Marketing Secrets (2017)

Step 1 starts with the bat-signal calling everybody to the bat-cave…

On today’s episode Russell talks about how he is using Trello and a bat signal to make all of his amazing ideas come to fruition. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode.

-Find out how Russell is using a bat signal to get his ideas out to his team.
-See how Trello is going to help keep Russell’s ideas organized so that every member does their part.
-And find out how you can make a similar system work for your own team.

So listen here to be let in on this awesome new system for getting Russell’s ideas out of his head and turned into funnels.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, I’m heading into the office today for a fun filled day. It’s going to be short because it’s almost Christmastime and we thought it would be fun to do something out of the ordinary. Everyone’s working their butt off and at the end of the day we’re going to leave early to go and see the Star Wars movie, which I’m freaking out about because I haven’t seen it yet. I want to see it so bad. Everyone’s got the positive and the negative reviews and all that stuff, and I don’t care what they say, there’s no way I’m not going to like it. I’m so excited.

So I’m pumped about that. Also, we have an acupuncturist who’s coming into the office to poke people all day. So I’ll be going through a session today, which I’m excited for. I don’t know how acupuncture works, but I had a miraculous healing from it one time, so I’m a big believer. And I’m not even hurt, I just feel like I want more people poking needles into my body apparently. So that’s exciting.

But what I want to share with you is the most exciting thing of all. So excited. It’s funny that we’ve grown as big a company as we have, with the fact that I’m not the best systems person in the world. I’m a big believer in it, just not ever been good at it. And Mr. James P. Freill, who is amazing. In the inner circle and been my friend for probably 3 years or so now. He came in originally and set up our Trello system, and it worked really good for a week, and me as a bad manager of it, it kind of fell apart. I hired him again later, he came back and set it up again, it worked for a while and then fell apart.

And then the third time I did it, so three times he’s helped me set this process up and the third time it lasted longer and then eventually kind of fell apart as well. So eventually I was just like, you know what, how about we just hire you to actually come and run this thing for us. So we hired him for the next six months and he literally moved to Boise, like a block from the office, which has been really fun.

And now he’s living next to me as we’re doing everything and systemizing everything. And what we’ve been focusing on is something I think everybody should do. Because as you know, you’ve listened to my opinion on this before, your business is not the thing that you do or sell, the business is the marketing of the thing you sell. So I think every company, the real company is your own marketing and advertizing agency. That is the company. And then what you sell is incidental, it doesn’t really matter. I can plug in chiropractic, I can plug in dentistry, I can plug in supplements, it doesn’t matter. Your business is the marketing.

So I was like, we need to build a marketing agency where we are our only clients. So we build this marketing agency out and there’s a funnel building team in the agency and there’s the traffic team, and it’s been really fun because he’s going through all the stuff we’ve been doing for the last decade that we redo every single time and he’s been trello-izing it and systemizing it and all sorts of stuff.

But the biggest thing we realized, when I have an idea, it’s like the idea, I have that moment where it’s like the flood of inspiration. And for me, I don’t know if it’s this way for everybody, I’m assuming that, I wasn’t this way when I began, but the longer I’ve done it and the more I’ve immersed myself in it, when I have the idea, I see the whole thing in my head. I don’t know if that makes sense. It’s not a vision, I don’t know, maybe it’s a vision. But it’s like, as soon as the idea comes, all these connections, all the things, everything I’ve learned and done and seen over the last 15 years in this business, it’s like as soon as the idea hits, I see perfect clarity what it looks like. I know, I see it really fast.

Then I freak out and try to explain it to everybody really fast, which is why I talk so fast, because I’m trying to get it out of my head before I forget it. I’m trying to explain the whole thing. And usually, whoever is closest to me, I grab and I explain it. So usually it’s Dave’s there, Melanie’s there, sometimes Dave’s there, Steven’s there, whoever. I just grab people and I’m like, “AHHH” and I freak out and tell them the whole thing.

And everyone’s excited and we go and run and do our things. But then we try to relay that to the next part of the team and then next part of the team. And eventually it’s like, playing telephone booth and everyone forgets and then, even Dave and Steven who were there initially, they’re like, “Remember on the white board we doodled this thing.” And they’re like, “What’s that square again for? I have no idea what’s actually happening. I remember you had a squiggly line here that was really important, but it just looks like a squiggly line now and I’m not sure exactly was it is.” And we always try to…we lose all this stuff.

So we’re like, man, how do we capture that moment of inception when the first big idea hits? How do we capture that so we don’t lose it? So in our trello process system now, it’s so cool. We’ve done it twice to test it out. But we literally…the way it works is like step one we have the aha moment, this is the idea. And the second we have that, I log into voxer and there’s a group with the entire agency in the voxer group and I literally send them the a gif of the bat signal. So boom, they get that which means, “oh my gosh, Russell had an idea. Get to the bat room.”

So then we set up the Zoom room, which is a Zoom room, we call it like the bat line or the bat cave or something like that. So as soon as I set out the bat signal then every…then I’ll send out the direct link to the bat cave, then everybody who is able to jumps on. And then right there I open the Zoom Room on my computer, from a white board I’m like, “Oh my gosh guys..” and I explain the whole thing as it happens and it records the whole thing.

So the whole thing’s being recorded and I go through the whole thing and anyone who’s able to come, comes. And obviously not everybody can come every single time. But whoever’s there comes, we explain the whole thing, we get excited, and I map out the vision on the white board, I explain things and then when I’m done I break down, “okay here’s the whole vision. I need so and so to do this part, so and so to do this,” and I explain all the different pieces. And then when it’s done, I stop the recording, upload it dropbox, post it in trello, here’s the vision and then here’s the, I take a picture of the whiteboard, here’s the whiteboard of the vision, here’s the video of the vision. And then I vox that out to everybody who may have missed the call. Here it is.

And then that happens and the person on our team who does the project management stuff, which right now is James and John, but eventually we’re going to be bringing in somebody full time to do this part, then goes and watches it second by second and basically builds out all the trello cards based on the vision. And then everyone’s got their stuff, trello cards, deadlines, everything. And it just all magically happens and it is the coolest thing in the world.

So we did it twice, two days ago and then yesterday. We’ve done two bat meetings. These aren’t like new aha moments, but it’s like new funnels we’re relaunching, so everyone’s got a little piece of this puzzle that I have in my head and we’re all working towards it, except for now everyone knows the whole vision.

And it’s insane, just the clarity, for me and I think everyone on the team has now, it’s just like, “Oh, that’s what Russell’s talking about.” Or people are like, I’m watching the office when I walk around, they’re rewatching the video like, “Oh, that’s what he’s talking about.” Or like, “In minute six of the video you said this, what did you mean again?” And then I can, it’s just really cool. It’s simplifying our process, I’m not repeating and re-teaching and re-explaining and re-showing things a million times.

Oh, and the other cool thing is after we got the whole thing done, then Jake on my team, he’s taking my whiteboard doodle and then he actually is going into Photoshop or illustrator or whatever he uses, and if you got the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, you know the little images of the pages and funnels, he’s actually building out a map for the funnel I sketched out in that , so we have a pdf of the actual map of what I doodled out, but it’s very specific. Like, “Here’s page one, page two, page three. Here’s the email sequence. Each sequence is here and goes to here.” We have an actual map we’re building off of as well, as opposed to some doodles I gave out.

Anyway, it’s just getting really, really cool so I’m excited. We’re systemizing the crap out of everything, we’re speeding up our processes, we’re making it so we remove me from a lot of the things I’ve been doing, just because they’re stuck in my head, and getting out into a spot where other people can help facilitate it. And it feels good, it feels freeing, it feels exciting.
So there’s an idea for those of you guys who are trying to figure this process out and trying to get the vision from your mind out to your team. Do a batman meeting like we’re doing. Send out a bat signal, bring them all to the bat cave, record your ideas, and then you’ve got it archived as everyone starts building and driving traffic and all those other pieces that come with it. That’s it, I’m excited.

Anyway, I heading in right now, I’m going to get some acupuncture, work on some funnels, I’m probably doing the batman meeting, we have four projects we’re trying to do by the end of the year. So I’m doing four bat meetings to catch everybody up, then we’ll have all our marching orders before the end of the year, then I’m heading to go see the new Star Wars. So excited. Alright guys, that’s all I got. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you guys soon, bye.

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Late night coaching session with my son Dallin…

On today’s episode Russell teaches his son Dallin, and the listeners all about the concept of supply and demand. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

Why Russell decided to teach Dallin about supply and demand after he saw a pair of Airpods on Amazon for $850.
Why supply and demand of Tickle Me Elmo dolls several years ago caused some parents to take back their own kids Christmas gifts.-
And how you can use supply and demand to boost sales for info products or supplements or anything else.

So listen here to find out how to use supply and demand to make more sales and more money.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. This is a special audio episode just for my audio friends. This will not be on video. I’m in the car right now driving to the grocery store with my son, Dallin. Dallin, how are you doing tonight?

Dallin: Tired.

Russell: He’s a little tired, it’s late. We forgot we have to have treats. He’s always tired though. He’s a growing boy. He asked me a question. I said, “Dallin, we’re going to answer this on the podcast.” So let’s queue in some music and we’ll come back and we’re going to share with you guys something very important for you to understand about supply and demand and Christmastime.

Alright everybody, welcome back. So Dallin came in the car and we were talking about headphone buds. Do you want to tell them what you told me, Dallin, when we were getting in the car about how much cheap headphones are versus these ones?

Dallin: So I was looking up how much the ear buds cost for apple, because I was looking at the iPhone 10.

Russell: He’s talking about the airpods that are super cool.

Dallin: And I looked up on Amazon, usually Amazon’s amazing, and it says it’s $850!

Russell: $850 for the Amazon headphones. He said, you can buy regular headphones for $5. And I pulled out those headphones out of my pocket, because I actually love those a lot. If you don’t have them you should get them.

I said, actually these sell for $100…

Dallin: Not from Amazon though.

Russell: Not from Amazon, and I’ll tell you why. I just explained this to Dallin. So I wanted to explain it to all of you guys, who I’m sure understand this but this sets up a teaching lesson I want to have here in a second.

So if you look at the pods, if you look at them they’re $150 on Apple’s site. But the problem is it takes two or three months to ship to you. So if you buy them and plan ahead it’s $150, but if you didn’t and it’s Christmastime and you’re like, “Ah, my wife, my girlfriend, my significant other, my kid, they need airpods, they’ve been asking all Christmas.” You try to buy it and you go to Apple and they’re like, “We’re not going to deliver til May.” And you’re like, “What, Christmas is in December.” And they’re freaking out. So they have to go look for other places, so they go on Amazon and they find people that had the foresight to know that people were gonna not have foresight. So they take their Apple Airpods that they bought for $150 and jack up the price for $800 on Amazon. And the people who are slow have to pay the difference.

So I was about to tell Dallin about Tickle Me Elmo, and then I said, “Wait a minute, we should share this story on the podcast.” So Dallin, here is the lesson of the story I want to tell you. And everyone can listen in on this.

So when I was a kid, it was right when Elmo came out. Sesame Street didn’t used to have Elmo. When Elmo came out, everyone, I remember being a kid and being like, “Elmo is the coolest.” He was just so much cooler than all the other muppets and we all loved him. And then one year for Christmas they came out with this, they called it Tickle Me Elmo. You guys have Elmo dolls now, but this was like the original Elmo one, where it’s a doll and you tickle it and it’ll giggle. And that was ground breaking 30 years ago.

Dallin: He’s scary.

Russell: He’s a little scary. So anyway, everyone wanted Tickle Me Elmo so the company that makes him, it’s the law of supply and demand. They made so many Tickle Me Elmo’s, and that was it, that was all they made. I don’t know the whole story behind it. But basically there was a lot more people that wanted them. Everyone’s kid wanted them, it was all over the news.

So Tickle Me Elmo started going, you’d normally buy them for like $20 and they got to $50 and $80 and people were auctioning them for tens of thousands of dollars for Tickle Me Elmo. And then other people heard about Tickle Me Elmo, and when they started talking about how there are none left. And then one of them sold on auction for $10,000. And people were freaking out, and people who already had them were like, “Well I can sell this and make some money.” So they would take the gifts away from their kids to make money by selling them to other people and it was just crazy.

Dallin: That would be sad.

Russell: Pandemonium. So the lesson that I want to teach you Dallin, and everyone who’s listening today, is the power of scarcity, supply and demand. So when you have a ton of stuff, like if there were a billion Tickle Me Elmo dolls, nobody cares and they’re not going to freak out and try to buy them. So the price goes lower. But when they’re high demand form and the supply is smaller, like the airpods, there’s a high demand for them, everyone wants them. But there’s only a few left, the people who sell them can charge way more for them because they need them.

So a lot of times in our businesses, depending on what we’re selling, a lot of times there’s not typically that built in supply and demand curve because we’re selling info products or supplements, or things that are kind of easy. But you can always do things in your marketing to create the illusion of supply and demand.

A good example is Bill Phillips, Muscle Media. When I was a kid it was the biggest supplement company in the world. In fact, some of my buddies now used to work for them, which is kind of fun. Anyway, Bill Phillips had Myloplex shakes and his whole EAS supplement line. He had unlimited stuff, he could sell as much as he wanted. But they needed to create urgency and scarcity to get people to buy it more, increase the price, all that kind of stuff. So there’s a marketing campaign that I believe Joe Polish was a part of or in charge of, Idon’t know. But I heard him tell the story one time, so somehow I know it’s credited back to him.

But what he did is they had two big shipments of supplements coming to their warehouse, two big semi trucks full. So they took a picture of it and they’re like, “We should do a marketing campaign around this.” So they sent a sales letter back to the entire Muscle Media Magazine list that basically said, “Hey, we over ordered. We’ve got two big semi trucks of supplements in the front. We need your help. Buy the excess stuff, that way we can get back to normal life.” So they sent the letter out and they sold a ton of supplents.

And then they’re like, “Well now we sold a bunch, so let’s decrease the supply, therefore increasing the demand.” So they took the exact same sales letter, and they took the picture of the two trucks and crossed out one of the trucks and said, “One down, one to go.” And then changed the letter to “one left, one left, one left.” Then they sent the same letter out to the same customer base. All it did was decreased the supply, therefore increasing the demand and they sold more from the second letter than they did from the first.

So that is what I wanted to share with you guys. Dallin already jumped out of the car, so maybe this is a lesson for you guys. Dallin, maybe when you are 25 working in a marketing company someday, you’re going to come back and listen to this podcast episode and hear the moral of the story, but until then we should go shopping for your treats.

Alright, that’s all I got guys. Anything to tell everyone who’s listening Dal?

Dallin: No.

Russell: Alright, you heard it here first. Alright guys, appreciate you and we’ll talk to you all again on the next episode of Marketing Secrets podcast. Bye everybody.

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A few cool stories that will hopefully re-align what you define as what you actually earn.

On today’s episode Russell talks about doing what you said you were going to do instead of trying to lie, cheat, and trick your way into money. Here are some of the other insightful things Russell talks about in this episode:

Why Russell gave back 8 figures to Pruvit, even though he had signed a contract to have equity in the company.
And why it’s important to only take the things you have actually earned.

So listen here to find out why integrity is more important than money.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Tonight we’re going to be hanging out and talking a little bit about the fact that nobody owes you anything and you should just be grateful for the opportunity.

Alright, I’m going to share with you guys some stuff tonight that I don’t normally share. Probably, I haven’t decided if I want to share normally or not. Anyway, I’m going to go into that here in a minute.

But I wanted to share one idea that’s completely not related to marketing, maybe it is. Who knows? Right now I am eating this, I don’t know if you can see this. If you guys are sitting here, I’m in my kitchen. This is my dinner. I share this because right now I’m on this, “How to get ripped before Funnel Hacking Live” diet with Bart Miller. It’s been funny, he’s got me working out, doing all sorts of stuff, but also had me eating a very specific way.

And I knew that there was no way that I was going to be able to stick with it. In fact, the first day Dave and I, Dave’s doing it with me, we both went over to the grocery store and bought stuff and it was like $50 for that one day just to eat stuff. We just bought packs of chicken breasts and broccoli and it was horrible.

And the second day, I brought turkey from Thanksgiving, you know a little bit ago. And then Dave ran out of time to buy food, so he literally had his son go and buy him packs of deli meat. So he sits there all day eating packs of deli meat. And by day two we were like, we will never actually do this, because this is too hard to actually live this way. Which I’m sure is why a lot of people don’t lose weight and probably other things in your life you don’t do because it’s too hard to consistently do it.

So we went online and found someone here in Boise who cooks meals. So we gave her all the macros, micros, all that kind of stuff of what it needs to be and then everyday she literally makes us three meals, drops them off in the morning all perfectly cooked, fine tuned, healthy with exactly the carbs, macros, micros, fats, proteins, everything that is perfect to actually what it’s supposed to be.

So that’s what I’m eating now. This is my third meal today and it’s nice not to think and just grab it and eat. So I recommend it for any of you guys. And it’s not that expensive. We’re paying $300 a week for this, which if I was to go out one meal a week, that’s way more than three hundred bucks. This is three meals a day and plus it keeps me, all I’m allowed per mouth is what she puts into the boxes, that’s it. So just a thought. Find someone to cook your meals for you and do other things that are keeping you from getting the goals you want.

Alright, I digress. What I wanted to share with you guys today, or tonight, is pretty important I think. So it, I was going to share one thing, but there’s stories I can’t tell. So there’s been, honestly three or four situations in the last two weeks that have been insane. It’s been probably some of the hardest two weeks of my life, when it relates to the negative sides of business.

So for me, it’s been funny because I’ve been trying to block it and defend it because I need to keep moving forward and the negativity of stuff can keep me or you or anybody from moving forward. So I don’t want to share those specific stories, but the way that people dealt with them was really, I don’t think right. So I’m going to leave it at that. I’m not going to go deeper into it.

But what I do want to share, I want to share something that actually…I want to share this not to brag, that’s not the point, but to show I practice what I preach. I don’t just talk about this stuff, but I actually believe it, because I think that’s important. So that’s the only reason I’m sharing this story and hopefully it will help some of you guys to think about how you deal with stuff in the future. Hopefully it will help at least somebody out there.

Some of you guys know that a couple of years ago there was a company that got launched called Pruvit. And I was part of the original team that helped launch that and I was the dude who wrote the script for the animated video. I had my animators animate the whole thing and that became the campfire video for that company and in exchange for me doing that initial stuff we negotiated some equity in the company. The equity right now, looking at where the company’s blown up in the last three or four years, is worth insane amounts of money. Well over 8 figures, probably closer to…..well, it’s insanely a lot.

I negotiated that ahead of time, and then I was going to do a bunch of other things for the company, and just for some reason some of the things didn’t work because it was hard within the company. Network marketing companies software makes it hard to do some of the funnels and things I was planning on helping with. So that was kind of hard and then Clickfunnels was taking off at the same time, so I was focusing there.

When all was said and done at the end of the day, I didn’t do what I thought I was going. But what I did have was this really cool fancy thing called a contract that I had signed that said I owned x% of the company. The situation with the multiple people this week, it was not this same situation, it was something kind of like that. Where people didn’t pull their load and then they’re demanding this justice. It was unjust because they didn’t do anything.

