’s just the funniest thing how he deals with all of the people that hate him [laughs] and how it affected him so much.

I know what he’s talking about, because I had something like that happen last night, at the end of my day, and it just kind of put me in the wrong mood for a while. Now it actually got me into an even better mood today, because I had someone that sent me – and I get stuff like that. Anyone who’s out there, you’re going to get hate mail every once in a while, and I got some yesterday. Usually I don’t see that kind of stuff, but somehow they got to my personal e-mail inbox and so it really frustrated me.

Anyway, it was interesting because stuff like that used to really, really be hard for me. In fact, I used to do all of my own customer support, and there was a time when I was ready to just quit because I’m like, “I’m out here serving, and doing my best, and trying to help people as much as I can, and people are sending me hate mail. I don’t get it.”

I remember I had a mentor named Dan Kennedy, and I heard him say something once that really helped me a lot, so I’m putting this out here for you guys. If you’re in the limelight at all with your business, you’re going to get some of this. Dan Kennedy said that if you haven’t offended somebody by noon every day, then you’re not marketing hard enough. When he said that, it really gave me permission to blow those people off, and I want to give you guys that same permission.

When I was working with Tony Robbins, one thing he said to me was really interesting He said that there’s two ways to build the tallest building in town. The first way is to go out there and put a lot of sweat and effort and all of this stuff into something, and build the tallest building in town. The second way is to go around to everybody else’s buildings and knock them down, and that way you’re the tallest one.

That’s really the way that people are. Most people do not want to go out there and work their butts off to build the tallest building. They want to go and tear everybody else’s down because it makes them feel bigger, and that’s kind of how I felt with this thing yesterday. It was funny. They guy sent a nasty e-mail, “F-bomb this,” and what a horrible scumbag I am and all sorts of stuff. At first I couldn’t figure it out, like, “Who in the world is this guy?” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Finally I realized that he was commenting on a promotion we did.

For those who are on some of our lists, we did this really cool local marketing webinar series where we had seven of the top local marketing experts in the world come on and basically show you exactly what they did in their business, and reveal the behind the scenes and show everything. They did each one of them like a two- or a three-hour webinar, so in all we had twenty hours of webinars. People could get on the webinars for free when they were live, and then at the end of the webinar, some of the speakers sold stuff, which is obviously how we monetized it.

What we did is we offered replays. –“We’re not showing anybody the replays, so if you want the replay, you’ve got to pay for it. It’s $97. You get the replay of all seven events, then you can go back and you can rewind it, you can listen to it, and learn all kinds of stuff. Plus as an extra bonus, I’m going to transcribe all seven of these events, so if you’re the kind of person that likes to read along, you can have the transcripts with it.”

I thought it was a good offer. I think for someone like me, I’d be like, “Man, if I can hear twenty hours of people doing the business that I want to be doing or the business that I am doing – seven people, some of the best in the world, and then I can actually have replays. I can watch it over and over and over again, and I can read the transcripts. That’s valuable to me.”

And so we priced it at $97, which I thought was a steal, and that’s what this guy was so upset about, saying basically, “How in the world dare you sell something digital for $97 where people can just... It’s something that’s just streaming off of your website. You shouldn’t be doing that,” and on and on and on and on. I was just shocked, and again, it really offended me at first. Then last night and this morning as I was getting ready, I was like, “You know what? He’s coming in and trying to knock down the tallest building in town. Why doesn’t he go out and provide his own value? Why doesn’t he go out and do something, as opposed to coming in here and just yelling at me and other people?”

It made me feel a little bit better, so I wanted to give you guys permission, right now, that if you get hate mail, if you get people that are upset or frustrated, don’t pull an Andy Bernard. Don’t go and complain and fight back and comment back on YouTube videos and stuff like that. Just ignore it, and then give yourself permission, like I said, from Dan Kennedy, “If you haven’t offended somebody by noon each day, you’re not marketing hard enough.” Let me give you that permission to go out there and do what you need to do. Just stop focusing on the people that don’t like you, and focus on the people that you’re serving. Focus on people whose lives are changing because of the good, the value, and the things you’re putting out there in the world.

We had over 10,000 people register for that webinar series. We’ve got hundreds of people sending e-mails and thanking us and success stories and all sorts of stuff coming in from it, and then there’s one dude who’s upset because we’re selling the replays. Don’t focus on the one dude that’s going to make you upset. Be grateful that you upset him, because that means you’re working hard. Focus on the people who love you. Focus on providing value to them.

I hope that helps you guys, and that’s about it. I’m at the office. I’ve got a fun day ahead of me today, so I’m excited. I hope you guys do, as well. If not, find a new job. Find a new line of work. Do something that you’re so passionate about. Right now, at 6:25 in the morning – I woke up early today, because I’m so excited to come in and start working on this project. Find something you’re that passionate about, and if you’re not yet, just go out there and seek it. You don’t have to do whatever you’re doing right now.

I have a close friend of mine who I love and care about a lot. He told me flat out, “This is what I wish I could do with my life,” and I said, “Why don’t you do that?” He said, “Well, I can’t because this.” He always had an excuse for why he couldn’t do it. He said, “I used to envy you, Russell, because you go out there, and you just do whatever you want to do.” I’m like, “Why don’t you just do it? It’s just a choice. You just have to do it.”

Figure out what you want to do. I ask myself probably once a month, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and then I go and I work towards that. That’s a good thing to do –“What do you want to be when you grow up?” If you’re not passionate and in love with whatever it is that you’re doing, figure out what you want to be when you grow up, and go and do it. Just quit everything else and focus on that. Well, don’t quit everything else – obviously you’ve got to pay the bills. If you’re doing something, you know you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but work your face off to get towards whatever it is you want to be doing when you grow up, because this life is way too short to not do that.

Anyway, I appreciate you guys. If you liked this podcast at all, please comment on it. We’re six or seven episodes into this thing. , I think, and trying to get iTunes to give us some love. They ranked us on the first page. This is really cool. I was on iTunes the other day, and I was scrolling through the home page, and our podcast was in there, so congratulations, you guys, the listeners. We’ve got people listening, which is exciting. I just need you to go and review it so that we can get some stars in there and people on iTunes can find us. I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all tomorrow.