There’s no school like the old school…
On today’s episode Russell talks about plans to use what he has learned from TJ Rholeder while on an anniversary trip in Hawaii, in his business once he arrives home. Here are a few interesting things you will learn in this episode:
So listen here to hear Russell’s upcoming plans for his business, or watch the video version so you don’t miss out on the beautiful scenery of Kauai.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, that is in the rain here in Kauai.
Alright everybody, I want to welcome to today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, it is raining on me right now. I don’t know if you can see that over here, if you’re watching the video version. But it’s beautiful here and I wanted to do an episode, this is going to be really good, I’m going to come and hide under the bush or something. I’m just going to sit here and get wet, it’ll be more fun this way.
Anyway, we’ve been in Hawaii almost a week now on my 15th anniversary, which is amazing being married to my beautiful wife, Collette for this long. I’m trying to get to do an episode with you guys, hopefully on the flight home or something, on what it’s like living with and being married to an entrepreneur. We’re trying to pick our keynote speaker for this year’s Funnel Hacking Live, and it’s funny because we got tons of people voting for everybody. Somebody posted Oprah, and someone put Russell’s wife and my wife got more votes than Oprah, which is pretty exciting. So we’re trying to get her at least to jump on the podcast. So that’s the goal and the game plan.
What I want to share with you guys today, the rain’s gone that fast, but there’s birds right behind me. Let me clean my phone off real quick. So what I wanted to share with you guys, I’ve been listening to a whole bunch of cool marketing stuff between the long drives around the island, all the cool stuff we’re doing. The course I was listening to was TJ Rohleder and if you don’t know TJ, he’s one of the legends in our business. He is one of the direct mail kings in the Bizop world, and he’s become a friend. We had him speak at one of our events a while ago, which was amazing.
What’s interesting, the course I was listening to was How To Become Super Rich in the Opportunity Market. He teaches people how to make money in the teach people how to get rich market. What’s interesting, as I was listening to it, if you read the Expert Secrets book, I talked about three core things you gotta do to build a mass movement. Number one you gotta have the attractive character, the attractive leader. Number two you have to have a future based cause. Number three you have to have a new opportunity.
What’s interesting is as I was listening to this, he’s talking about how to sell opportunities but basically if you’re doing a mass movement the way we’re talking about, it’s always a new opportunity. Everything he’s talking about, the opportunity is the way he positions it is how to get rich, how to make money, here’s the opportunity market as he calls it. But in my mind every market is the opportunity market. So I’m going to see if I can interview TJ and dig deeper in that because his stuff was brilliant, it was all targeted towards selling people stuff, how to make money. But if you look at it from the lens of the Expert Secrets book then it kind of works for all of them. Because every single opportunity, everything you’re selling should be a new opportunity. So I’m going to try to see if I can do that.
Plus, TJ launched his company, he lives out in Kansas and he actually bought a hospital and renovated the whole thing and that’s where he runs his company out of, an old hospital, which is kind of cool. I kind of want to go down there and see his whole operation. It may come to an episode of Funnel Hacker TV soon. Where I go down there and tour his hospital and see his whole organization. In the last ten years they’ve sent out 9500 different direct mail campaigns, which is crazy.
Some people will get on his list and they might get between 2 or 300 letters in the mail per year, depending on what sequence they take, what offers they say yes to and no to and all sorts of stuff. Super inspiring.
But what I want to talk about is a couple of core things I learned from him that I think are really good for all of you guys. The first one is not from TJ it’s actually from a Bill Glazier thing I was listening to. So Bill was partners with Dan Kennedy at Glazier Kennedy and he was my marketing dad for five or six year that I was in his inner circle. And one of the things that was cool that I was studying from Bill this week, he was talking about how at the very beginning of the year they have their big thing. So they do two events a year, they did InfoSummit and Super Conference. For me, I do Funnel Hacking Live, that’s my big thing.
They said they categorized all their promotions based on the importance. So number were their two events, number two was this, number three…they had it all mapped out and mapped out the entire year, the promotional schedule at the beginning of the year to make sure they fill the events and all these other things fit in there.
I was thinking about that, and I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not super good at mapping out my promotional calendar and schedule and things like that. I kind of just go week by week, month by month and do stuff. And what Bill does in this course, and it’s an old course, but he maps it out and then they do everything. So It started thinking about this and at one of our inner circle meetings, Justin Williams was talking about with his stuff now, as you guys know if you’ve been listening to our podcast for any length of time, the two magic things that marketers have are urgency and scarcity.
So he started doing with his is, he re-launched courses throughout the year and he’d open and close them. So he’d have the urgency and scarcity close. That’s where most of the sales always come in, during the closing of the thing. Also if you listened to when Stu launched Tribe, he’s talking about Michael Hyatt when he launched his membership site, the big secret they had was opening and closing. So twice a year they’d open up the membership site and then it was closed. I started thinking about that and I’m like, right now most of our programs are open all the time, which is good. But the urgency and scarcity is not there. So I think what I’m going to do is start calendaring it out where twice a year our things are available.