It makes me so angry and frustrated. So I was thinking about that with myself and I was like, I’m in the same situation here. Based on what I negotiated three years ago, I own x% of this company. And while that’s awesome and it’s worth insane amounts of money, if I’m completely honest with myself, it is not fair. Not to me, it’s not fair to them. And if I was in their situation, I know in my mind that I would be annoyed by me all the time. The very thought of me, “Russell got this thing, and he did this little thing upfront and then we haven’t heard from him in the last three years, doing his own thing, running his own direction.”

And instead of being like, “Hahahaha, I got the contract, you owe me.” I actually actively reached out to them and said, “Hey, I don’t feel like I deserve this.” And Brian who is the owner of the company of course is like, “No, no you totally deserve it.” And I’m like, “I don’t and I’m okay with that. I thought I was going to be doing this, this and this for this movement and I didn’t. I wasn’t able to. Some things were because of technical things didn’t connect on the funnel side, some of it was because I didn’t have time. And I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. It’s not fair to you and I want someday when you sell this thing for you to be mad at me or angry at me when you have to give me this huge check because I didn’t deserve it, and I didn’t earn it and I don’t want it.”

He’s like, “Well this is kind of weird. What do you want?” and I was like, “For what I did, I think this is what would make sense.” And it’s literally like me giving back 8 figures worth of cash and just being like, “Here you go.” And taking something way less. Because that’s what I actually earned, and that’s what I deserve. I think he was kind of confused, then he said okay and now we’re making the transition, the shift away and I’m signing away my equity in exchange for something way less, because that’s what I actually earned, and what I actually deserve.

So that’s what I want you guys to start thinking about and doing. In a situation with a business partner or a friend or an employer, whatever it is, get what you actually deserve. Don’t get more. There’s this weird thing inside where people think they deserve everything. It’s ridiculous, it’s insane. I wouldn’t have believed some of these things if they didn’t happen to me over the last two weeks. But it’s insane what people feel like they deserve, even though they don’t deserve. Because of something, they feel like they….it’s so infuriating to me.

I remember I had a chance to hear this guy speak a little while ago name Nido Qubein, if you guys never heard of him, he is probably the best speaker I ever heard. I heard him probably seven or eight, longer, probably ten years ago now, at a Dan Kennedy event. And I think he’s like the CEO or something of Wonder Bread and a bunch of other things. He’s an entrepreneur and he actually came over to the country with like $20 in his pocket and built this huge empire. He’s an awesome dude.

In this speech, I’m totally going to slaughter because it’s a decade ago that I heard it, I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember the feeling I got and the message. But he talked about how he basically got a job as the, I don’t know what they call them in college, he was in charge of this college. The college had been struggling and he came in to turn it around.

And he came in the first week, he worked really hard for the first week and then when he came in they handed him a paycheck. He said, “What’s this for?” and they said, “This is your paycheck.” And he said, “Well, I haven’t done anything yet.” And they’re like, “Well, you get paid every two weeks, that’s how it works.” So they gave him the check and he sat at his desk and said, “I did not earn that.”

And he kept working and working. Two weeks later they came in to give him the next paycheck and he’s like, “What is this for?” and they’re like, “That’s your paycheck.” And he’s like, “I didn’t earn that.” He put it down. He kept trying to, his job, his role was to transform the university and he couldn’t do it, he kept trying and it took him a while because it’s a big thing to do. And eventually, I can’t remember, a year or two years later, whatever it was, he transformed this university and had this big impact.

At the time I guess somebody came in his office and he had this stack, five or six inches tall of these envelopes and somebody said, “What’s that big stack?” He said, “Those are the paychecks they keep giving me, but I haven’t earned them yet so I’m not going to…they’re not mine.”

I remember hearing that and just being like, that’s the right attitude. I don’t know, as opposed to the other situations, where you try to slip your way in and if you don’t get what you want you try to sue somebody. Or you try to get a contract signed, you try to sneak in, or you stop doing what you committed to do. Or whatever that thing is. It’s insane to me.

And like I said, it’s happened four times in the last six weeks. Dang. That people have done that. Where they feel like they deserve something, so they’re threatening to sue. Or they feel like they deserve something because they have a contract, they didn’t actually do what they committed to do, all these things. It’s just so frustrating to me. That’s not how I want to be remembered.

I want to be remembered as a person who actually got what I earned, and I showed up and did what I said I was going to do and if I didn’t do what I said I was going to do, I didn’t take what I contractually signed to because the contract said, because I know inside my heart that I broke the contract. I didn’t do what I said I was going to do.

I’m not someone who wants to come in and try to get what’s not mine through threats. It’s just ridiculous. I want to be the kind of person who someday I can tell my kids, I can tell my grandkids, hopefully someday a thousand years from now, someone’s going to watch this podcast. Someone in my posterity and be like, “Wow, great, great, great, great grandpa Brunson was a man of integrity. He actually did what he said he was going to do. When he didn’t earn something, he didn’t contractually trick somebody. ‘well, they got a contract so it kind of sucks.”

No, I freaking gave it back to them because I didn’t earn it. And I took what I did earn. I hope that rings true to some of you guys. If it does it will be worth the rant for tonight. So I hope it does. And if you haven’t heard Nido Qubein speak, I’m going to try to find…I bought a bunch of his stuff back in the day, I wonder if I could find that presentation where he talked about that. Because it was so impactful for me just to hear that and realize that’s how we should be working.

Just because the rest of the world shows up to work, falls asleep and gets a check every two weeks. Us, the people who are producers, who are moving forward, that’s not how we should look at things. We shouldn’t be okay with that when our team is doing that. We shouldn’t be okay when people around us are doing that. We need to earn what we earn and go out there and do the thing. That’s the goal.

And if you do work your butt off and you do, do the thing, you do earn the money. Be proud of it. Don’t hide and be embarrassed, you actually worked your butt off and you deserve it. But don’t do it the other way around. Where you trick, cheat, scam, lie, whatever it takes to get what you think is yours because it’s not yours. You don’t actually deserve it. You should just be grateful for the opportunity.

So that’s where I’m leaving this one. I’m grateful for the opportunity Pruvit gave me, excited……it’s funny, I should be so sick to my stomach about this, but I have no issues. I’m so excited to be giving back this equity in exchange for something that’s really cool, that’s a good fit. It’s good and I feel good about it, and I’m going to sleep really, really good tonight because of that. That’s what really matters.

So hopefully that helps somebody. Hopefully my great, great, great grandkids are watching this and they straighten up when you hear it, because it’s important. That’s what I got. Thanks guys for listening, appreciate you all. Have an amazing day, bye.

View Details

Some awesome advice from Bart Miller as we were doing our late night walk.

On this episode Russell talks with Bart Miller from his inner circle about immersing himself in the things he does instead of dabbling. Here are some of the cool things to listen for in today’s episode:

Find out how Bart made a commitment to get in shape and ended up winning awards for body building in under a year.
Hear why both Bart and Russell have been able to really commit to things instead of dabbling.
And find out how you could possibly see Russell standing on stage at Funnel Hacking Live in a Speedo!

So listen here to see why it’s so important to be an extremist when you set a goal to do something.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m walking right now with Bart Miller. How you doing, man?

Bart: I’m good, how are you guys?

Russell: Doing awesome. We’re going to show you guys some cool stuff here after the intro.

Alright, so we’re out here, it’s freezing cold out here.

Bart: It is cold.

Russell: Bart’s been in the inner circle now for a year and a half and I want to talk to you about him because he’s taught me some cool stuff, and I think it will help you guys as well. It makes it harder to walk and talk. It’s going to throw the whole thing….

Bart: Another level here going on, I love it.

Russell: So I’m going to embarrass Bart, because he doesn’t even know what I’m going to ask, I just turned the camera on. First off, for background for those who don’t know, he runs a couple of businesses. What are the core things you usually run?

Bart: So we have an Amazon business, we have a makeup school and Russell tries to keep me as focused as possible on those two things. So we’ll just say those.

Russell: As he does everything else. The other ones he refuses to tell me about because I will tease him forever.

So this is what I want to talk about. We hung out, when was it we went to Dallas?

Bart: That’s been a year ago.

Russell: So a year ago we went down there because we working on the beauty school and we filmed an episode of Funnel Hacker TV, which actually is the next episode, I don’t know if you knew that.

Bart: I didn’t know that. Cool.

Russell: The end of the last one said, “Up next week,” and it had that thing with Collette.

Bart: How did I miss that, I watched it.

Russell: It was after the credits. Anyway, next episode is going to be showing that whole story. It shows me wearing skinny jeans and bunch of other things.

Bart: Which was amazing, by the way.

Russell: Oh skinny jeans. Anyway, so what I think was interesting and why I love Bart so much, why I just wrote him a big huge check to come kick my butt is because after that, you’ve always been into fashion but that wasn’t your thing. We talked about it, “Okay, Bart you should be doing fashion for people.” And then he got intense and obsessed in it and just was awesome. And he basically at the last Funnel Hacking Live, dressed me, dressed half the inner circle and a bunch of other people.

Then fast forward 7 or 8 months, since Funnel Hacking Live, when was it you decided you were going to get ripped and shredded and everything?

Bart: So my son was leaving on an LDS mission, and I’ve been racing bikes for the last 7 years and I just always wanted fitness, because a lot of people think it’s easy to be fit all the time. And I’m here to tell you, and don’t tell my family this, but my mom’s obese, my sister’s obese, my dad’s obese, I know it runs in my family. I’m probably taking way too long here, but what I’m saying is, my son, I wanted to spend time with him before he was leaving and getting out of the house.

That was a year ago, so I decided I was going to start lifting, and then Russell’s going to tell you I’m afraid, that I’m an extremist.

Russell: Which is actually the moral of the story, this is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Bart: So I get super extreme into things. And that’s why I hired Russell really, for inner circle to be honest with you. We’ll get into that, but anyway, I couldn’t take it anymore and I went after the best coach in the world in my space, which is physique and body building and I hired him. So I fly to California every month for a full week and I lift with him, then I fly home, implement it all and then I fly back and do more. I did my first show in California with him, did my second show in Boise. At the first show I won an overall, and 40+ category and took second in the 35+ category. So I was super, super stoked, blessed, but put all the hard work into motion, made it happen.

Russell: Awesome. Okay the battery is about to die, I’m going to grab my phone and finish this because I still haven’t got to the point of what I want to share with you guys. Alright we’ll be right back.

Alright the battery died, but now we got it back. So you missed our walk, it was really fun.

Bart: It was amazing.

Russell: Went four miles, it was awesome. So I don’t remember exactly where we left off, but it was somewhere between why I respect Bart and why you guys should listen to what he’s going to say right now. So my question, not my question, but my observation, I would love to get your thoughts on it, is just….the battery is going to die again now. We may go back to the phone in a second here.

But it’s basically, when you go into something, you don’t dabble. Some people in life, they dabble, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, or do this.” You’re like, “I’m going to get fit. I can’t remember if you talked about this or not, but you went and hired a weight lifting coach who lives in a different state, you fly out there one week a month, work out with him, come back, and then you sign up for body building competitions, all sorts of stuff. It wasn’t just like, “Oh I’m going to get in shape.” And then you do it for two or three days and then you quit like most people do, including this guy right here sometimes. You went insanely all in.

I just think that that is cool and people should learn from that.

Bart: Thanks, so one thing I’ll just tell you. The camera’s on and I’m a talker, Russell knows it.

Russell: That one died as well. We’re back again, we’re on the new phone now.

Bart: So you guys get the honor and the privilege to see Tony at his event coming up, which is why we’re getting fit. But on that note, I learned this from Tony Robins, he said, “If the pain doesn’t outweigh the pleasure, you’ll never be successful.” At the time I was like, are you kidding me? And I really didn’t understand it.

And then he made it really clear. He said, “If you want to quit smoking, or you want anything in life, that if you’ll make something so painful, that you have to get there. Like you have to accomplish it.” For example, if I wrote a check for a half a million dollars, let’s say I was super wealthy like Russell. I wrote a check for an enormous amount of money to a charity that I absolutely detested, and if I failed at that, then XYZ could cash that check. That pain would outweigh me ever getting there.

So the pain of me getting on stage and not looking my very best was enough to, I would give up anything. I never cheated on my diet or anything one time because I knew that if I failed, I couldn’t live with myself.

Russell: You’d be embarrassed in a Speedo on stage.

Bart: Totally. Well, not in a Speedo.

Russell: And actually, by the way, when I started this process, he was like, “What is the thing that’s going to cause you the most pain?” I was like, “Honestly if I ever had to get on stage in a Speedo with a black tan, that would be the worst.” So if I don’t hit my goals, you guys will see me on stage.

Bart: You’ll see Russell doing an event. And that’s the thing, if I could you any advice, it’s the same advice Tony did. So when I commit to something, I always tie it to “what’s the consequence”. And I shouldn’t be teaching this to Russell because now he’s going to do this crap to me. This is a horrible podcast. Don’t listen to this again.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, you’ve got to put something there that helps you not just get there, but you’re going to make it because if you don’t this consequence is extreme for you. If you say you’re going to have a funnel every week and you don’t accomplish that, you need to have something so serious that there’s just no way you’re going to fail doing that. And that’s what I’ve learned in my life to push me to that next level, and that’s why I did it.

Russell: That’s awesome. So I’ve seen Bart do it twice in two different things right now, and it’s super inspiring. In fact, it was like a year ago, when you came and worked out at my place the first time with Anthony here. You were just kind of doing some stuff. Then here today he was kind of taking the show, “Hey Russell, do this, do this.” I was like, dang. This is a different Bart in less than a year, which is insanely cool. But it’s because you go all in and you don’t dabble. It’s awesome.

Bart: It’s like you said, immerge in yourself. It’s the same thing you teach, you don’t have to be only a few steps ahead of everybody else to be successful, but if you total immerse, it’s the same thing that Tony Robins preaches, and you’re the best at it. Russell commits to things he should never commit to. I mean it serious. Have you seen his life?

Russell: My wife’s like, “Why are you doing this?”

Bart: Yeah, but it’s the same thing I’m doing. He puts himself through so much pain that if he doesn’t get it done, he knows he’ll never accomplish it if he doesn’t do it. Just like taking this challenge right now. He does not have time to get ripped for Funnel Hacking Live, let’s be clear. But we’re out here at 10 o’clock at night. How many other people are sitting doing something else? And while we’re doing it, we’re creating a podcast. He utilizes time like crazy, it’s insane. But he does the exact same thing that he’s complimenting me for, but it’s the same model he runs every single day of his life. So learn from that and you’ll be super successful.

Russell: There you go guys, you heard it here first. So thanks Bart for hanging out man, and for the walk and the workout, and for, I got a sweat belt on, this is sucking all the fat out of me. Dude, I’m going to be so ripped, it’s going to be amazing. And if not, you’ll see me in a Speedo, which would be the worst thing ever. Let’s all pray that I stick to my goals.

Bart: Hey everybody, send him really clean food, nothing for the holidays, be nice.

Russell: No junk food. This guy’s going to be gone my FHL. Anyway, if you don’t have your tickets yet, go to funnelhackinglive.com. Bart, you’re going to be there, hanging out for the party.

Bart: Hanging out for sure.

Russell: So when you’re there, grab him and pay him to help get you dressed nice and get you fit, it’ll be awesome. Anyway guys, appreciate you all. Thank you man, for hanging out. See you guys later.

Bart: Bye

View Details

Be a fly on the wall during the ClickFunnels partner meeting and hear the #1 thing each of us learned on our journey so far.

On this episode we get to hear from the entire Clickfunnels partnership team. They all share the big takeaways they have received as they have watched the company soar to over a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. Here are some of the cool things you will hear.

How Russell learned that having a great partnership and team was better than being on his own.
Why Todd thinks it’s important to have someone who is obsessed with the product you’re selling.
Why Dave thinks the Dream 100 is so important.
How John prioritizes and delegates to make sure everything is done by the appropriate people.
Why Brent thinks it’s important to stay small and nimble as long as possible and why you shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.
And why Ryan believes that constraints are not a limiting factor, but what helps you focus and succeed.

So listen here to find out what the Clickfunnels partnership team members have learned that have lead the company to surpass their goal of a hundred million dollars in revenue a year.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today is a special episode, we’re here above the ice right here, there’s hockey happening down there. But we’re in our partner planning meeting, here are all the cofounding partners of Clickfunnels, hanging out and plotting world domination. The theme of today’s event and the theme of this podcast is this:

It comes from social network, millions of dollars isn’t cool. You know what is cool? A billion dollars.

Alright everybody, so welcome back. We’re excited to have you guys here. We’ve been here locked up in this awesome office for the last day and a half planning world domination and how to make Clickfunnels better for you as a user, how to get more of you as users, so we can serve more people, more audiences and more entrepreneurs. It’s been really, really fun. We’ve been going around plotting and scheming and planning and creating and doing and a whole bunch of really fun stuff.

So I thought we’d take a quick ten minute break here and I thought it’d be fun because we actually had a call yesterday with, I guess they’re not really competitors, a cool company that we like what they do. We’re potentially interesting in maybe buying them or whatever.

It’s funny because they’ve been watching what we’re doing, obviously and he’s like, “You guys are what, 10 million dollars a year in revenue?” and we’re like,
“No.” So in case you guys are wondering, we passed $10 million in revenue year one. We’re year three.

So I thought it would be kind of fun to maybe look at this, a little bit ago, like 2 months ago we passed a hundred million in revenue. So we went from zero to a hundred million dollars in about 3 years. And I wanted to say what was the biggest aha that each of us individually got, that we’ve learned in that process. So you guys get ideas from everybody inside the team here. So just a really quick intro with everybody, then I’ll share my aha and then move on.

So I’m Russell, I’m the nerd who is the dancing monkey who’s talking about Clickfunnels all day long. That’s what I do here. This is Todd Dickerson, he is the genius that built all of the original Clickfunnels and look at that beard, so manly. Over here, this is Dave, he’s all the business development stuff, he’s got the retro Clickfunnels shirt on. Then over here is John, he does all of our ads, and if you see us every day on every platform it’s because of that guy, so blame him. Over here we have Brent Coppieters, he does all our operations stuff and he’s going to be transitioning to a bunch of our new, something we can’t talk about live or publically yet. It’s going to be cool. And this is Ryan, what’s up Ryan. Ryan is the genius who is always coding.

So I thought it would be fun to give you different people’s perspective, because obviously we’re all in different parts of the company, lifting different parts, doing different things, so I thought it’d be interesting to hear everybody’s ideas. So I’ll start with mine.

So I think the biggest takeaway, I shared this last night with these guys, is as I was growing my business initially, the first 8 or 9 years I was very, I don’t know what the right word is, scarcity mindset or whatever. Where it’s like, I am Russell. I am the leader. I own the company, and all these things. And I think I had one or two deals with partners that went sour because I was like, I will never have a partner, I will only be me.

It’s funny, with that mindset and that attitude, we were able to get to this level and we kind of camped out there. And I’m lucky for me, Todd came in. Trojan horsed his way in, where he basically worked for free for an entire year, which was awesome. And then we worked together for a couple of years. I don’t even know how many years it was ahead of time, a couple of years before that, and then we had the idea for Clickfunnels. We were sitting in an office in Boise, we bought the domain, we were going to call it something different and then we finally found Clickfunnels, we bought the domain, then for a whole week we were mapping out on the whiteboard everything.

At the end of the week, and this is to kind of take you back, this is on the backend, we had 100 employees, the whole thing collapsed, we had to fire 80 people. I had to go from a 20 thousand square foot building to a 2 thousand and we could barely afford the rent. It was the most humbling, painful time of my life. I think that the Lord or whoever, whatever you want to call it, humbled me to a spot where I was willing to say yes to this. And I am so eternally grateful that I did.

But at the end of that week Todd was like, “Okay, I’m going to go back to Atlanta. I’m going to build this thing, the Clickfunnels thing. But I don’t want to do it as an employee, I want to do it as a partner.” And the Russell two or three years earlier than that would have been like, “Um nope. This is the Russell show.” And I would have done something stupid like that. But luckily I was at a point where I was sufficiently humble. I was like, you know what I’m going to do that.

And I’m so grateful that I did because then Todd built Clickfunnels. Holy crap, seriously. It’s insane. And then after that, that’s when we brought in these other guys as partners as well. They’re all rockstar people. It wasn’t just like, “I’m going to give you a base salary.” Or whatever. It was like, “Okay, come in and become a partner in this thing.” For me it’s like, as you find the right people and incentivize them….If I were to ever build a company again, I would never build a company where Russell’s the thing.

We went and watched Justice League last night, so maybe this is because it’s in my head. Justice League, Avengers, Batman, whatever. I would literally, if I ever build a company again, the initial thought will be, I’m going to build my Avengers team, my Justice League. I’m Batman, there’s Iron Man, everyone’s got their spot. Ryan’s Wonder Woman, I just want to look like Aqua Man, that dude is ripped.

But if I ever start a company again, the first thought will not be, what product should I sell? It will be what team should we assemble? And then I would carve out where everyone’s roles were going to be. I’m not going to be CEO next time, so any of you guys can pick that, I’m done after this.

But we each pick our different roles and then from there, collectively, be like, “What should we create? What should we build? Who should we serve?” And then we’d go from that. So my biggest takeaway from going from zero to a hundred million dollars is definitely give up control, build your Avenger team ahead of time, because Russell Brunson could have never gotten here. It took these guys and the team we built to create that.

Anyway, there’s my number one. So I’m handing it off to Todd now to share the biggest thing he’s learned from going from zero to a hundred million dollars.

Todd: What’s funny is that I was actually thinking about saying very similar things. One of the biggest things is the team. Seeing how to build a team around you and actually do things as a team as opposed to by yourself independently. That’s how I’ve always done things in the past, on my own more or less, same type of scenario.

But I think something else that stands out to me is having someone who is obsessive about the product itself. We always talk about how marketing is the big thing, and it is. But if you’re focused on the marketing, you still need someone on your team that is obsessed with the actual product. Making sure you’re delivering the best possible thing to people. So when you sell it to them, they actually like it and they come back and want more. So that’s my other big epiphany I think that I’ve had over the past…

Russell: Especially in our world. Our world, everybody’s obsessed with marketing, rightfully so. A lot of times if you’re in the marketing and product, if you do them both, it’s really, really hard. I tried to build software companies in the past where I was like the marketing guy, plus trying to convince the developers how to do it. Whereas with this, you were able to run with the product and I could just sell.

Todd: Absolutely. That’s why I think that’s worked as a great partnership. Russell focuses on the marketing and I focus on the product. And I think having that really makes a difference. Pass it on to Dave here.

Dave: Hey there. So we talk about this all the time and I cannot express the importance of it, and that’s the Dream 100. So I took a look back on everything that’s happened as far as first of all having an amazing product and then amazing leaders, and then Todd and Russell, the two of them are amazing together. I think the part for me, is I look at everything we’ve built over the last three years now, is the importance of the Dream 100.

Originally Dream 100, as far as affiliates, and even most recently when we did the book launch, what I really learned a lot from that was the importance of understanding it’s a Dream 100 per platform as well. So as far as your influencers, where are they at? Are they on YouTube, are they on Facebook, are they on Twitter, or are they in Instagram? Wherever they might be.

And then as recently, as far as, a new Dream 100, as far as hiring partners that you really want to end up working with long term. So for me, I think the most important thing is when you start looking at building something, is really identifying your Dream 100 and then being very, very consistent in continuing to mail out every single month to them. Establishes and builds that relationship with them, they get used to seeing you.

It’s been fascinating as we’ve gone out and traveled and go to these different places and people remember the boxes and things that have been sent. And they’re like, “Oh, how do I get on that list?” And if they’re asking to be on the list, I don’t need them on the list, I don’t need them basically. But the reality basically says that it actually works. So I would say, in building a hundred million dollar company, and any size company I would definitely say Dream 100 is one of the most important things. John, up to you.

John: Alright, so a really interesting journey we’ve been on. It’s been so much fun. One of the things that I’ve learned which is just huge, is prioritizing your time and your tasks. I mean, especially when we’re all internet entrepreneurs, we’re on the computer, it’s so easy. The computer is a gateway to anything. So a huge thing for me is to, before even opening the computer, physically write down or use your phone or use something else that’s not your computer, to structure out. We all do this, Russell does this, I do this. We structure out what we’re going to do.What are the next things I need to do?

Because if you can get that basically spiritually created, if you can get that thought through before you actually begin, then it changes everything. Then you’re actually getting through stuff instead of just fumbling along. It’s so easy because we’re all bombarded with a million different things, we could be paying attention to a million different things. Only some of which are really going to move the needle.

And the other thing is, especially as you grow your team, as you get more people working with you, it’s about….So I build out that list and then the next thing I ask myself as I go through that list is, “Okay, who can do this? Who can I get to do this? Who can I get to do this?” And that specific question, as I go through the list, as who can I get to do this, that allows me to go through and delegate as much as possible to team members, so then I become more of a leader. Because it’s so easy to just be like, I could just do it all. Yeah, you can probably. But maybe you shouldn’t be doing it all. You know, that’s something to think through.

So build out that list, really think through it before you start to take action in the day, prioritize it and then go through and glean through the list and be like, “Who can get to do these things.” Assuming you’ll be doing none of them. Of course there will be a handful that you end up doing, but that way it’s just a mindset that will help you get things delegated properly. Here you go Brent.

Brent: Awesome. Hey everybody, it’s good to connect with you. I just want to express how much we appreciate you. Everybody who follows us, who’s obviously dedicated listeners of Russell’s program. It’s funny, more and more as we travel with Russell, even locally here in the Boise area, he’s getting like, people recognize him all over the place. They see the jeep, or they see him in the hallway of the hotel and they’re like, “Hey, I’m your neighbor.” Just these random……Albertsons…..it’s just funny.

Anyway, a couple of things. I’ve had the privilege of working with Russell for over 11 years and the one thing I think that you just cannot replace, or that’s absolutely needed is hard work. You have to be dedicated in getting this business and be willing to sacrifice what you need to sacrifice to get going. Another thing that I think we’ve learned through this journey is stay nimble and small as much as you can. Don’t go out and try to lease some big office space until you’ve got sales coming in, consistent sales, your business is in good shape that way.

Another thing that we’ve kind of followed here in our company is we’ve been slow to hire and quick to fire. Building a team, and Russell’s done a tremendous job of this, obviously we’ve got great partners here. And then that has extended to our team members. Again, we love all our team members. We are essentially a great family of likeminded individuals who are focused on a goal. And the leadership in this company has helped us all work to achieve that goal. So that’s been awesome as well.

So stay small as long as you can, be nimble, be humble, but you gotta work hard. Once you do those things, don’t sweat over the small things. We’ve had different variations of an employee handbook, and I’m just finally getting it out here in the next few weeks. And we’ve been in business three years. So don’t stress about the mistakes. We were somewhere, we were at an event in Denver a few weeks ago, it was related to customer support, and that’s very normal. For small startups, that’s very normal. Those things just come, but don’t worry about those little details. They work themselves out. But work hard and you’ll achieve that success. So I will hand this over to my buddy, Ryan.

Ryan: So I love talking about this topic, and I think it’s best summarized as, “Worse is better.” You can do a lot more than you think. Gary V told us that when we met with him on the social media side. We’re like, “We already do everything, we already do a ton, we’re on everything.” He’s like, “You can do more.” And I think this is true on everything we do in engineering, everything we do when it comes to product. You’ve heard it in every single answer from everybody to some degree.

But I think the killer, underlining subtext to all that, is that constraints are not a limiting factor. They force you to focus, the focus forces you to prioritize, that forces you to do the one thing everyday that’s most valuable so that you can compete with somebody who’s got 40 million dollars in funding and you’ve got three guys in an office trying to figure it out because it makes you laser focus on the thing you have to do every single day.

That’s what enables you to compete at a higher level, that’s what enables, and I believe the most important thing we’ve done in our culture is force everybody, from hiring decisions, to business processes, don’t worry about the handbook, don’t over complicate this, simplify this. Because those constraints are what make us as powerful as we are and what enable to be a hundred million dollar company with a hundred people.

To grow to a billion dollars with fewer resources and a fraction of the budget and everything else. Everyone else who’s competing with us, they have no idea how we do it. They’re all like, “Wait, how many engineers do you have? How do you do this? How big are you?” it blows their mind and I think that’s the thing they miss. Those constraints are what enable us to do it. Our weaknesses are our strengths and people see them backwards. And we see it the opposite. That’s why everyone’s so blown away and why nobody gets it. I think that’s our secret sauce in many ways. So I love that. That’s our thing. That’s what I learned, that blew my mind.

Russell: That’s awesome. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Its fun hanging out and we just want to thank you guys so much for allowing us to serve you and serve your audience. We love what we do. We’re obsessed, we’re passionate, we’ve been up for the last two days going crazy trying to figure out ways to do it better. You know, for us, a lot of people say, “You guys made it to a hundred million. That’s crazy.” That’s step number one for us. We’re just getting started, wait until you see what’s going to be coming out over the next twelve months and beyond. We love you guys, we appreciate you, we’re so grateful for the ability and the right and the gift we have to be able serve you guys in what you guys do. So thanks again so much for everything and we’ll talk to you guys soon, bye everybody.

View Details

Interesting thoughts after my whirlwind week.

On this episode Russell talks about what’s it’s like being an introvert in an extrovert’s business. He shares how you can still be successful while being introverted, just like him. Here are some interesting things in this episode:

Find out why Russell loves speaking in front of thousands of people, but can still be awkward one on one.
See how Russell is able to get past his introverted tenancies to still be able to sell a room.
And find out why you just need to start sharing your message and with consistency you will find your voice.

So listen here to find out how an introvert is making it in this extroverted business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about what it’s like being an introvert inside of an extrovert’s calling. Here we go.

Alright so last week was a little bit insane. I think I only slept about 2 ½ hours last night and I am really excited to fall asleep. The kids are almost all in bed, but one of them is finishing their homework so I’m like, I’m going to sneak away and talk to you guys before I pass out and then go back and finish the homework with them so. That’s why we’re here right now.

So last week there was an event that I wanted to speak at for a long time and I got invited probably about six or seven months ago. I was looking forward to it and then after someone else….I get invited to speak at a lot of events, and unfortunately I have to say no to most of them just because it’s hard to leave and travel and be away from family, so it’s not typically worth the investment or the time away, especially this level in the business. It’s tough because it’s like, I’ve had people come back like, “Hey we’ll pay you $100,000 to come speak.” And I’m like, I feel like a jerk because to be able to travel there, being there, being able to travel back, it’s like, I could do a webinar and clear way more than that, you know what I mean, and be able to go sleep in my own bed at night and be with my kids that night.

So it’s just tough unfortunately. But someone asked me, one of my friends, James Malinchak asked me and since I was already going to be speaking at WarriorCon, which is widespread event that I was super excited to speak at. James is in the same city. So it was like, “Sweet dude. I’ll just drive over and we’ll do this whole thing.” So we’re at the event and I’m like, I’m going to be in LA, what else is in LA? Tai Lopez is in LA, we should go hang out with Tai. Justin and Tara Williams are in LA, we should hang out with them. And it turned out to be really, really cool.

Here comes Bow-dog, who has been working on his homework. Say hi to everybody.

Bowen: Hey!

Russell: Anyway, the vacation was crazy. Basically what happened is Dave and I jumped in a plane and flew out there to LA, and at night we got to the Warrior Event, so we decided to sneak in. We were at the back and we had white shirts on and everyone of the warriors got black shirts on that say “Warrior” on it. I wasn’t speaking until the next day, but I walk in and they came and grabbed the shirts and like, “Go put these on right now.” So we put our shirts on so we could fit in with the whole cult-ture that their building over there.

It was just cool. And then that night I was going to work on slides, I was super tired so I just went to bed. Woke up in the morning and I was going to work on slides, and I was super tired so I didn’t and we went and got massages, don’t tell mom. Massages were really good. Then after the massages I was going to work on the slides, but then I didn’t. And then Justin and Tara came to lunch, we hung out with them for lunch, which was awesome. Then it was like, the ninth hour, or twelfth hour, however that works.

So I had to go get the slides done. So I went up into the room, got my slides done, saw Kevin Anderson who does all our Funnel Hacker TV stuff, he came to come film. And Brandon Fischer was there as well, he does all of other video stuff. So it was kind of cool to have those guys come out as well. They were filming the room, walking around, getting a bunch of footage and everything, which is pretty sweet. So you’ll probably see some of this on Funnel Hacker TV soon.

But that’s kind of what’s happening. It’s so cool, Warrior was insane. 600 men, just insane, everyone dressed in black, it was really, really cool. I was teaching a lot of the Expert Secrets book stuff, but as I was teaching it to them I was also showing how Garret had done it. The process Garret had done to create the Warrior movement, it was really kind of cool to be like, “Here’s this piece of it, here’s how I did it. Here’s what Garret’s doing, here’s what you need to do.” And kind of go through the whole thing. So I think everyone thought it was pretty cool.

The only problem, it’s so bad. I started the presentation and then I come up and Garret does this huge thing to get everyone pumped up and excited and I come on stage and start my slides and my slides aren’t working. And it’s like, I had done all this research to find out, the day we launched Clickfunnels, it was like 138 days later that he had launched his and it had the dates and time and all this stuff in the first slides. So it wasn’t like I could just BS my way through the first three or four slides. They had like pictures and the date and time. I’m like, “Ugh. Well….”

So it was super anticlimactic for probably, seemed like an hour, but probably the first 2 or 3 minutes. And then they came back, you know you get kind of thrown off. It took me 5 or 6 minutes to get back on and then I think the rest of the presentation went pretty well after that.

That was awesome and then we got done and we were supposed to leave to head to Tai Lopez’s house, which is like a 2 hour drive I think, but also Stu McClarin was doing a charity event…..this is homework, we’ll talk about that in a minute. We’re almost done bud, then you can…..

So Stu McClarin is doing an online charity event, so I was supposed to do an interview for that, so I jumped on at the hotel before we left. And of course the hotel internet goes out. It keeps going in and out, so it’s all…..but we did our best there and ended up raising like $22,000 I think for that charity event, which was really sweet to help some families out that have been struggling with hurricane stuff.

Then jumped in an Uber, drove to Tai Lopez’s house, they asked us when we got there, “What’s your hard leave time?” “We have to leave at 11:00 sharp.” So we ended up being there until after 1, almost 1:30 I think. We filmed to info products there, ate dinner with Tai and then did an interview with him, which if you haven’t seen yet, it’s online. It ended up being almost 2 hours long, it was really good. I’m going to see if I can get it on the podcast, so I may play here for you guys to hear. It turned out really cool. If I do that I will explain some of the reason behind the podcast.

But we got done with that at like 1 in the morning. Jumped in an Uber and got to the new hotel somewhere else by 2. And then passed out and woke up at like 6 because I still had to do slides for the next day’s event. So I was working on slides all day. Then got down, get onstage at James event, closed 30% of the room on our package, did the whole thing and by the time we left, we were driving to the airport and I’m like, I just can’t keep my eyes open, I’m so tired.

We drive to the airport, fly home and it’s interesting, because in those situations, I’m onstage, 100’s of people, everyone’s cheering, I love that. That’s me, as Russell the extrovert. I love that. My calling in life and in business is like, requires me to do that, be good at that. Because I gotta stand onstage in front of all of these people and entertain and inspire and hopefully give them the tools they need to be able to move forward.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that’s not natural to me. I’m not naturally very extroverted. In fact, my whole entire life up until probably 10 years ago, when I kind of started into this business, it wasn’t even when I started this business, it was way into the business before I realized I had to start learning how to speak, talk. But I was super introverted, in fact, still am very, very introverted. But when I’m in those situations, I’m at an event and I’m onstage, it comes out of me. I love it, I really, really enjoy it but it’s funny because Dave, who’s there at all these events, he told me, “You’re onstage, you’re present, doing your thing, loving it. Then you get off stage and someone comes and asks you a question and you just shrink in this weird introverted, like you can tell I’m not comfortable in that kind of situation.”

At James Malinchak’s event, it’s funny because I haven’t spoken at an event like that, where you speak and sell and people can ask you questions afterwards for a long time. And it was just tough because I’m in the back of the room and probably for an hour and a half I had people ask me question after question after question. Which is just like, super uncomfortable for me typically. And introverted Russell was really, really struggling.

And then it’s funny, I got home, we took an Uber home, flew home, got back to my house about midnight and the next morning at like 8:00 we had this big church Christmas party that my wife was in charge of. Such a crazy week. So we get there and there’s you know, all the entire church, all these people, and all this stuff, and I’m there with the kids because she was stuff ready. So I bring the kids in and it was just interesting. I come in and totally introverted Russell took over. Not comfortable in that situation.

I kind of sat down at the table with my kids and there’s all these amazing people who go to church with us, that I know who they are, I like them, I like them a lot. There’s especially a bunch of guys that I really think are just awesome. And it’s so weird how much fear I have to go and just say hi to them. I hate it. That’s one thing that really frustrates me about myself. In my element, it’s easy to go out there and people come to me, because it’s the brand I built. I go to events and people come and they want to ask me questions, so it’s really easy. It just very naturally comes to me and I can talk to them.

But I go to these other places where no one really knows who I am, and it’s just, I’m a person. It’s hard. I don’t know why I struggle so much to just walk up and say to them and talk to them. It’s interesting how much that introvert side of me, how much I struggle with that.

I remember sitting there the whole Christmas party, looking around and seeing all these amazing people, people that are fascinated by us, “I want to go talk to that person, I want to ask them a question, or do whatever.” But I honestly have so much fear inside of me, it drives me nuts. All this fear keeps me from going and saying hi, just going and talking to them. And even when they do come say hi to me or whatever, it’s just weird.

I’m really good at carrying on a conversation when people come and ask me questions, you know, but it’s like, we’re on mutual ground, they don’t really know much about me or whatever, I really struggle. I always try to think, I need to be interesting and ask them questions about themselves, but I’m just not as good at that. It’s just fascinating, the contrast of the night before I was onstage in front of all these people, people chanting my name and screaming and going crazy, people crying and this whole thing.