So twice a year people can buy our certification program, twice a year people can join Funnel University, twice a year they can get Fill Your Funnel, twice a year….all of our core offers are only open twice during the year, and they’re closed down other than that, which is kind of fun. It gives us the ability to have urgency and scarcity and build up the hype and the buzz, and it gives me each month, something to focus on. This month is Funnel U month and we’re going to open and close it. The next month is this, we’re going to open it and close it and all content and all things can be related back to that one thing.
So that was the first thing I kind of started re –thinking through when I was listening to Bill Glazier talk about how they structured their promotions around their events. That’s the first cool thing. Now with TJ, a couple of cool things that he does, I think it was good for me to hear again, it’s good for all of you guys to hear again.
So TJ is in the business opportunity market, mostly through direct mail. He has 50,000 letters he mails every single week. Week in and week out consistently, they know 50,000 letters will go out every single week all for new customer acquisition. New customer acquisition, 50,000 letters every single week. And that’s just the schedule. I think for a lot of us we get in this thing where we have these front end funnels, these break even funnels where we bring people in, then we have our monetization funnel. So I think a lot of us, we create a really good webinar funnel let’s say, and then that becomes our focus. And then that’s it, we’re driving traffic and that’s the business.
TJ if you look at this again, he’s got his frontend lead gen offers and he’s mailing 50,000 pieces a week. He said at his peak, he was selling a $50 course from his frontend lead gen stuff, and he said he would spend up to $500 to sell a $50 course. From there you go into all the backend funnels and the backend things he was selling. But he had this consistency of 50,000 pieces every single week.
I started thinking about that. He’s mailing 50,000 new names every single week, what’s the equivalent of that for my business? I need to make sure I have something consistently doing that every single week to one frontend offer. He talked about one of the big things also is he’s not mailing 2 things or 3 things to that 50,000. They have one offer, the hottest converting one and that’s where they drive all their energy, all their money, everything.
And for us, I think all of us, we have our hot offer, we need to be spending as much as we can to get people into that thing consistently every single week. Just knowing I spend 50 grand a week, or 10 grand a week or a thousand bucks a week, whatever it is for you, into that frontend thing. If you break, if you think about this, break it down, there’s kind of two sides to this, or three sides depending on how deep you want to get. We talk about this at this upcoming Funnel Hacking Live, but there’s a process.
There’s basically three types of funnels. There’s acquisition funnels, getting people in. There’s ascension funnels, ascending up within your membership. Then there’s monetization funnels. But for this argument today, I’m just going to talk about the two. So there’s an acquisition funnels, so what is your one acquisition funnel that you can consistently do X with? For me it might be I need to sell at least a thousand books a week, or I need to spend 10 grand a week, or whatever that thing is for you. You just know that and you have to do it consistently. We have to sell a thousand books a week and we should build a whole team of people whose entire goal is to sell a thousand books a week, or 5 thousand, or whatever that number is for you.
Back when I had a call center, that’s how it was. We had free plus shipping leads and we had to get 8 thousand leads a month to get enough leads for our sales floor and that became the focus of the business. For you it’s like, think about TJ, what is the frontend offer that’s consistently bring people in? And then from TJ, it’s so crazy. I’m hoping I can go down there and film his whole operation for you guys because I want to see it to. But like I said, as soon as someone gets through the frontend then he’s got all these direct mail campaigns that go out offering these two step things.
So he’ll send out a letter for a free cd about whatever to the existing customers. So he’s only sending it to people that already bought his $50 thing, then he’ll put them onto a sequence that gets a free cd. Then if they respond to the free cd he puts them in a sequence to sell the thing that that cd upsells to. Then he puts out the next offer and the next offer and he keeps putting out all these frontend lead gen, I guess their acquisition and monetization letters to the buyers of his 50,000 a week thing. So 50,000 a week bringing people in. And after they come in and bought the $50 thing, then he starts sending them letters trying to get them to raise their hand about specific opportunities that he’s going to sell them. If they respond to those then they go into a whole other sequence. They might get 10, 15, 20 letters to sell a 2 or 3 or 5 thousand dollar course on the backend.
And that’s kind of the process that he does over and over and over again. So for me, what I’m looking at, what I want my focus to be, is somebody comes into my world, and again I’m focusing way more effort consistently on this, I’m going to call it 50,000 letters a week, but for us we’re not doing direct mail right now, so it’s not that, but that’s the concept. The frontend lead acquisition. Then if they come in, we’re taking our core courses and we’re opening them and closing them, opening them and closing, opening and closing them, opening and closing them throughout the year. So those are our monetization funnels after people come in.
So that’s kind of the game, and I’m really excited for it. So that’s the game I’m going to be playing and I hope you guys model that. The other cool thing I’m going to be doing, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this for probably two weeks. It started at Scout camp and it’s been in my mind even here as we’ve been in this beach house. Having one really good follow up funnel sequence that takes people through my offers in a very strategic way. So we have igniteyourfunnel.com, which is right now, we’re using it for something completely different, but I’m going to be changing that to where this is an opt in form where we get people to opt into and then it’s going to take them through a sequence. I haven’t quite mapped the whole thing out, but first thing I want someone to buy is what?