And then the next day I’m around people that live near me and I can’t even…it’s interesting. So that’s a little glimpse of what it looks like to be an introvert in an extrovert position or calling. So unless you think that I got everything put together, I still get scared to death. One of my biggest fears in life is calling people. I hate calling people on the phone, it scares me to death. That’s why I use Voxer with my inner circle members, that’s why I never, the only phone call I ever answer is from my wife. Everyone else I make go to voicemail, then I listen to the voicemail and if it sounds awesome I call them back, otherwise I just don’t call them back at all. I’ll text them back or I’ll vox them back. Just because I have these weird fears about that.

Anyway, it’s not just me, it’s everyone. So don’t feel bad if you are like, “I’m too introverted I’m never going to be good at this business. I don’t dare talk to people.” I get that. Still to this day, I get so nervous behind it. But that’s one of the powers and beautiful things about this kind of business. My thoughts are like, when you are introverted it’s really hard to do face to face, one on one selling. Nothing scares me more than that.

It’s funny how we built huge call centers and stuff like that and I don’t think I’ve ever picked up the phone and called someone and sold them on the phone. I don’t think I would even have the guts to do that yet. I can stand in front of a room of a thousand people or five thousand people and sell.

For example, I’m speaking at Grand Cardone’s event in February and there’s supposed to be somewhere between 8500 and 10,000 people. I’m so excited for that. The extrovert in me is like, yes, this is going to be awesome, I’ll step onstage, I’ll speak, I’ll sell. It’ll be so much fun. And then afterwards in the hallway, anyone asks me questions I get all awkward and weird. Hopefully someday I figure it out.

So hopefully my kids, hopefully Bowen over here, will never be nervous. Do you get nervous from talking to people at all?

Bowen: Yeah.

Russell: Do you get nervous standing in front of a lot of people and talking?

Bowen: Yeah.

Russell: Both of them?

Bowen: I’m about to do it in front of my entire class.

Russell: You’re giving a presentation tomorrow?

Bowen: Wednesday.

Russell: On Wednesday? Does it make you nervous?

Bowen: Yeah.

Russell: What makes you more nervous, talking in front of a class of a whole bunch of people, or just talking one on one with somebody?

Bowen: Probably the whole class.

Russell: The whole class does? Interesting. See for me, I was just telling them, when I’m onstage with a whole bunch of people I feel comfortable, but then one on one I get really nervous.

Bowen: if it’s one on one I guess you do kind of get nervous. I mean, it was kind of hard for me to do this because one on one is kind of hard because if you mess up they’ll recognize it. Except if it’s a lot of people, they don’t yell it out.

Russell: Anyway, I just wanted to share with you guys tonight, I don’t think this is something anyone is going to learn much from, other than hopefully give the introverts out there some hope that they can do this.

And people that are extroverted, help them understand their super powers. A lot of those guys are going to be a lot better one on one and a lot of introverts just seem like….it’s funny, because it’s not just me either. I was talking to Frank Kern and he’s like, “I love doing big events, but it scares me to talk to people afterward.” He’s super introverted. I think a lot of people in these kinds of positions are.

So it’s neat because it’s something that introverts can thrive in, in mass situation, but then they’re…even within there they can still have success. Hopefully that helps some of you guys who may get nervous or may think, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this. I’m not like Russell.” I get people all the time, “I’m not like you Russell. I can’t stand up in front of people and just talk for hours.” I’m like, “Dude, but you can talk to someone face to face, I can’t do that. It scares the crap out of me.” I mean, that’s a bad word here, in this family. It scares the..something else out of me. That’s the worse swear word you’re going to hear from Russell.

Bowen: Crud maybe.

Russell: Crud? It scares the crud out of me. Yeah, that’s way better. Good job. Anyway, I hope that helps those introverts out here to understand how it is that you can still succeed in an extroverts world. In doing this stuff, the Expert Secrets stuff, putting your voice out there, putting your message out there. Because when all is said and done, the only thing that really matters is the impact you have on people’s lives.

So do it, it’s worth it. At first you’re not going to be very good, but if you get consistent with it, you get better and better and better. I think I told you guys, Steven Larsen told me, because I started this podcast back before I knew how to see if anybody was listening to it, so I think for four or five years I didn’t have it hooked to any stat system. And I’m glad I didn’t know because I just kept doing it and doing it. And Steven Larsen said to me one time, “Yeah, the first 45-46 episodes weren’t very good. After that it started getting really, really good though.”

But that’s how it kind of works. It’s all about you guys getting out there and sharing, sharing, and sharing and eventually you’ll get comfortable with your voice. I just watched Alex Charfin, he launched his Momentum podcast after the Pirates Cove mastermind this year, and he’s passed like 80 thousand downloads, which is awesome. And what he just posted on Facebook about it was just, because he thought about doing a podcast forever and I was the one that was like, “Dude, just do it. You’d be awesome at it. Just jump off the cliff.” And he said that by doing it, it was really cool. He’s like, “I found my voice. People started finding me. Other people referred people and my audience grew. I have people listening to my voice every single day and it’s just like such a good thing.”

But again, it’s all about just doing it. And the more you do it, the better, the more your message will get clear, the better you’ll find your voice, the more comfortable you’ll feel. The nicest thing about these mass media things that we have, podcasts and videos, webinars, things like that, is that even if you’re introverted you can still do this because you don’t have to talk face to face to anybody. You can do group selling, group everything and it’s awesome.

So there you go, that’s all I got. I’m going to go get this kid to bed, get his homework done so I can go to bed because I am so tired. Appreciate you all, talk to you soon. Bye.

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The two most important things your can do between now and the end of the year to double your business for next year.

On today’s episode talks about his upcoming meeting with his partners to plan next year, and goes on to explain why he’s simplifying his value ladder and his life. Here are some awesome things you will hear in this episode:

Why it’s important to have a planning meeting with your partners to decide what you want to achieve for the next year.
What kind of things Russell is doing to simplify his value ladder and why he’s doing it.
And why Russell is turning off two programs that each do well over a million dollars each year.

So listen here to find out how you too can simplify your value ladder.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, so I’m out walking, I just took the garbage out. If you look out here it is getting close to Christmas time, Thanksgiving is over. For those who are watching the video, these are the lights we have wrapped around our house, lighting up for the Christmas holiday, which is kind of fun. So I’m just going to walk around here so you guys can see my face and get enough light to connect on camera. For those who are listening in, I hope you had an amazing holiday, Thanksgiving, getting ready for the end of the year.

The end of the year is always a fun time for us marketers and entrepreneurs because it’s focusing and planning for the beginning of next year, which is coming soon. So it’s kind of fun, we got not this week but next week, Todd and Ryan and everyone’s flying here to Boise and we’re going to be doing a big partner meeting and planning out the rest of this year, world domination for next year and set our big HAG’s, our big hairy audacious goals, figure out what we’re going to do and reverse engineer that to make it possible.

It was kind of fun, I was watching a podcast I did last year that basically said, “These are our goals, here are the five Hail Mary passes we’re going to do to try to hit those goals.” If you haven’t listened to that podcast, rewind to about a year ago and listen to it. That’s what’s going to be the goal of this meeting. We’re going to set our big goal, what we’re trying do and then I’m not going to just have one execution plan, but here’s four or five things we’re going to do to hit that goal, if one or two of them hit, then we’ll hit these crazy big goals. That’s what we’re going to be doing, not this week, but next week. So I’m sure I’ll be doing podcasts from there talking about it.

But I’m excited for that. If you haven’t done that yet, make sure this year before the end of the year that you spend some time and block it out with your team and do that. Figure out again, what’s the big goal, and reverse engineer what you gotta do to make that happen. And then from there figure out 3 or 4 different Hail Mary passes that you gotta throw to get your big goal. So that’s kind of what we’re going to be doing, I’m excited for it and it’s going to be fun.

So what I wanted to share with you guys tonight really quick before I head back in, because it’s a really beautiful night. It’s not too cold, it’s just kind of nice for a little walk around the yard. So what I’ve been working on, on my side, and I talked about this a little bit after inner circle meetings, one of the big aha’s. It’s kind of funny how we go through these cycles, we know things and then we forget them and re-realize them. But the Dotcom Secrets book we talk a lot about the value ladder, right. And it’s funny because ever since we launched Expert Secrets we haven’t talked as much about that. Because Expert Secrets is all about figuring out the first part, the what and how. What are you selling and how are you selling it.

So it’s like figuring out how to create your offer and how to position yourself, create your mass movement, figure out what you believe and what you don’t believe, what’s your future based cause, who are your people, all those kind of things. And then you create a message, presentation to get people to follow you to sell your products and that process takes a little while. You gotta re-do your presentation four, five, or six times until you get it perfect, and then you’re driving traffic and you keep doing that. And eventually if you do it enough times, follow the process, do a webinar live every single week for a while, keep tweaking and changing based on what we talked about in the book, eventually you hit it and you know you hit it because you go from $0 to a million dollars fast.

That is when you’ve figured out the what and the how. What it is you’re actually selling, and how you sell it. So eventually you get that figured out. Now the next phase is really shifting back to the Dotcom Secrets stuff. Now you got customers coming in, and this is where entrepreneurs start freaking out because then they start talking about the value ladder. I need upsells and downsells and backends and frontends, and they start going crazy.

And what I want to talk about is the big aha I had from the inner circle meetings. I’m watching the people that are crushing it and the ones who are struggling, and the consistency amongst the people in the inner circle that are killing it is that most of them came in and had one thing figured out, and they got that working. That’s about the time they joined the inner circle, right. Because people need to be making about a million bucks a year to be in there. So it’s kind of the fit, right. So they came in the group then, and then they’re trying to figure out what’s the next, how does it all work?

And really what’s interesting, the people who are growing the fastest, what they’re doing is they’re very systematically building out the backend of the value ladder. And most value ladders are simple, in fact, traditionally most people making money, they focus on the middle first. The webinar or something like that in the middle. They build out the backend, whatever that thing is, and then that’s done. You have the middle and the backend and it stops. You don’t keep creating any more backend stuff. That’s the end of it.

And then what your business is moving forward is creating new front end offers that bring people into the middle of the value ladder, which is essentially the backend. And I started looking, it was interesting, I lost my way, I’d forgotten these lessons. It’s funny, I kind of created them in the Dotcom Secrets book and I forgot some of them. It’s been a little while since I revisited those thoughts. And what I realized is that my value ladder came and kind of split up and broke off and there’s all these different things that people could do. And it was, we’re monetizing a bunch of them, but there’s confusion.

So it’s interesting, there’s actually two programs that we have, both that do well over a million bucks over a year that I am turning off. Not because they’re not awesome, they are. Not because they’re not making money, they are. It’s because they don’t, they’re deviants, they deviate off the value ladder. My value ladder’s very, very simple moving forward. So the rest of this year, I’m trying to get these few things in place to execute on that. But it’s very simple.

What it is, we have a webinar where I sell Clickfunnels, Funnel Building Secrets, which is the new Funnel Hacks, Funnel Scripts and Traffic Secrets. Those four products, bundled together, own six full months of Clickfunnels for $2,000. That’s what I sell, that’s the thing.

I did a webinar a couple of weeks ago, it did really well. That’s what I sell, that’s the middle of the value ladder, $2,000 thing. On the backend of that we have our Two Comma Club Coaching, which will be releasing here probably at the live event. And that will be where we take everyone to and that’s the value ladder, that’s the backend. Inner Circle is full, so we’re not taking any more people in there. So we’re going $2,000 for Clickfunnels and then whatever the pricing is on the Two Comma Club coaching that’s coming up and that’s it. And that won’t deviate, that won’t change. That’ll be the same for forever.

And all I will be doing, from this point forward for hopefully the rest of my life, the rest of my business career is just creating cool frontends. So I’ll have the Dotcom Secrets book, which is a frontend, then the Expert Secrets book, which is a frontend, eventually we’ll have Traffic Secrets, the Marketing Secrets and other ones. Perfect webinar, all these other things. I’ll just be having fun and creating frontends, but the only point of frontend is to get people to ascend up to the $2,000 and from the $2,000 to the Two Comma Club coaching. And that’s it, that’s my business.

And I get to figure out cool and new ways to sell frontends and that’s all I’m doing, selling frontends. That’s it. So it’s very simple. So all of your creative juices in entrepreneurship is on figuring out the next event, the next backend and all that kind of stuff, it should be simple. It should just be, what’s a cool frontend we can drive more people into. And that’s kind of the game, so I’m excited. You’ll see some of the tweaks I’m making now with this severe hyper focus on the value ladder.

Somebody buys the Expert Secrets book, if I know that this is my severe hyper focus thing, what’s the process I’m taking them? They buy the book, they go through the upsell, downsell process, the thank you page I’ll have a live presentation right there of me pitching the $2,000 thing. Right there and after they finish that it’s like, “Hey, do you want to apply for coaching? Come here.” And it’s just, that’s the process, very simple, very easy. We’ll just replicate it over and over again.

So anyway, I’m simplifying my business, simplifying my life. Hopefully those of you listening to this will simplify earlier, not later. Because sometimes we get all excited and then next thing we know there’s a billion things happening and….simplify now.

Anyway, that’s all I got for you. I’m heading in right now; get to bed because we got a crazy week starting tomorrow, which I’m excited for. Hopefully this gives you guys a couple of things. Number one, hopefully it gives you guys some thoughts on doing your team core planning meeting with you and your partners. If it’s just and your employees or whatever it is, if it’s just you and your spouse, or just you. Sit down and plan next year’s goals, figure out, reverse engineer what you need to do to actually execute on that and hit them and then figure out what the 3 or 4 Hail Mary passes are you’re going to need to throw to be able to get the big goals.

And number two is really map out your value ladder, try to simplify it as much as you can. That’s what I’m doing. You guys will see it, coming January first, a bunch of new, fun, clean, simplified things will be coming out of team Clickfunnels here. So I’m excited for it. That’s all I got.

If you haven’t got your tickets for funnel hacking live yet, they’re getting close to being sold out. We sold a ton of them over this last weekend. So if you don’t have your tickets yet, now is the time, go to funnelhackinglive.com. That’s about it. With that said, appreciate you all, thanks for listening, thanks for subscribing and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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This is the marketing secret I’m dusting off from the archives of one of the greatest campaigns we ever ran.

On this episode Russell talks about going old school with a technique he used to use that worked every single time. He gives all the information you need to be able to do it for your business. Here are some cool things on this episode:

How Russell used to use this technique back in the day.
How you can use it to build curiosity, which translates into people signing up for a membership site.
And why Russell himself hasn’t used this technique in a while, but why he’s going to use it again very soon with Clickfunnels.

So listen below to find out what awesome technique Russell used in the past with massive success, that he plans on using again.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I got something exciting I want to share with you right now.

Alright everybody, there’s something I talked a lot about in my inner circle recently, it seems like a lot of people are launching membership programs, membership sites. Have you guys ever had something where you did something really successful for a long time and for some reason you stopped doing it and then you don’t know why you did?

So that’s one of these ideas that came out, so I shared it with a bunch of them and they’re all going crazy and a bunch of them are all trying it out right . I was like, man, this should be a marketing secret that I share with everyone else. So I’m bringing it to the podcast.

So this is what it is. This is a way, if you’ve got a membership site, to stimulate growth really, really rapidly. It can help you get a hundred signups in like a day, or 200 hundred or 1,000 depending on how big your thing is. How to get a whole bunch really, really quick. I haven’t yet done this with Clickfunnels, but I’m going to. Maybe I’ll do it on January 1st….anyway, I don’t know.

But I used to do this back in the day on our membership sites and I saw initially, the person I modeled and did this first was a guy name Alex Mendosian and they did it to fill up a whole bunch of people in their software program, which was kind of cool. So I watched them do it, and then I did it four or five times afterwards and it worked amazingly well every single time and then for some reason I stopped doing it. Because that’s what we do, when things work we just stop doing them sometimes. The ADD-ness of an entrepreneurs mind.

Anyway, so this is a really important, really cool one. So this is the strategy. I will walk you through all the pieces, and hopefully it gives you guys a tool you can use anytime you want to sell some stuff really, really quick. So what we do, is we would promote it, I did it back in the day of the teleseminars. I think it would still work with teleseminars, in fact, it’s almost….anyway, who knows. It will definitely work with webinars as well, or Facebook Live, or a lot of different ways you could do it. But the big key is you’re promoting an event. The event is to talk about something cool. A new discovery you’ve figured out which is brand new to whatever you do.

There’s different ways to position it. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book there’s 5 different curiosity hooks we have in there. But my favorite one for this is, “Oh my gosh, I figured out this thing, I want to show it to you guys live. So you have to be on this thing because I’m going to teach you, show you, walk you behind the scenes of this new thing that just came out.” A new discovery is the hook that I love for this the most.

For example, last time we did this, this was back when we had, when we were focusing more on business opportunity seekers as opposed to entrepreneurs, and we had figured out a way to generate leads, it was really cool what we were doing. We were going to CPA networks and there were these offers that were getting a thousand sales a day and the people who had these offers, would actually sell you the leads. It’s not a strategy that I believe in or I would recommend or I don’t think anyone should ever do, but it was a really cool thing.

So we were tapping into these CPA networks so that offers, basically when someone would opt in for an offer and then they would buy that person’s product and we would get the lead put into our auto responder, kind of like code reds, but a little different. We were getting a couple thousand leads a day coming in and it was really, really cool. I probably shouldn’t have told you that because now some of you guys will be like, “Teach us that.” But don’t. It’s a horrible idea. It will get your auto responder shut down; people won’t know who you are. It’s not spamming, but it’s as close as you can get without having legal issues. So don’t do it, it’s bad.

But back then, it was the new opportunity, the new thing. I was like, oh my gosh this is amazing. So what I did, I did this teleseminar. I was like, “Hey I want you guys to jump on and I’m going to show you this new way that we found out to get an extra three thousand leads a day. And it’s happening every single day, it’s crazy.” People are like, “What?!” They’re going crazy, they want the thing. So they get on, and this is a mini, it’s not a perfect webinar, so don’t think of it as the perfect webinar. This is me talking about a new discovery I just had and I’m going to teach them what it is. I said that with emphasis on purpose. I’m teaching what it is. What is the thing.

So it’s the what, not to be confused with the how. There’s a what and there’s a how. So this is the what. This is what this new thing is. So for 45 minutes I told the story about how I figured this thing out and where I met this person and how it worked and I showed them exactly what it was and here are the offers that the CPA offers in there. And here’s how you plug in your auto responder and this is what it was. And from there we’re getting three thousand leads a day, coming in consistently.

So I showed the what and people were going nuts. Oh my gosh, I want to do this. But the problem is they know the what, but they don’t understand the how. How you actually do it, how you find the offers, the people, how do you negotiate, how much is it going to cost? All those kind of things. So they know the what, but not the how.

So you show them the what in a 45 minute thing and this is basically you telling the story about how you figured out the what. If you tell them the story about how you figured out the what and the result you’re getting from the what, and they’re like, “What the dump?” that’s a Brunsonism I think. “What the dump?”

And then at that point you step back and say, it’s a clock, so you start at the top of the hour, spend 45 minutes. And at that point where they’re like, “What the dump? I need this.” You say, “Wait, I actually am not going to show you, I don’t have to show you this right now. But for all of my members over here inside of Clickfunnels, inside of my membership site, inside of whatever my thing is, I’m going to be doing a 90 minute break down and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this. HOW to do this.”

“So if you’re a member, congratulations! Log into the members area, the call in number or the login number for the webinar is right there on the dashboard. It’s there, go login, jump on the training. This is a live training, I’m doing live. I’m not recording it, I’m not going to share it ever again. It’s happening one time and one time only. If you want it, now is the time. So go login to the members area, and go login.”

“If you’re not a member yet, you’ve got exactly 15 minutes before this training starts. In 15 minutes the clock hits the top of the hour, I pull it off the page, and if you wait to sign up til 5 minutes later, you missed your shot. It is gone forever. The only way to ever understand the how on how to do this, is to be on that live training. In fact, we got 3 other experts, the people you need to meet, the person who’s going to help you get this thing started, whatever it is, is going to be there on the call. But this is a onetime only, not being recorded, and it starts in exactly 14 minutes. So you better hurry now. Go sign up right now for the trial at whatever.com.”

You push them into the membership site fast. People freak out. They’ve got this 15 minute window to go signup, get their account, get logged in, get the downloading, so they can get in on this special live training to show them the how. So that’s the marketing secret. That’s the trick you guys, it’s like the coolest thing ever.

So again, to kind of recap, you’ve got to have a really cool new discovery. You have a new discovery and you want to show them what it is. You get people to come onto either Facebook Live, the teleseminar, or the webinar, it doesn’t matter the vehicle you’re doing it through, just get it on a live event that’s happening so you build some curiosity, anticipation, getting excited. You get on there and say, “This is the what. I’m going to show it to you.” And you tell the story about how you figured out the what, you show them the big result that you got from this what.

And you say, “look, in 15 minutes for all of our paid members, we’re starting the how training. So go login and jump on the how training, we’re going to show you what to do. If you are a member, congratulations, it’s in the members area. If you’re not a member yet, you have 15 minutes before this puppy goes live, so now’s the time to start running. And go.” And you’ll watch your phone with all your stripe notifications, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.”

I’ve seen times when we’ve signed up 4 or 500 people in 15 minutes for membership sites, which is insane. So it works. Let’s say your list is smaller, you only sign up 100 people. It’s fine, the conversion rates on these, especially if you have a free trial for the membership site, the conversion rates on these things are like 50% of the people who are on your webinar will sign up, it’s crazy.

Again, I have not done one for a long time, but I’m going to probably do one for Clickfunnels here maybe in January. That’ll be fun. I’m going to do it, you’ll see me execute on it. But most of you guys should have enough intel to be able to do it faster.

So there you go, the what and the how is pretty awesome. I hope you guys love it, I hope you guys use it. Let me know if you do, and if you got any value from this, please share this episode and all episodes with your friends, your family members, other marketers, people you know could benefit from this. Again, this is the Marketing Secrets podcast, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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A conversation I had today explains the reason why most businesses end up suffocating and dying.

On today’s episode Russell talks about something awesome he witnessed with his kids school. He goes on to talk about discussing marketing with another parent at school and why he considers it the lifeblood of a business. Here are some of the insightful things in this episode:

Why marketing is the lifeblood of a company.
How cutting back on marketing in a business is like putting pressure on the carotid artery in wrestling.
And how to get a successful business by tripling down on your marketing.

So listen here to find out why you need to become obsessed with the marketing of your product, rather than the product itself.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing today.

Alright everybody, it is the day before Thanksgiving. We have 20 bubble soccer balls being delivered to my house; we’re going to be playing a huge bubble soccer game on the smurf turf, which is really exciting. Or the Astroturf, we call it smurf turf because of the blue here in Boise. Looking forward to that.

But everything’s getting ready. We had wrestling practice this morning with the kiddos, and I had some cool experiences that happened there. One that was just a special moment that I want to share with you guys and one that was the reason why most people aren’t successful in business. So I’ll give you both and hopefully you’ll learn a lesson from the two.

So number one, it’s really cool. At the kids school, there’s a kid, it’s kind of a crazy story. Apparently his mom and him both found out they had cancer about the same time, together. It’s a cute little family, a little kid named Nico. So at the Junior high, or middle school, whatever you call it, it’s gotten around this story, and trying to help them out. It was just cute, all the kids wear Huskies for Nico t-shirts. Dallin had a shirt on today that said Huskies for Nico. They do fundraisers for Nico and all these things, it’s just such a cool thing how they’ve gotten the school behind this one person, this one cause or movement.

And its cool, I always talk about building mass movements and things like that, but I think a lot of times these little private, intimate movements that mean so much to people and really help people to become something more. And it’s just cool watching this and watching my kids participate in this movement for a little kid in their school named Nico.

So today at wrestling practice we got all these, probably 60 or 70 wrestlers out there training to be warriors, trying to be tough and everything. In the middle of practice Nico and his dad came in, and when he walked in the whole room went silent out of respect for him. It was just one of the neatest experiences that I’ve witnessed in a long time. I got chills sitting there watching and all the kids sitting there looking at him and talking to him. They came in and they presented him, because Nico was a wrestler as well before all these problems happened. So they gave him wrestling t-shirts and sweatshirts and stuff like that. And then they had Nico lead a cheer. So they brought everyone in and did their cheer. And it was such a special, such a cool thing. So anyway that was a fun thing that happened today.

And then afterwards I was talking to one of the dads, and the dad’s a successful real estate dude here in Boise, and it’s kind of funny because he’s like, “Hey I recognize you. I see you in my newsfeed every single day.” I’m like, “Sorry about that. Wish I was better looking.” But it was kind of funny because he was in there and we were talking for a while afterwards and it was interesting because there’s a big reason why more people aren’t successful. It’s a mindset little tweak and it’s something he had, definitely. So I want to share with you because if you’re stuck in this mindset tweak, it’s what’s keeping you back.

I did a podcast episode, I don’t know a hundred podcasts ago talking about not outsourcing your lovemaking, and in there I talked about if you look at a business, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If you’re selling houses, cars, supplements, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, you’re selling. That part doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, the marketing is the only thing that matters. It’s the only thing that’s actually the lifeblood of a business. It’s what drives leads and customers and sales. It’s the only thing that actually matters.

I could take my marketing systems and plug them into any business and it will work. Because business psychology’s insane, how we can get leads and it’s the same, how we convert those leads is the same. So we’re talking to him and he’s like, “Yeah, I saw Clickfunnels. I just haven’t done it yet.” I’m like, “Oh, whatever.” It doesn’t affect me at all. And he’s like, “Can I ask a question? Do you guys do stuff for real estate agents? I watched the viral video with the squirrel and the prospector, sounds like it’s only for selling products.” I’m like, “No, it’s for, it generates leads, sells products, whatever you need it to be.” And he’s like, “Oh, do you have anyone in real estate doing it?” I’m like, “Yeah, we have tons of people.” Off the top of my head we have like a half a dozen people or so that are killing it, real estate agents using it.

In fact I even told him, “There’s a guy that’s got one of the biggest brokerages here in Boise, he’s using it.” He’s like, “I hired some marketing company to do that for me and they’re trying to get us leads.” And I’m like, “So is it working good?” and he’s like, “No, not really. I wish we could just get rid of all the leads, but all the other agents underneath us, they want the internet leads so we have to do that and I don’t like it. I just think it’s done. Right now we’re selling about a hundred houses a year, if we got to the point where we had 200 houses a year, then we could afford to hire a full time marketing person to generate leads and stuff.”

As a marketing guy here, I wanted to grab the guy and be like, “What are you…how do you not understand this?” it’s like saying, let’s say you’re struggling in your marriage and you’re like, “My wife and I when we start having, when marriage gets good and we’re happy and everything is perfect, then we’ll go to counseling.” No, counseling or whatever it is, is what gets you there. It’s just funny, when we’ve grown high enough that we can afford someone to generate leads, then we’ll generate leads. No, you can’t afford not to. You should stop everything you’re doing and the only thing you should do is generate leads.

It’s funny because he’s like, “The biggest person in town, they sell a thousand houses a month, but they’re doing all of it online and generating all these leads online, but they’re able to do it because they’re selling so many houses.” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. It’s because they’re doing that they’re able to sell so many houses. It’s not because they have so many houses they can do it. It’s like the chicken and the egg. It’s like you’re trying to cut off the oxygen to your brain, your brain will stop. So don’t, it is the lifeblood….”

And he’s like, “Can we hire you guys to do that stuff for me?” I’m like, “No, we certify people that can do it, but if you really want to be successful, you have to become the head of the marketing. You cannot outsource your lovemaking. You can’t do that in business and expect it to be awesome. In your marriage if you’re like, okay this is my wife, I’m going to outsource the lovemaking to somebody else, your marriage is going to fail. It’s the same thing in your business. It is the lifeblood, it is the thing that gets customers into your world and gets them to like you and believe you and trust you and give you money. It’s the most important part of business.”

I think the biggest problem, it’s funny, if you listen to the Emyth by Michael Gerber, he talks about this. People are technicians and they have an entrepreneurial seizure and they think they want to start a business because they work at a cake factory and they see the dude who runs the cake shop and they’re like, “This guys a moron, I could do a better job than that.” So they start their own business and they’re not entrepreneurs, they’re dudes that build cakes. It’s like, the dude that builds the cake, anyone can build a cake. You can hire a lot of people to do that. It’s the person who is going to actually sell the crap out of the cakes that runs the business. If you don’t have that, your business dies.

It’s funny, in 2008 when the economy crashed and all these companies were crashing, I see all these people in the companies that their first instinct was not, let’s lower costs on stupid stuff. They all cut their marketing and their sales budget. I’m like, okay we’re struggling, let’s cut off the lifeblood to our head.

Like in wrestling, when I’m wrestling somebody, there’s a little, for those watching the video, right here on both sides of your neck there is a thing called a carotid artery. And if I’m wrestling someone and I get them in a front headlock, if I put a little bit of pressure right there, against the carotid artery, that fast the blood flow stops to your head.

It’s not like someone chokes and eventually you die. But with the carotid artery, if I touch it right, that fast you will black out. It’s really fun when you’re wrestling somebody, when you’re getting it, you get it and boom, and his whole body goes limp and you flip him over and you pin him. Because it’s the blood that goes to your brain. If you cut off the blood, it’s like a second and you’re out cold. And I take it back off and the blood keeps coming and you’re back alive.

So companies go and cut off the lifeblood and then the company dies that fast. That is what’s keeping you alive. In times of bad economy, triple down on the advertizing, triple down on the marketing. You guys all know that. I’m preaching to the choir here. But for everyone else, I just wanted to kind of talk about that because I thought it was so funny.

I told him that and he’s like, “Oh, lead generation for me is nurturing the clients we have and things like that, and we can’t outsource that. That’s my lovemaking.” Or something. Anyway, so that’s all I gotta say. I don’t even know what to say. If you want to grow a company, focus on the marketing and sales of the thing. I know most of you guys are in business because you love the thing you do. That’s awesome. But if you want to have a lot of people use that thing, you’ve got to become obsessed with the marketing of the thing. That is the key, the marketing of the thing is the business. The business is not the thing.

The thing is the fulfillment of whatever you want to do, but the business is the marketing of the thing. And that’s the only thing that actually matters because without that, your company dies. With that, the lifeblood goes off to your brain and instantly you’re out cold. That’s why I look at us versus other SAAS companies, other SAAS companies are focusing on hiring these huge teams of people to do whatever, I don’t know what they even do. We focus on marketing, marketing drives it.

So there you go guys. I hope that helps some of you guys who are thinking and wondering, “I’m going to hire a marketing team.” It’s hard to do. You can do it, but if you really want to grow, you’ve got to become obsessed with the marketing of your thing. You’ve got to not try to outsource your lovemaking and realize that that is the business. And if you want to be in business, you want to be an entrepreneur, like the entrepreneurial seizure you had trying to start this cake company or your whatever thing is that you sell. If you want that baby to survive and to live, being obsessed with the thing is not going to do it. It’s being obsessed with the marketing of the thing.

So I hope that helps, I appreciate you all. I’m going to go, I got a couple of hours to work, get my to-do list killed, crushed so I can have a Thanksgiving that’s not stressful. For those who know, us entrepreneurs, my buddy Alex Charfen always says, we’re all about momentum. So it’s like, Thanksgiving scares me because there’s no momentum. I gotta get so much momentum over the next four hours; before I gotta go back home that it will knock down any dominoes tomorrow that are standing up when I’m trying to relax with the family. So that’s it you guys. I appreciate you all, have an amazing day. Bye.

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If you structure your value ladder right, you’ll never have to do a payment plan.

On this episode Russell answers a question posted on Facebook about why he doesn’t do payment plans. Here are some of the awesome things he has to say in today’s episode.

The reason Russell doesn’t have payment plans, and it’s not only because he doesn’t sell to broke people.
Why being handed an already successful business that you didn’t have to work for will usually cause it to fail.
And how Russell justify’s giving away stuff for free and what his philosophy about it is.

So listen here to find out why Russell doesn’t usually give an option for payment plans.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? It’s Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Tonight we are going to be hanging out with some Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Alright so, why am I talking real quiet? Because it’s late at night and the wife and kids, everyone is asleep. Why am I eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Because I have committed that by Funnel Hacking Live I’m going to be in shape. So, Bart Miller who helped dress me at Funnel Hacking Live, he just went through this big body transformation, got ripped with a six pack and everything. I was like, “Alright Bart, we’re going to do it, just get me in shape.” So we’re going to do it, but it doesn’t start until the day after Thanksgiving, so I got a week to eat garbage. I’ve been eating really healthy for the last 6 months, right now I’m going to go as unhealthy as possible so I’m eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch at like midnight. How great is that? I’m pretty excited about that.

Alright, I was just going through Facebook right now and somebody asked a good question, they said, “How come RB (I’m assuming that’s me, hopefully), why doesn’t Russell use payment plans on anything?” It was fun because all the, everyone’s just kind of throwing out their guess of why they think I don’t use payment plans and stuff like that. I’m just going to tell you why.

A couple of things, first off, it’s not that I don’t believe in payment plans. I think a lot of times you will make more money when you offer payment plans, but there’s just things about it that drive me crazy. Especially online, one of the big ones to drive me crazy is the fact that there’s no repercussions if someone signs up for a thousand dollar course and you give three payments or whatever, and they do one of the three payments and then they don’t do anything else. There’s nothing you can do, you can’t go after them, you can’t call them out. It’s just kind of frustrating.

In the digital world, unfortunately there are a lot of people who, they’ll get one payment through, they’ll go through some of the course, then they’ll feel okay not doing it. It just kind of bugs me. That’s not really the real reason. You know the real reason why I don’t do them for the most part, and I won’t say that I won’t do them because there’ll be situations I’m sure I will in the future. One of our new higher coaching programs will be having a payment program, which I’ve never done that in the past, but we will be just to be helping people with cash flow and stuff like that.

But the main reason I don’t is because, one person commented and said, “Russell doesn’t do it because Russell’s rule is don’t sell to broke people.” And well, that’s mostly true. It’s not that I don’t like broke people or that I don’t want to help them. But if you study my stuff, especially Dotcom Secrets, in the book I talk about the value ladder. I’m taking people up the value ladder and I know full well that people likely come into my world and they don’t have money when they first come in. So I’m like, okay how can I provide the most value possible so they have everything they need to be successful? On the front end, on my books, my perfect webinar training, things like that that are free plus shipping or really, really low price. I don’t hold stuff back on that.

Dan Henrie’s a good example, he struggled for years, read the Dotcom Secrets book, learned how to do my webinar, did it and made a million bucks in 5 months. I’ve been giving away the perfect webinar now for 2 or 3 years, just the script and the video and power point slides. And people always ask me, “Why do you give it away for free, your best stuff?” I’m like, “Because if someone uses it and they make money, they can afford my expensive stuff.”

So for me, that’s really more of my goal. I want people to come in and I want them to use the stuff I have and it makes them more money and then they can come for the next things. If they’re jumping up four or five tiers, if they have money that’s fine, they can short cut success, but I almost feel like sometimes, it does not serve your customer to short cut their success.

When we first started doing Funnel Hacker Tv the very first time, I was just taking businesses, a few I liked, the people, the entrepreneur, but they weren’t having success yet. We would come in and just do all the work for them, launching their businesses. And what we found is people weren’t ready for that. We’d launch it and hand it back to them, and the people who get these businesses back, they hadn’t learned all the stuff they needed to have success with it. And they struggled and then despite the fact that I gave them the keys to a Ferrari, they couldn’t drive the Ferrari.

I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice. Sometimes people just jump too far too fast, spend a bunch of money they don’t have, and then try the thing and it doesn’t really work because they don’t have the foundation stuff they need to get there. Business is all about for us, increasing our capacity. When you first start a business you have a big capacity to do a lot of stuff. I did, when I got started my capacity was, I struggled to read a book. Then I read a book and I was like, that book was awesome, and my capacity expanded a little bit and I did more and it expanded, more and it expanded.

Now 15 years later we run a huge company where we’re one of the top two or three most visited websites in the world. Making a lot of money, doing a lot of stuff, helping a lot of people, all those things. But if I would have just been handed this 15 years ago, I promise you I would have destroyed it. Not because I wanted to, but because I wasn’t ready for it. And I think a lot of times, I know I could sell more stuff if I offered these huge payment plans to let people in, but the reality is someone comes in on a payment plan they can’t afford and they’re trying to learn stuff and then they can’t afford it, and then they go buy traffic and other things they need to do and they can’t afford it, it doesn’t really serve them more, or me.

So I want people to grow with us. So that’s why we do stuff, the way low ticket stuff, mid tier, high tier things like that. That way people come in, they learn, they apply, and if they get value they should naturally ascend up, right. It’s kind of like in my stack I have a line that I say in there, it’s funny because it’s a really good closing line, and I’ve had a lot of people knock it off since I started using it, but it’s true for me.

For me it says, “I have a philosophy here at my company that if I can’t make you money then I don’t deserve yours.” And I honestly do believe that, which is why I don’t just go hard close them on these huge payment plans. We see a lot of people do product launches, they’re selling a $2,000 course, or twelve payments of $300. I’m like, the problem with $300, I remember me in those days and that was a lot of money. It almost does them a disservice. If I have twelve payments of $300, twelve months from now, I’m going to have my stuff in place and start buying ads again because I got this huge budget of $300 a month. So that’s kind of my thoughts.

So I hope that kind of helps. Again, it’s not that I won’t do payment plans, I will do them in the future. There will times and seasons I will do them. A lot of businesses I recommend them. So it’s nothing against them, I just think for me personally, that’s my goal, that’s my vision. Just try to blow people’s minds at every step of the value ladder, and if I do that correctly then they’ll be able to afford the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

You know, I could tell you probably a couple dozen examples of this but Dan Henrie is one of my favorites. He joined the Inner circle and he posted on Facebook. He was like, “I don’t know why I joined Russell’s inner circle, I feel like I got, I made a bunch of money and everything, I don’t really need to be, I don’t really want to be in it. But I feel like I owed Russell 25k for all I got for the free book I bought.”