For my business the first thing I want someone to buy is Expert Secrets, so I’m going to be like, have a video of me explaining why they need Expert Secrets and why it’s step number one. Actually, let me step back, step number one is not going to be the book. Step number one is going to be, on the podcast you guys heard a little while ago, the two episodes on You’re one Funnel Away, I’m going to show that video to build connection with people immediately after they opt in, from there I’ll tell them to get the Expert Secrets book and then from there, what do they need next? I’ll logically build out a really long sequence that’s going to be this ascension funnel that takes them up through our core offers in the middle.
And then the big thing that our team is going to be focusing on is RKPI’s how many opt in’s a day are we getting inside the Ignite Your Funnel funnel, the Ignite your Funnel ascension funnel, ascending them through all of our offers. I’m trying to think how this whole thing works together. It might be when someone opt’s in the first time they go through this ascension funnel, that all those offers will be open to them, open and close, like in Evergreen format. And after that they’ll bump over to a monetization funnel. Our longer term email sequences that then they’ll be on when we open and close them each month. I’m not positive on that, still figuring out the details. But it’s fun to think through it. Anyway, that’s the game plan.
So those are some of the fun things I’ve learned and been thinking about while I’ve been here having some fun in Kauai on my 15 year anniversary. I hope that gives you guys some ideas and things to think about. So kind of to recap the important things.
Number one is focusing on consistently bringing new blood into your business. 50,000 letters a week rule, should we call it that? 50,000 letters a week rule, consistently bringing new blood in. I remember Garret White at the last Funnel Hacking Live talked about people that make it rain, the rainmakers are the ones who dominate this world and this business. You gotta be focusing on making it rain. If you want to learn how to make it rain, right now the program is closed, but depending on when you’re listening it might be open, is our Fill Your Funnel course. Fill Your Funnel is all about how to make it rain, how to get new customers into your funnels. So that’s number one.
Number is then after they come in, what’s the monetization? So maybe number two is the ascension funnel, which is for me it’s ignite your funnel, which takes them through our offers in chronological order of when I want them to see things, opening and closing them in Evergreen format. And at the end of that, then put them into our monetization team, monetization funnels, which then would be taking our core six offers and opening and closing them twice a year. That’s going to be the business. That gets me really excited. Really, really excited.
So anyway, that’s the game plan guys. I’m glad I had a chance to talk this out with you guys, it’s making it clearer and clearer in my mind. I hope you guys something of value out of that too. But like I said, I don’t just talk about this stuff, I practice what I preach so you will see me implementing these things in the very near future. Hopefully you guys will see them and enjoy them and model and funnel hack them for what you guys are doing because I know this stuff is going to be amazing.
So that’s all I got you guys. Anyway, here’s one last view. Here’s the beach house we’ve been staying in. It’s an AirBNB, we were going to get a hotel and we looked at AirBNB and we found this. AirBNB or BRB, I can’t remember which one. It’s like 5000 square feet, my wife and I are up here and Brent and Amber are over here. There’s all this open space and there’s even like huge guest house over here that we got massages in the other day. It’s crazy.
We’re literally, this is our beach. It’s just ours. And it’s crazy. I was flying the quad copter today, I learned how to finally fly the quad copter. I took it out over everything. So if you’re watching Funnel Hacker TV, which hopefully you are, you’ll have a chance to see above this place and beyond, it’s insane. It’s probably a little expensive, but for your 15th anniversary you go all out. Look at that, that’s our beach. We rented these paddle boards too, I guess if you’re listening on the podcast you can’t see this.
But a couple of cool things also, just so you guys know. This is obviously on the audio podcast, which right now as of today, we’re number 5 in the business category, which is awesome. We’re still killing it there, we just also released this as a video podcast, if you go to iTunes at the very top there’s audio podcasts, you can switch to video podcast. We also have Marketing Secrets as a video podcast now too. So if you want to watch the videos, or if you want to watch the videos you can go to marketingsecrets.com and they’re all listed there along with the transcripts, see if you want to listen to what I’m saying and read along. The transcripts are at marketingsecrets.com as well.
With that said, I would love it if you guys would give me a review and a rating over on iTunes. Like I said, we’re number 5 in the business category, the other guys above me still have more ratings, it’s not fair. I’m killing myself giving you guys the best stuff I got, I need some more ratings. So if you can take 5 seconds out of your busy day, stop everything, go over there, leave a rating and review, tell me what you think about Marketing Secrets, let the world know, that’d be awesome.
And then the other thing is please subscribe to the video podcast as well. Feel free to watch the videos there if you want, that way you can see some of the beautiful scenery behind me. Yeah, that’s all I got you guys. Thanks again for listening, have an amazing day and we’ll see you guys soon. We’ll be back in Boise next week, back to a normal schedule. I got some cool stuff I want to publish and share with you guys. I gotta finish my anniversary and then get back to you guys soon. Appreciate you all, see you guys soon. Bye.