How cool is that if your customers feel that way. Man, I got so much from this I feel like I owe you. I need to invest in higher ticket things because I got so much down here. That’s what I’m trying to create.

So there you go, I hope that helps you guys. I hope it helps you, again, obviously we’re talking about this for my business which is teaching business owners how to grow. So it’s very applicable because it’s like “Hey make money here and grow.” But it’s the same with any business. Let’s say your business is helping marriages right. You give them something free and it increases the spark in their relationship or it fixes something and they feel better, man they will want to give you more and follow you further and all that kind of stuff.

So anyway, it’s a fun game we play. I love it. I appreciate you guys, as customers, as friends, as subscribers, listeners, and I hope that you got some good ideas out of this, I’m going to get back to eating my Cinnamon Toast Crunch before it all gets cold, gets soggy. It’s a little soggy already so I’m going to go. And by Funnel Hacking Live I will be sexy. I promise you guys, I will have a six pack. And if not then I won’t say anything else about it. Alright everybody, talk to you soon. Bye.

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A quick play-by-play of the last 24 hours of my crazy life.

On this episode Russell talks about the last 24 hours of his life and the events that made it feel crazy. Here are some of the interesting things you will hear in this episode:

Find out why Russell is being sued by a Clickfunnels customer.
Hear about some other legal problems that Russell has been dealing with for quite some time.
And find out why Russell and his family had to take trip to the ER.

So listen here to see why Russell’s last 24 hours have been such a stressful roller-coaster ride.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Tonight is going to be a late night reflections episode.

Alright, I don’t know if that’s really a thing, a reflection episode, but it has been, the last 24 hours of my life have been insane. I learned some really good lessons along the way. I just wanted to sit here and talk it out with you guys if you don’t mind. Hopefully you’ll get something out of it.

So some of the back story, we are in November, for those who are watching or listening to this later, it’s almost Thanksgiving; it’s about a week away. It’s been interesting, working on a lot of really neat, amazing projects and some things that I feel are part of, I don’t know, it sounds cliché but part of my mission in this life. It’s not building, it is indirectly building funnels, but it’s for who we’re building them for, what we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish with it. Things that are really, really good in life.

And what’s interesting, I know that everyone listening has got different beliefs, but what’s interesting is whenever you try to do something good, the adversary, call it whatever you want, fights against it. And I was starting this project with this group we believe in and start moving down this path, I was warned by a lot of people who were in this project saying, “As you start trying to move forward towards this thing, the adversary, or whatever you want to call it, is going to fight against you.” I was like, okay bring it on.

And it’s crazy because I’m starting to see, maybe not, maybe it’s just my mind, but as we’re moving towards this thing, I’m just noticing a lot of stuff happening. So the last 24 hours were crazy. So right now, I think it’s 11 at night. I just got my kids to bed. About 26 hours ago, a little longer than a day, 24 or 25 hours, whatever it was, a little over a day ago, I had just gone to bed as well. It was just a normal night, I was going to be staying up late working because my wife had just left to Disneyland yesterday, she’s out with her girly friends doing Disneyland. So I was like, I’ll have some time to work, catch up on some projects.

I was going to start on them, and by the time I got the kids down and was about to come and start working, I got a text message from Melanie saying, “Hey, this weird thing is happening.” It’s kind of cool, someone from my inner circle saw something where basically lawsuits were being filed against us. They’d seen it ahead of time. We got spies everywhere around the world. Anyway, so we looked at it and it was kind of a violation. Basically it was somebody had gotten, we found out later, it’s been 24 hours. But it was a text message that they’d gotten that they said that they didn’t want to receive from us.

So instead of just being a normal human being and being like, “Oh, I don’t want to receive this text message.” this person is filing this huge lawsuit against us. It’s crazy. So we got the name and number and all sorts of stuff and it’s crazy. Somebody signed up for Clickfunnels with a fake credit card, it wasn’t even a real credit card, logged in twice and never logged in again, their credit card failed. So our system, when your credit card fails, actually when you log into Clickfunnels, there’s a little thing saying, “Hey, if your credit card failed, would you like us to text you? If so what number?” So you put in the number.

So the credit card failed, so we texted saying, “Hey, we don’t want your websites to go down, you should login to your Clickfunnels account, add your credit card so you don’t lose your websites. It sent him two text messages, this was like 2 or 3 months ago. So this person, it’s insane, gets these text messages and files a lawsuit against us. A lawsuit, for crying out loud. For irreparable damages and on and on. It’s just nuts, nuts.

So it’s funny because I always heard about frivolous lawsuits and it’s just like, I always thought those were like, I couldn’t fathom that those were a real thing, that human beings were like that. But it’s just like, I just saw it, I’m seeing it right now. I’m like, holy crap. It’s funny because, it’s interesting, when you don’t have money you’re like, “Oh, if I just had money all my problems would go away.” I got bad news for you guys. Problems don’t go away, they just turn into different problems, more annoying problems, where literally people are shooting at you and attacking you all the time. It’s nuts.

So I get that message about that, so we’re trying to just research and figure that out. I can’t think about this, I got too much stuff to do. So I kind of put it on the back burner, sat down at the computer right there, my work computer where the Expert Secrets book was written. Sit down at the work computer, check my email, and there’s two emails. First email was from this organization we’re working with to try do a lot of good in the world and save a lot of kids lives, this thing that we’re moving forward on, do the ultimate good. Then the email that came in literally a minute before or after that one was from this other person.

I’m not going to tell the back story behind this because it’s not important. But it’s a person I dealt with three years ago. This huge email, I haven’t heard from him in over a year, huge email talking about, going on and on about how they’re going to sue me for all these crazy things. I’m just like, I can’t even, I don’t know how to handle this right now. It was just crazy.

I did my best to get a handle on it, but I gotta get this out of my mind because I gotta get some stuff done. So I was up until about 2 last night working, passed out, the kids were up this morning at like 6, so I got four hours of sleep last. Got up, got the kids ready because my wife’s gone. Luckily we have help, a nanny who comes and helps get the kids out the door and everything with school. And then, head in to the office, have a ton of stuff going on, obviously, we’re trying to coordinate so much stuff. I wish I could, just let you have a glimpse of all the stuff we’re doing at once. I don’t think people would believe it. There’s a lot happening, obviously. It happens when you’re trying to change the world.

It’s fun, we did a podcast with Nathan Latka, the top, if you’ve ever heard his podcast, it’s really, really good. I did a podcast 18 months ago with him, and we did another one to follow up with him now. We’re 5x of where we were at 18 months ago, which is insane. It was really cool recapping all the positive growth that we’re doing. It was cool, when the questions he asked at the end, he’s like, “Most business owners reinvest their profits back in their company, that’s where they get the highest return on investment. Where do you invest your money Russell?”

And I laughed, “You know, we reinvest money back in the company, but for me, I didn’t start a business to reinvest money back in the company.” He’s like, “So wait, real estate? Where are you reinvesting your money?” I’m like “I’m not reinvesting in anything. I reinvest it in my kids, my family. Right now we have an acre and a half, two acre lot next to our house that was just full of weeds, so this summer we knocked down all the weeds and put in a full Astroturf baseball/soccer field. We put in 9 underground trampolines, a volleyball court, a baseball field, a full basketball court and a track that wraps the whole thing. I’m investing my money back in my kids. I want to spend weekends and night with my kids playing games. That’s why I got in the business. The cash flow is nice, but that’s what I’m reinvesting my profits back into, you know.”

It was kind of just a fun answer because I’m sure most people on a business podcast don’t think that way, they think about whatever business, real business people think about. Anyway, so that was kind of fun and stuff.

But I had to deal with the issues. So we had to deal with this dude who got two text messages after he told us to text him and he didn’t update his credit card. And I started realizing, after we started learning all about the do not call list, and the do not text list, it’s just crazy. Basically we brought on all these lawyers and companies and all this crap in the last, all day today, which is crazy. But we found out, it’s interesting, these texts, there’s 150,000 known people, if they get a text message from you they will file lawsuits. That’s all they do.

So as soon as they get a text once, they get blocked across all these things. So it’s like we’re tapping on API’s, so we pull out all these known complainers and stuff, but it’s insane. So all these guys do is go out there and sign up for things and wait for you to text them. That’s it. This is a real thing. You hear about this, I always thought there’s no way that people are that evil. But they are, this is a real thing. It’s happening, it’s happening to me right now. So now we gotta fight this thing, it’s just nuts. Time, energy and money wasted for some moron who’s going out and looking for lawsuits. That’s it, it’s crazy.

So there was number one, then I deal with number two. Some of our lawyers came in and the lawyer basically, this deal from three years ago and I haven’t heard from him in over a year, the lawyer is just shocked. I can’t believe we’re hearing from him, it’s just insane. And sat down with me and went through everything again. “You guys are in the right. 100% in the right. My authority as your lawyer is we need to go and just destroy this person and put him out of his misery.” He said it nicer than that, but not much.

But I was just like, we’re in the meeting and everything and I think it was Dave or Brent, or someone on my team asked me, “What does your gut tell you, Russell?” and I was like, “My gut tells me I just need to do whatever it takes to make this go away.” I listen to my gut a lot, because I don’t think it’s my gut, it’s other stuff.

Anyway, I told my lawyer that, and it’s funny because I had this really rare chance to learn something today, something I teach my kids all the time. My kids, we get in these arguments with each other, especially my 7 year old and my 12 year old. They’ll get in these arguments about things and the older one is so mad because they’re trying to prove that they’re right to the younger one. I’m like, “It doesn’t matter, just stop. It doesn’t matter that you’re right or wrong, just stop fighting, please. Just stop fighting.” “But he’s wrong.” “It doesn’t matter, it does not matter who’s right and who’s wrong. It does not matter at all.”

And I try to teach that to my kids over and over again, just walk away, let it go. It does not matter. It’s funny because after we got done with the lawyer meeting and stuff and I wrote this person back and just said, “Hey, here’s the lawyer, you can figure all this stuff out.” And that person wrote back and said, “Please get on a call.” And I was like, I don’t want to get on this call. I just don’t. I don’t want to get this call.

So for me, I kneeled down and I prayed and I was just like, “What should I do.” Asking for help because I knew that I wanted to be like my 12 year old and be like, “No, you’re freaking wrong.” And yell at this person, but I knew that wouldn’t solve anything and just hurt everything. So I prayed for humility and prayed to know what to do and how to do it. I got all this frustration and anger so I picked up the phone and called this person.

I listened to the person, who basically starts yelling at me, telling me all these things that he thinks I’ve done wrong. At every point I just want to fight back and be like, “This is not true, that is not true. I’ve proved that’s not true.” And everything. But I sat there and bit my tongue. I was just praying in my head, “Let me know what to do, how to handle this and what to do.” Just sitting there and sitting there, taking it and taking it and finally just, “Dude, what do you want? What’s the real story, just tell me.” And we talked about it and I think we figured out a way to solve it. And it sucks because like my little kids…legally, people get justice with lawyers, justice needs to be served, you were in the right here, this is not your fault.

And I’m looking at this from another angle, saying, there’s two laws, there’s justice and there’s mercy, these two things. Legally, we always want justice for everything. There’s the other side of mercy. I don’t know about you, but there’s things in my life where I make mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. Made way too many mistakes to brag about, especially on a public form like this.

But there’s times in my life when I needed mercy from people and from things. There’s times when mercy came through to me and it saved me and helped me. In my physical life and spiritual life, in different things like that, and I’m just grateful for the times when I was extended mercy. And I think for me at the time, you don’t have to have perfect justice, extend mercy here and it’ll make everything better. I don’t know if that’s always the case, but definitely was the case for me today.

So that was the first two issues. And then, I’m all excited for my kids wrestling match tonight. This all happened by 3 today, then I had to leave to go the wrestling match. So I go to the wrestling match, we get there and I’m working with my kids because last week they kind of got beat up a little bit at the tournaments. So all weekend long I worked with them in the wrestling room at our house and got them better and better and better.

I got there and my first, Dallin my oldest of my twins was first match, he wrestled the perfect match, it was so awesome. All the stuff we worked on this weekend he was doing, it was really neat, really special to see that. He won and it was just so exciting.

And then Bowen had the next match, but it wasn’t until the end of the night. So he’s warming up and goofing off and having fun and Dallin is doing the same thing and then Brandii, who is our nanny, she brought all of our kids, and luckily this turned out to be a huge blessing. She brought the kids to the wrestling match, which was kind of stressful because I’m with Norah, holding little baby Norah and the other ones are running around and all sorts of crazy stuff.

And then Bowen is getting closer to warming up, so I gave all the kids back to Brandii and went to the other side of the mat and start getting Bowen all warmed up and then Dallin is there goofing around because he’s between his match, having fun and he goes over to the bleachers, the side of the bleachers and he saw someone jumping up doing box jumps on this ledge. There’s like a metal strip across this ledge, and he sees them doing box jumps and he’s like, “I’m going to do it.” Because he’s kind of bored, sitting around. So he goes to jump and do a box jump and misses it, hits right below his knee. I’ll actually show you guys this.

Those of you who are watching, this is like, parental discretion advised, this is kind of freaky. But if you’re listening you can’t see them, but he hits his leg and is like, “Ooh, that hurt but I’m fine.” But I look at him and I’m like, “Dude, you are not fine.” It was the deepest cut I have ever seen in my life. You can see this here, that’s his knee. It looks like you can see the bone. If you’re listening you can’t see this. I want to throw up just looking, it’s like the deepest cut ever. I looked down and I was just like, “Oh my gosh. You can see all the way to the bone with this cut. It is huge.”

And then there’s blood pouring everywhere, all over the mats, all over the thing. I’m like, “I don’t know what to do.” I’m just going to keep showing pictures while I’m doing this. I’m like, I don’t know what to do or even how to handle this. This is….So I’m kind of pulling him out of the wrestling room, and trying to warm up Bowen on the side of the mat, now I’m pulling Dallin out and there’s blood just oozing everywhere. My wife’s not there, I don’t know what to do, there’s no one, I don’t know what to do.

I come out in the hallway, and luckily the wrestling coach, he’s got some kind of medical background, I’m not sure exactly, he was there. I’m like, “I need help.” He’s like, “Oh my gosh. Yes, put him down.” So he puts him down, here’s some more pictures. Luckily, because I was kind of in shock I didn’t know what to do, so he goes and gets someone to go grab some gauze and they wrap the knee up. I was like, “We gotta take him to the ER, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to miss Bowen’s match. Bowen’s been training.” Ugh, look how deep that is.

So anyway, the coach is there and helps me wrap this thing up and then I ran over to Brandii, our nanny, who is over there….Here’s my little buddy, laying in the hospital bed, smiling during the surgery. There’s him all stitched up at the end there. Anyway, he’s laying there, and I grab Brandii, who is our nanny and said, “Dallin just cut his leg open and he’s gotta go to the ER.” So she grabs all the kids and comes back and I’m like, “I don’t know what to do.” Bowen’s trying to warm up and he’s all frazzled because of that.

So me and the coach pick up Dallin and run him out to the car, which is like at least half a mile. We get in the car and Brandii loads up all of our kids plus her kids and heads back to the ER. I run back in and I’m trying to…oh, I don’t have our medical cards on me, of course, because that’s how I roll. So I’m trying to find medical stuff to send with him and Bowen’s warming up for his match and he’s all frazzled because he saw his brother bleeding to death, he’s sure his brother’s going to die, his twin brother’s about to die.

So then I’m trying to keep him focused, get him warmed up, and he goes out there and wrestles, and poor little dude. He’s trying so hard, and he’s so much better, but he got thrown in the first 10 seconds and pinned. And he comes off just crying his eyes out and I think he’s more upset about his brother, but just all the emotions of that, they’re just little dudes right now.

But oh, it was emotional. I was trying to find Dallin’s backpack is in some bleachers, and then Bowen, getting all out the door and then racing over to my car and speeding off to get to the hospital. But I remember when we were leaving all the kids were like, “We’re starving, we’re starving.” At the wrestling match. I’m like, my kids haven’t eaten yet. It’s like 6:00, 6:30 at night. I’m racing to the hospital and I run off to a fast food restaurant, this is a crazy story, I’m sorry. I got no one to talk to, my wife’s gone tonight, so hopefully you guys don’t mind.

So I race to the fast food restaurant and I order food, I’m going through the drive thru and I’m like, “I need ten hamburgers, ten drinks and a kids meal because I got a little baby daughter.” So they pull me through and the lady’s like, “Hey, the manager wants to see if you want ten custard ice cream things.” I’m like, “You know what, yes. That’d be awesome.” So we had this car full of hamburgers, ice cream and water for me and Bowen. We’re racing back to the ER, we get there and we find Brandii with all the kids and I give her the keys and I’m like, “go feed the kids in the car.” And then I run in and Dallin’s in there and he’s about to start surgery to get his knee all cleaned up. Poor little dude.

The cut was so big and they had to get a needle to numb, they probably shot him, I would say conservatively probably about 30 different shots, he’s just screaming, he was so tough. They stitched him all up and it was just forever. Brandii took the kids home, they went home and did homework, and got them all to bed, they did homework until almost 11 and went to bed. That’s been the last 24 hours of my life.

So it’s been crazy. I just wanted to tell you guys that, it was a fun story. Just some of the things, some of the lessons of today I learned. Number one, whenever you are moving towards things that are good, the adversary or whatever you want to call it, is going to fight against you. That’s okay, it’s normal, it’s going to happen. I know a lot of listeners are people who believe in God, who think about God and if you’re not, I just recommend remembering there’s a reason why these things happen. I believe it’s to get us to remember God. So first off, remember God.

Number two, there are evil people in this world, frivolous people who are just out there to steal money. And they’re there, and the bigger you get, the bigger of a target you’ll become. So just be aware of people and protect yourself in any ways you can. We’re trying to put up a whole new line of defenses for us, so know that.

Number three, know that sometimes, if you want to have mercy, if you want people to have mercy on you sometimes in life, don’t always fight for justice in every situation. Be okay letting somebody else, just be okay giving somebody else mercy sometimes. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Even if it’s not, even if it doesn’t give you justice. It may hurt, it may suck, but if you ever want to receive mercy in your life, it’s worth it to give to other people. It’s important.

The last one, I don’t know what the moral of the story of the last one is, other than it was just a lot of stuff. That’s about it. Anyway, I hope that helps you guys, I hope you learned something, I hope you got something. If not, don’t worry about it. If you did, though, please share this video or this podcast with somebody you love and care about. I appreciate you listening, it’s a huge honor to have you guys listening to this stuff that we share and I hope that it helps. That’s all I got for tonight. Thanks you guys, appreciate you all, have an amazing night, we’ll see you guys all again tomorrow. Bye.

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A podcast from Russell and Todd in a private plane.

On this special private plane episode Russell and Clickfunnels co-founder, Todd Dickerson, rant about troubles they’ve had with different platforms, most recently iTunes. Here are some of the interesting things you will hear on this episode:

Find out why Russell is not longer getting subscribers for his podcast, and how all efforts to fix the problem have been fruitless.
Hear Todd tell a story about a friend of his that basically lost his business when Amazon D-listed his product.
Find out why YouTuber, PewdiePie pretty much lost everything after using an offensive term.
And discover how we can learn from these examples to make sure we don’t have all our eggs in one basket.

So listen here to find out why it’s important to have a back up plan when it comes to social media platforms, as well as merchant accounts.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we are taking, this whole thing is happening on a private plane with Todd Dickerson.

Todd: Well, it’s a little bumpy right now.

Russell: Alright, so right now we’re on a private plane and I want to show you guys the moon out here. Now we’re in the middle of a cloud. I don’t know if you can see this.

Todd: Busting through the clouds.

Russell: So those who are watching this, if you’re listening you can’t see it, but we’re on a private plane, we’re at, I don’t know how many feet in the air. We just left Atlanta, Georgia. Not Atlanta, we left Cherokee county, at the airport, which is kind of cool. We were supposed to be…we were really excited because this flight there was supposed to be a beautiful girl right there, and a beautiful girl right there and then Todd right there. But our beautiful ladies, aka our wives are not here. Todd’s daughter got sick the last two or three days so his wife’s like, “I can’t make it.” And then my wife’s like, “Well if she’s not going, I’m not going.” So now we’re on a romantic trip together without our wives because we already booked a plane.

Todd: So we’re going anyway, it’s going to be fun.

Russell: It’s going to be so awesome. Oh, check it out, here’s the moon. There’s the moon shot. Yeah, there’s the moon. So for those who are watching this, there’s a picture of the moon. It’s so cool. For those of you guys who are listening, you have no idea what we’re seeing, you are totally missing out. Go to marketingsecrets.com and you can watch the video version as well.

Anyway, man this plane is really bumpy. Bumpier than I thought. We’re above the clouds now, so we’re legit. Alright for those of you guys who don’t know Todd yet, you need to know him. He is the brains behind Clickfunnels. He’s the one who built it all initially and he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. We’ve been trying to get him to move to Boise now for like 6 years. But he told me no. So finally, I feel bad, he comes to Boise like every quarter.

Todd: Every few months.

Russell: This is the first time I’ve come to Atlanta to hang out with him and see his house. I had a chance to hang out with him in his home and his family is amazing. Tell them all about how cool you are.

Todd: Okay.

Russell: Anyway, right now we’re actually heading down to a conference, St Petersburg airport.

Todd: Clear water beach.

Russell: An email marketing conference, a mastermind thing.

Todd: It’s top secret. We’re not allowed to say where it was.

Russell: We can’t talk about it. Well, by the time this comes out, you can’t yell at me anyway. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re putting this along so we can show you guys what’s happening. But it’s kind of fun. And check it out, oh it looks so cool.

Anyway, I don’t exactly what we’re going to talk about. There’s so many things we can talk about when we’re like, “We’re on the plane, let’s do a podcast.” I have one thing I want to rant about and while I’m ranting I’m going to let Todd rant about whatever he wants. Because I want you guys to get to know him better.

So my rant today, right now I’m recording my podcast. Some of you guys know I’ve been a podcast, Marketing In Your Car first, and…… I just popped my ears, that’s why I’m doing weird stuff….So we launched that podcast and ran it for almost 6 years, every single day in my car podcasting, podcasting. Putting in the time, the effort, the work. We built a big following, and then about a year ago we rebranded it as Marketing Secrets. And since we’ve rebranded we have 3.5 million downloads, we’ve been in the top ten business podcasts for the entire year, our video podcast is the number one, not only in the business category, our video podcast is the number one video podcast in all of iTunes. So you’d think that iTunes should like us.

Todd: Yeah, you’d think so.

Russell: But apparently, ten days ago they decided they didn’t like us. What they did is they shut down, basically, if you’re subscribed to our podcast you continue to get our stuff, but nobody new can subscribe. We’ve been appealing to them, writing to them and they’re like, “Sorry.” And we’re like, “Why are we kicked out?” they’re like, “You’re just kicked out.” Well, why? They won’t tell us why, they just said, “You’re out.” And it reminded me about something I wanted to talk to you guys about because it’s very, very important. And it’s never, never, never trust a platform. If you’re building your business on a platform, just prepare to lose it all very, very soon.

I’ve done this multiple times and now it’s happening with iTunes. I’ve lost, how many since we’ve known, how many email auto-responders?

Todd: Oh my gosh…

Russell: I’ve been kicked out of Aweber, almost a dozen times. iContact, at least 8 or 9. ActiveCampaign, Bellcheck multiple times, SendGrid multiple times and again just recently, they did it again. Facebook I’ve been kicked off at least 2 or 3 dozen times, we’ve been really good and consistent recently. Instagram kicked me off, I got back in luckily. Google kicked us off like a decade ago. We never really got back. YouTube I launched, I had one video that the headline was, “The Internet Marketing Illuminati” and they cancelled our account. It’s just crazy.

So all of us, we put all of our eggs in this basket, like Many Chat or Facebook Messenger, every time we put the eggs in, we gotta put all the eggs in this basket. The problem is if somebody doesn’t like you for whatever reason, or no reason at all, they don’t even have to tell you a reason, they can just turn you off. It is insane. You were telling me about the Amazon one today…

Todd: Oh yeah, the Amazon guy, so there was guy locally that was selling stuff online on Amazon, and he was killing it and doing great. He ordered a huge new pallet of stuff from China, had it all shipped over and got here. While it was on the way over, Amazon decided to D-List his product. They didn’t like the name of one of the products, they thought it was too close to another name of something else, D-Listed the product completely. His entire revenue stream disappeared overnight. Luckily, he had been talking to one of our other guys, support agents about funnels, so he started his funnels up, but he was completely dependent on Amazon. Lost a business, he had 5 employees, all of his employees are looking for what they’ll be doing next. He’s struggling to get things going and it’s all because he was 100% reliant on Amazon.

It doesn’t mean that it can’t be a side channel that’s awesome for sales, but you cannot have it be a primary thing. Not Amazon, not Google, not Facebook, nothing.

Russell: It’s crazy. So I just wanted to re-emphasize this to all of you guys. If you’re building your business 100% on Facebook, I got bad news for you, Zuckerberg doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t. “But Russell, I’m paying $1000 a day in Facebook ads.” He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care even a little bit. We’re spending insane amounts of money and they don’t care. They don’t care about you, about me, about any of us. All they care about is their customers, making sure the platform’s happy. And guess who their shareholders and platform doesn’t like? People like us. So guys, you just have to be aware of that.

iTunes apparently, now that I know, they don’t like people like me. I don’t know why, I just kind of, added a ton of publicity to their platform, added thousands of viewers, millions of downloads, and they just one day out of the blue, “Oh, bye.” With no rhyme or…it’s crazy to me.

Todd: The top guy won’t even tell you why.

Russell: Yeah, the escalated it to the highest guy in support, he’s like, “Yep, we cancelled your account.” I’m like, “Why?” He’s like, “This ticket has now been closed.” You won’t even tell me why? I don’t know what to do.

So a couple of things. Same thing with merchant accounts. I almost went bankrupt before. I had 14 merchant accounts at one bank and all of them got shut down the same day. So 1 is a very, very scary number in business and in marketing. So always think about having multiple things, having multiple ways you are collecting money or are able to collect money. Making sure you have customers from different platforms, make sure the way you message your customers, there’s multiple platforms.

In fact, can we talk about this right now, or is this top secret?

Todd: It’s a little top secret still.

Russell: It’s still top secret.

Todd: We can’t talk about this part of it, but what he’s leaning towards is, what we already do in Actionetics on some levels, is being able to communicate on multiple channels, multiple modalities and stuff. But there’s definitely nice stuff that’s going to be coming in the near future.

Russell: I don’t want everyone, again, if you relying 100% on email, you could be in trouble. It’s hurt me multiple times. I think, I would say conservatively about 20 times I’ve lost my email service provider. And I’m not an aggressive marketer, maybe I’m aggressive. I may be aggressive but I’m not unethical. I follow the rules of everything. So it’s just kind of crazy.

So a lot of things we’ll do, if you were at last year’s Funnel Hacking Live we talked about the big benefit of using Actionetics, you can plug in your other SMTP and if SendGrid shuts you down, you plug in the new one, but you still keep your accounts. We’re trying to be a platform that’s not shutting our members down, so you have access, so if something bad happens you can plug in to other things.

Todd: it’s the new thing with custom domains, I’m not sure….now with Actionetics you’re able to have your own custom domain for everything. So link tracking goes through a custom domain, your unsubscribes go through a custom domain. Everything goes through a custom domain so you don’t have any relationship to any other people on the platform or to us. So if you get in trouble or someone else on the network gets in trouble it doesn’t affect anyone else. Which is, that’s not the case, and the reason why Aweber won’t let you import people into their platform, it’s because if you import people and spam them, then it hurts everyone on Aweber. That’s no longer going to be the case on the whole Actionetics platform. You are super isolated, so it’s only going to affect you if you cause a problem. And if another person on the network causes a problem it’s only going to affect them.

Same thing with image hosting and everything, it’s all going to be on your own custom domains now, which is actually already live. So if you haven’t set that up, go set up a custom domain, we’re giving everyone free custom domains.

Russell: It’s awesome. We’re trying to figure out ways to make it so that, we care about you guys as customers, we want to protect your businesses, so we’re trying to make Clickfunnels easier to use. So you can add in multiple SMP, multiple ways to collect money, multiple ways to message us. You’re not 100% relying on email. There’s just a lot of cool things that are coming. I can’t tell them about…..

I always tell people stuff before we’re ready and Todd yells at me, so I’m going to be careful. But that’s where we’re going and I just want to re-emphasize for you guys. If you are relying on one platform, if Zuckerberg is the way your entire business runs, now is the time to diversify. Don’t diversify in 6 months from now, or a year from now. My guess is that windows not going to be that long.

About a year and a half ago when Facebook started shutting our accounts down, I was like, “Lose Facebook, Facebooks over.” For some reason they loosened back up. They had a tight grip on people, but they loosened back up. But you know it’s going to come back again, you saw what Google did. I have friends who are making millions and millions of dollars a month, who when Google put the chokehold out, they never recovered. They’re doing, working at McDonalds, I don’t know where. But they’re not doing their business anymore.

So if you want to be around in the long term it’s very important to understand that. I still think you should start with a platform, start with Facebook or whatever that is and go there, but be very aware, as soon as that’s working, it’s like now you need to add a second source, so as soon as one disappears….or I need two merchant accounts, in two separate banks. I need to be able to collect money just in case one dries up or goes away. Make sure multiple auto-responders, SMTP, all those things are very, very important, just don’t rely on a platform. The platform will screw you over. They do not care about you or me, they only care about themselves and their customers. They think for any reason, because of something we produce it effects the experience of the customer, gone.

Todd: Or the shareholder.

Russell: Or the shareholder.

Todd: That’s the reason why we’re not VC by the way. Same type of thing.

Russell: The reason why we love you guys, we’re not taking VC money because we want to be able to protect you guys. But it’s crazy, I have no idea. I talked about God in my last podcast, maybe that was why. I don’t know. It’s crazy.

In YouTube, we were talking about….who’s that famous dude who lost his YouTube again?

Todd: Oh, there’s PewdiePie or whatever, there was 50 million followers. I mean to be fair, there were some things that he shouldn’t have said, but instantly they shut down his business, he had dozens of employees, everyone out of work, completely shut down this entire media empire more or less, with the flip of a switch.

Russell: Cutie Pie?

Todd: PewdiePie

Russell: PewdiePie! So if you guys know PewdiePie, he got screwed by this as well, it’s crazy. And if you look at it there’s stuff on YouTube that’s so super offensive. I don’t even know what he said, but he said something.

Todd: He said something offensive, it was probably really bad.

Russell: It was probably really bad, yeah. But nevertheless they just crushed him like a grape, and they don’t care. You’re like, “But dude. I put in 5 million dollars a year in your platform.” But “We don’t care about you.” That’s what happened with Google. I remember when Google slapped everybody, everyone’s so shocked like, “I spend a hundred grand a month on Google ads.” They’re like, “You are one of our smallest clients.”

Todd: It’s a blib. They won’t even talk to you if you’re spending that.

Russell: It’s a lot of money to us, but to them, they don’t even care. They’re just angry that you interrupted the customer experience. So it’s just something to be very, very, very aware of.

Todd: Yeah, if you’re selling on Amazon, if you’re building your business on any of these platforms, that’s fine, but you need to also be expanding out. Building your customer list, building your email list, building your different chat lists, building your different communication channels with this. Building an actual business where you’re able to keep things going if Amazon decides to shut you off tomorrow. Because it will happen, it has happened to plenty of people.

Russell: So there is your warning. Ye have been warned. Thus sayeth Clickfunnels. Be careful because they will screw you over.

Okay, one last thing for this podcast. Todd’s working on tons of new stuff, we can’t talk about it, but what are you most excited about with the new stuff in Clickfunnels coming out?

Todd: I’m most excited about this thing that I can’t tell you about yet.

Russell: Sorry! It’s so awesome though. He showed me all the screenshots today.

Todd: So yeah, there’s the potential to basically 2x probably the results that you’re getting from different leads that are coming in on the front door from a communication perspective. Double open rates, double click rates, that kind of thing on what you’re currently seeing on your primary channel of communication.

Russell: That’s like being super, low balling. Double is….

Todd: Super generic low balling but it’s way more than that.

Russell: Yeah, it really is probably.

Todd: Yeah, it really is probably way more than that. And there’s also some cool things with payment processing that we’re beta testing right now that should literally instantly double mobile conversions.

Russell: That one we can talk about?

Todd: Yeah, I mean we can talk about that.

Russell: You can be in on this one.

Todd: So ApplePay, AndroidPay and Paypal all on one push to order. So the results we’re seeing preliminary at least, on the apple based stuff is literally, you go online, you click add apple pay to your thing, you press your thumb on it, and it’s instant. Everything works with upsells, with OTO’s, down sells, one click ad sales.

Russell: So imagine on your mobile, you’re on your phone and someone comes with a free plus shipping offer and they buy, does ApplePay pop up on their phone?

Todd: They only literally have to order once. They order on your primary order form, one time. Just like you, instead of typing in an order number, we have their thumbprint. Boom, it’s ordered. And then on an upsell they can just click one button, just like you would if they had to put in a credit card number. We can charge them, do the whole process, do everything we need to do. Same thing for Android. That’s the other sexy part that just recently came out. Brand new Android, they’re calling it like Google Pay or something like that, but we’ll be also supporting that as well. So you’ll be able to have Apple and Android, which for the longest time, most of the other platforms out there, they still have, if they do support it, it’s only Apple.

Russell: So that’s crazy. For those who are selling stuff mobile-y, it’s going to make your mobile experience so insanely good. People, I don’t know about you, I never buy things on my phone because I hate trying to type my credit card with my thumb. So what I do, I always email myself the link and then sometimes I buy stuff and sometimes I don’t because at that point I forget about it, whereas this is now like, oh…and they click their little thumbprint and it dings their card and then upsell, upsell, upsell, boom, fulfillment.

I’m also going to prophecy, I don’t know if I should prophecy, it’s kind of sacreligious. I don’t want to get shot down in this plane. I’m going to forecast, is that a better word? I’m going to forecast the future of where things are going. I was telling Steven this the other day. You know how we always design websites for desktops, usually wide, using multiple columns and stuff like that, mark my word, the future of where website design is going, is in single column, narrow width pages. If you look at Dollar Shave Club’s order form, this is the best example. You go to the page and the order form is like this wide going down the middle, and the fields are all centered and very, very clear, and it works really good mobile-y.

But I think that’s going to be the future of where even desktop is all designed. That’s my forecast, I’m guessing. So you’ll start seeing, you’ll notice Clickfunnels, one of our order pages right now is a lot more simple. That, I think that’s where future things are going to be.

Todd: It needs to be sized down properly, to do that. And you can easily, in the Clickfunnels editor, you can easily do that. Just jump into mobile mode, build it first in mobile mode, click desktop and you’ll see it in both modes. That’s the great thing about it. You literally only have to design it once. You might change some font sizes or show some images on desktop that you don’t show on mobile, stuff like that, that you can customize. But in reality you can do it first on mobile very easily.

Russell: I think people read more on mobile than videos, don’t you?

Todd: Yeah.

Russell: When I’m looking, I never push play on a video on mobile, like a sales video, I’d rather always read. Which is why I also think like a blend of video plus text is going to be more and more important. I look at a lot of our stuff now and it’s like here’s the video of me pitching it and then below there’s the copy of me pitching it. Because a lot of video I’ll see the play button, but I’ll, typically you’re in the bathroom or something and it’s awkward. This is my phone hand….Just kidding.

Anyway, there’s some forecasts and some ideas. But that’s what we got for you guys. So I hope you guys have enjoyed the flight. We’re probably half way to our destination. All you need to remember is, first off, don’t rely on one platform for anything. Your advertizing, your messaging to your customers, your merchanting, the only one platform you should be relying on 100% is Clickfunnels because we love you guys.

Todd: We’re flexible with everything too. We allow you plug in other platforms. We allow you to plug in every other platform out there. That’s why we built a way for you to….

Russell: We’re the only ones that love you enough that you should just focus on us. But then like I said, our focus, one big thing that we’re moving forward, is building in all the back ends, so you can plug in backups for stuff, you have multiple ways to message people outside of just email, in case email gets shutdown. Multiple merchant accounts in case your merchant accounts get shut down. All those kind of things. But don’t forget on your ad side, on your podcast side, all those things. My podcast downloads have dropped because I’m no longer listed, which drives me nuts. And nobody can subscribe to my podcast now. So now I gotta do work, anyway it’s just a new annoyance happening.

And there’s always a work-around. If you get your Facebook account shut down, don’t just walk away and be like, “Apparently I broke their terms…” This is the other thing that drives me crazy. I remember, you’ve probably heard us talk about SEO days, people were like, who were anti-SEO were like, “Well, we don’t want to do this because it’s against Google’s terms of service.” And it’s like, “Their terms of service…they’re coming to your website and spidering you. You can do whatever you want on your website.” It’s this weird thing.

So same thing, people getting their Facebook account shutdown are like, “It’s over. I’m done. This is not fair.” No, you don’t understand. This is your business, this is war. If they’re coming in and shutting you down, you need to fight back and get back in and keep coming back and coming back. Don’t just get knocked down and be like, “Ugh, I’m dead.” If that had happened to us, we would have lost our business decades ago. But we’re fighters so we get back up and keep going.

So you’ll see my podcast back, very, very soon. It’s annoying because I will lose all of my pre….anyway, we’ll leave it at that. It’s all fun games. When all is said and done, it doesn’t really matter. We’re trying to change the world and these guys get in our way. The platform will get in your way, and try to keep you from that. So just ignore them and keep moving forward. They shut you down, come back, make some tweaks, changes and keep going on and keep serving your people because they’re there, it matters, it’s worth it. Anything else? Any final words?

Todd: See you on the ground.

Russell: See you guys. Bye everybody.

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Interesting thoughts I had on my drive home from Salt Lake City.

On this episode Russell relates following God’s will to following the will of the market in business. Here are some of the enlightening things you will hear in today’s episode:

How spending his weekend talking to a leader in his church reminded him that’s its important to align your belief’s with Gods.
How aligning your beliefs will God’s is similar to aligning your product ideas with the needs of the market you’re in.
And find out how you can align your own beliefs with that of the market you are in.

So listen here to find out how Russell is able to relate business marketing to God.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are all having an amazing day today. Whoa, I’m juggling my phone as I get in the car. Crazy day. We are just leaving, I was about to leave the house today and I walked out and Norah was outside on the trampolines jumping.

Some of you guys heard my crazy stories. We had a big side yard that was kind of a big empty weed field. So we decided this year to go a little crazy. So we put in a football/soccer field, a volleyball court, basketball court, baseball and a track that wraps the whole thing and then 9 underground trampolines. And they got the 9 underground trampolines up this weekend while we were gone. So we spent all night last night when we got home jumping and then this morning, I was about to leave and I could hear little giggles outside and I went outside and Norah was jumping.

It’s a little bit cold out here, but I went and jumped for the last little bit. Now I’m heading out so I’m buckling up in my car and we are ready to rock and roll. It’s funny, we were gone this week. We went and drove to Burley where my in-laws live and we dropped off our kids and from there we drove down to Salt Lake because I had a meeting that I’ll tell you guys about here in a second.

But it’s funny, on the way home we went camping and stuff like that, so I haven’t shaved in two days. So my face was all prickly, you know what I mean. I was picking up Norah yesterday and her curly hair is like Velcro on my beard. I tried for two days and I just hated it, so I just shaved it this morning. I’m like, ah, I feel so much better.

But I hate it because I’ve been watching, we’ve been studying Dollar Shave Club and Dollar Beard Club’s off-boarding process. In fact, I wrote about it in Funnel university this month. And I don’t know what it is, all the beard guys just seem cooler and part of me is like I wanna be cool like the beard guys but I just can’t. Two days and I gave up, it was horrible. So I’ll never be as cool as the beard guys. But I will give them credit, they are definitely cooler than us shaved guys. Anyway, hopefully someday I’ll become a man and be able to grow one out. That day is not today.

Anyway, so I want to share something today, and some of you might be thinking, Russell this is a marketing podcast why are you talking about God? Because he has to do with everything, it’s really important. And the lesson I learned this weekend has to do with God, but it also then relates back to you guys and your market, so I think it’s really, really important.

So I was in Utah and I had a meeting with someone who is one of the top leaders in my church, the Mormon church. And we believe in our church that there’s a prophet and his 12 apostles, similar to how when Christ was on Earth. And my meeting was with one of the twelve apostles, which was really a huge honor, and scary and exciting and all those things all wrapped into one. And I had a chance to meet with him.

So this whole week prior to leading up to it, I’ve had a lot of thoughts about just life and how things work and then obviously meeting with him and then afterwards, it was a really neat reflection in time. And there was something that came out, I mean, there was a lot of stuff I wish I could share in the context of this podcast, but it’s probably not appropriate or the right spot, so I won’t. But there was one thing that just kept ringing through my head that I wanted to share because I think it’s important and it does relate back to marketing. So there you go. Is it I alright if I relate it back to marketing, if I talk about God for a few minutes? Hopefully that’s okay.

So it’s interesting, if you look at the world, what the world tries to do is that they see, I don’t want to get political because I don’t care about politics at all, so I’m not going to get political. But I see this mostly, it’s amplified in politics, where it’s like these are the agenda items that people either believe this or believe this and they fight back and forth, who’s right and who’s wrong, and all that stuff. And it’s kind of crazy.

And it’s been interesting, in my life, and I’m not perfect in this by any stretch, this is what I aspire to be, when I look at an issue, when I look at something it shouldn’t be what do I believe. What does Russell believe on this topic? It should be, okay I believe in a God, so what does God actually believe on this topic? And then my job as a human here is not to try to convince God that, “No, no, no, you’re wrong.” Because he’s not.

So my goal is to look at what he believes on the topic and then bend my will towards that. Say, okay this is what he believes therefore this is what I believe. That’s how it should be, if you do believe in an all powerful creator who created the heavens and the earth and everything. I think we should bend our will towards him. This is what he thinks, therefore this is what I think, on any topic.

I think that’s important as we’re trying to set up our belief’s. What we’re for and what we’re against. It should be less of, this is my opinion, this is what I think is right, this is what I studied, what I read. It should be like, what does God actually think and then sit back and pray and find out what he believes and then be like cool. I will align my will with yours. I will align with that because that’s what you believe.

So I was thinking about that, again, something I probably wouldn’t normally share inside the podcast, but I started thinking about this from the business standpoint too because there’s always correlations between all things. And it’s funny because a lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with, it’s interesting what they do. They have an idea, “This is a product I want to create. It’s the greatest thing in the world. It’s going to change mankind. I want to charge this price for it, this is how I want to deliver it.” And they have all these things that they want to do because it’s their idea. It’s their baby.

And they go out there and they put it on the market and the market crushes it and it’s like, that idea sucks. Or that price point is not right. Or whatever it is, the market goes and does it’s thing. And the market in this situation is kind of like God. The market doesn’t care who you are, not that God, God does care. But the market doesn’t care who you are. The market doesn’t care how good your ideas are.

The market is what it is. If you put your thing out there and it will tell you, that idea sucked. Or that idea is amazing. Or whatever the thing in between there is. And our job as entrepreneurs, is not to try to convince the market that our idea is the best, our job is to find out what does the market actually want and then align our will with that.

And when you do that, that’s when things explode. That’s why when we test funnels, we’ll test and be like, oh the market said no. And we try again and we test and tweak the messaging and the pricing, we keep moving things around until we figure out what does the market actually want? How much do they want to spend for this? What’s the price point? What do they actually want? Do they even want this product? A lot of my ideas they didn’t want. As great of an idea as I thought they were, the market did not care about it. And the market is the only thing that actually matters.

So I always tell people, it drives me crazy people in my coaching programs, Facebook groups, and everything will come in and be like, “What’s your opinion on this?” and I’m like, “Dude, don’t take my opinion on it. I don’t even trust my opinion on my own stuff. I let the market decide. I create the thing the best I know how to do, based on what I have seen the market respond to in the past. I make the thing and then I send some traffic to it and I let the market vote. And I don’t let the market vote through quizzes or surveys or things like that. Where they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I would buy that.’ The only thing that I care about is people that actually pull their wallets out of their pocket and swipe their credit card. That is how the market votes. They don’t vote with their mouth, they vote with their credit card.”

Yes, I do, for those of you watching, I do have a Clickfunnels sticker on my wallet because it is what fills my wallet full of the stuff that we need to buy.

Anyway, so that’s how it works. So for you guys, as entrepreneurs, it’s important for you to not get so caught up on your ideas and what you believe. It is important for you to figure out what the market actually wants. What they actually believe. They believe this is worth this amount of money, they believe that this is what they want to buy. You figure out what the market actually wants, and you do that you become rich. If you fight against that, you struggle. I’ve seen people go years, maybe decades and never have success because they are trying to jam their belief’s down the market’s throat. And the market doesn’t care about you, all the market wants is what it wants. So you gotta figure out what it wants and then you align your will with that. And that’s it.

So as I was thinking about that this weekend with God and our responsibility to not so much try to dictate what we believe and try to shove it down his throat. But to figure out what he believes and align our will him. It’s the same thing with the market. And when you understand that, that’s when business becomes a lot easier.

It comes back to Expert Secrets 101, like page 3 or whatever, find a hot market, ask them what they want, and then give it to them. It does not say, find a hot market, decide what you think would be awesome to create and then jam it down their throats. That is a hard business to run. Okay, it’s the opposite way. Find a hot market, ask what they want, and then give it to them. That’s it and the market will tell you. The market will tell you if you’re right. The market will tell you if you’re wrong. If you’re wrong, don’t be mad about it. Just change your approach, change the pricing, change the hook, change the angle, change the product, change the service. Create what it wants and then everything will take place that you need it to.

Okay, there you go, is that okay that we reel religion into this thing? Because even if you guys don’t believe in God, it doesn’t mean he’s not there. That’s what’s interesting. I have people, friends that are like, “I don’t believe in God, you shouldn’t talk about it.” I’m like, “Whether you believe in him or not, he’s still there.” That’s the interesting thing.

People are like, “I don’t believe this will sell.” Whether you believe it or not, it doesn’t really matter, it’s what the market believes. So let’s go find out what the truth is, and let’s align our belief’s with that. That’s in all aspects of life. So there you go.

That’s preacher Brunson preaching on. Hope you guys don’t mind. Anyway, regardless, I hope you got something out of that one and hopefully you guys understand that’s how the world works, how the market works. And when you understand that, and you align your will toward it, that’s how you grow a company. Find a hot market, ask what they want, and give it to them. Alright guys, I’m at the office, I gotta go. See you all soon. Bye everybody.

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Russell’s rant about what’s keeping people from success.

On this episode Russell rants about the difference between daycare, college and coaching and why to be successful you need coaching. But to be a champion you have to put in the extra work because coaches can only take you so far. Here are some interesting things in this episode:

Why you need to listen to your coaches to be successful, otherwise you might as well go to daycare or college.
And why putting in extra work after the coaching is what will make you a champion.

Listen here to find out why you need to move on from daycare, and college and jump into coaching and then put in even more effort to become a champion.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and this is an emergency impromptu podcast with angry Steven behind me. So I have to do this right now. The Software Secrets webinar is starting in less than an hour and I should be doing slides, but something just made me angry so I wanted to jump on. And you’re kind of angry too.

Steven: It actually kind of pisses me off. It’s a recurring thing.

Russell: Alright so, this is a coaching call for everybody, and owe, we’re going to queue the Marketing Secrets intro and then we’ll come back to what we’ve gotta do.

Alright welcome back, so now that we’re still angry, hopefully the intro got you pumped, I want to talk to you guys about the difference between coaching, college, and a daycare. This is very important for you to understand because some of you guys for some reason think that we run a daycare here and we don’t.

So right here actually, if you’re watching the video version, if you look out the window here, this is our office, Clickfunnels right there, there’s the daycare. So it’s right next store. There’s a little playground right there, you guys can see it. That’s the daycare.

Steven: And they cry and they scream and they’re whiny.

Russell: So the daycare, it’s really cool. The way it works is you show up there and then someone takes care of you the entire day. Like when you’re hungry, they give you food. When you’re thirsty they give you water. When you poop yourself, they wipe your butt. It’s really, really nice. It’s like what? $50 a month, $100? I don’t know how much it is. But that’s a daycare , that’s how daycare’s work.

So that’s one option of how you can get better at life, you can go to a daycare. Option number two, you go to school. Now, the thing about school is it costs a bunch of money. They don’t care about you at all. You show up and then you do your assignments or you don’t, they don’t really care and they give you an A, B, C, D or F. or if you’re in England I also found out they have an E. We don’t E’s in America, but apparently in England there’s E’s. But A, B, C, D, or F and then as long as you get a C, they don’t, C’s good enough and you get a degree. In fact, my motto in college was C’s get degrees. That’s how I passed school. As long as I got a C I could wrestle. So I literally had a 2.1 GPA, I had complete C’s all the way through, except for I got a B in, I think it was something….It was like semester one of year one. So it was a long time ago, I don’t even remember what it was.

But I got C’s, I got a degree and yay! I got a degree, whooo. And I leave with a piece of paper that’s completely useless. So we got daycare, we got school and then the third option now, is coaching. So how does coaching work? I’m a wrestler and every single day I show up to wrestling practice, my coach was there. My coach was really good. He knew what he was doing. And I show up and all the other wrestlers would show up and we’d sit and watch the coach and he’d teach us moves and we’re like, “Oh, cool. That’s a good move.” And guess what?

Some of the kids would watch the coach and they’d try the move and they didn’t do it right and they just sat there on their butts and did nothing. And then guess what? They sucked at wrestling. And the coach didn’t give them a B, or a C, or an A and it didn’t matter because they were going to put them out on the mat and they were going to get the crap kicked out of them in front of everybody. That was the reality. You don’t get an A, B or C, it’s like okay you’re about to go fight someone. This is your preparation, if you want to just crap it away, congratulations, you did that. And you’re going to get beat up in front of everybody.

Then there are people like me, I listen to coaches, I watch, I train, I ask them questions, I keep doing it, I train, I practice. When he would leave my dad would come over, my dad’s out there. When he would leave, then we’d go out to the house eat dinner and my friends would come to my house and we had a wrestling mat on my back porch, we’d wrestle on the back porch and guess what?

I became a state champ, I became an all American, I got a college scholarship, because I did more. My dad used to always tell me, “ A coach can take somebody to this level. And a coach has got a whole bunch of people he’s coaching. That entire wrestling room is all there and everyone’s getting there and the coach can get everybody to this level right here. The difference between someone who’s going to be a coach, and someone’s who’s going to be a champion, is after the coach gets you here, it’s that extra effort. That’s what makes you a champion.”

So what’s cool about marketing and sales, first off, we’re not a daycare. I’m not going to wipe your butt. I don’t freaking care if you succeed or not. That’s not on top of me. Number two, this is not college, I’m not going to be like “Congratulations, here’s a C you can go get a degree.” Because guess what? You’ve gotta go out there on your webinar or with your pride, and you gotta step out there in front of everybody and you’re getting the crap kicked out of you and if you’re getting a C, you’re going to get destroyed. I’m not giving out C’s. It’s not a college, or university. I actually care about your success.

So what we’re going to go is we’re going to have a coaching program, but we run the coaching program just like wrestling. We’re coaching a whole bunch of people the best that we know how. We know what works, but guess what? Everyone sitting in the room is hearing the exact same thing. And the difference between a champion and someone who is average is who’s going to take that extra effort. Who’s going to ask the coach other questions? Who’s going to follow up? Who’s going to practice? Who’s going to get better? Who’s going to do stuff on their own? Who’s going to go home at night, after they eat dinner, for the third practice of the day because they want to be a winner?

Those are the people who win and those are the people we coach. So right now you’re in a coaching program. So any of you guys who are in our coaching program, this is specifically towards one person who I’m yelling at, but this is an important lesson for everyone. First off, we’re not a daycare. If you want someone to wipe your butt, it’s like $100 across the street from Clickfunnels. Across, it’s not even the street, it’s like over the fence right there. They will wipe your butt and you’ll feel really good, because you gotta clean butt.

Number two, you can go to college. Boise State’s like, I don’t know, 4 or 5 miles down the road. They’ll give you C’s and you’ll feel really good. You can put it on your wall and be like, “I got a degree.” And you’re so awesome, but you’re going to go out in the real world and get the crap kicked out of you.

Or number three, you can become a champion. Show up every single day, work your butt off, work hard, and then go out and do the extra effort you need to do to be successful. The last two nights in a row, guess how late I was here at the freaking office working on my slides? 2:00 both nights in a row. “But Russell, you’re super successful, why are you still working hard?” Because champions go the extra effort.

I could have gone home. I could’ve not done this. I could’ve just slept. And we got people who are like, “Oh Russell, I worked really hard. I was up til like 8 last night.” Dude, you guys aren’t even there yet. You shouldn’t be going to bed until at least 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning til you freaking get this thing figured out. If you want to be a champion, the coaches can get you to this level. My coaching, Steven’s coaching, what we are doing, we will get you to this level but that’s the level everyone’s at. And guess what? If you’re at that level that everyone’s at you’re not going to be successful.

Champions go the extra effort. Champions do a practice afterwards. Champions go home and do another practice. Champions are thinking about it, dreaming about it, working on it, trying to perfect the art so they can become a champion. If you want to be successful in business you’ve got to do that because this is not something where we’re going to give you a C and now you’re going to make money. It doesn’t work that way. You’re going to go out there into the real world, into the marketplace, the marketplace is going to kick the crap out of you if you haven’t been prepared.

If you show up and you’re like, “Hey marketplace, I did my first webinar and nobody showed up.” It’s because your stuff’s boring because you just did the baseline and you quit. “I did the webinar, 5 people showed up and nobody bought.” First off, it’s because you did the baseline. If you want to be a champion you have to put in the extra effort from here to here. That is the extra effort you have to be to be a champ.

So to recap today. Number one if you want your butt wiped, go sign up for the daycare, it’s really cheap. And they’ll wipe your butt and it’ll feel so good. Number two, if you want to feel good about yourself, feel happy, and like kumbaya and all that crap, go to school, they’ll give you a degree. C’s get degrees, but they will not make you any money. And number three, if you want to be coached, be coachable. Come to the coaching program, listen to what they say and then do it. Don’t complain, “I can’t figure out….” Dude, there’s a thing called Google. There’s an answer to everything, you have to go that extra effort. You have to freaking do it. And you have to do it and you have to do it and you have to do it and you’re going to get beat up a lot during this practice period of time, but guess what?

If you do that and get beat up, that’s how when you step out on the real mat against really good people, that’s how you win and we’re creating winners here and that’s what we want.

So if you’re wondering, man this stuff doesn’t work for me….actually for those who are watching the video, I’m going to show you this stuff works really good. I’m going to show you, come down the hall. This is how well it works. For those champions, those who take the extra effort there, from here to here, we have them immortalized on our wall. There’s a lot of them. All of these guys here, the Two Comma Club award. All these people, these are the champions. They didn’t just go through the coaching program and stop, “Steven wasn’t as clear on how to do…”

They freaking Googled it and they asked other questions. They asked the community, and they worked hard, and they tried, and they tested, and they figured things out, and they were rewarded with a gold platinum record here, with two commas. There’s tons of them, boom.

I was showing Instagram last night, if you guys haven’t seen this yet. This month alone, the first guy came in….we filled this wall completely up, and right now if you look at this there’s 15 new one’s that came in.

Steven: It’s like 4 or 5 a week.

Russell: 15 that came in this month so far, but check this out. I came in last night and look at this, we have a whole other stack. Another 11 more. 11 +15 is 26. So we had 26 people join the Two Comma Club in the last 30 days. So what does that mean for you guys. One millionaire a day’s being made, so if you aren’t hitting it, you’re just stopping right here. You’re not doing that last little bit from there to there that is important to do. So there you go.

Steven: You gotta understand that Russell and I don’t hold the key to your success. That’s not at all how this works. It’s funny to watch different people who come in and do different coaching and stuff. It’s always easy to see, that extra little bit, that’s what keeps going. If you’re looking for external things to motivate you, it’s the wrong question already. No one needs to motivate you to do your thing. No one cares about your thing as much as you do. So you gotta be the one who’s all fiery and out there doing the thing, being a pioneer to some extent for your own success with it. Because honestly, you’re the only one who’s going to care enough to do it.

So Russell shows the framework, we’ll show how to do it, we’ll help you do things along the way as you get stuck, or whatever it is, but it’s totally up to you. You’re success, everything is gonna be riding on your back.

Russell: 100% If you don’t really want success, you just want someone to wipe your butt, go to daycare. If you don’t want success, you just want to feel good and get a degree on the wall, go to freaking college. If you want to make money, change your life, be successful, get a coach. If it’s not me, get someone else. Get a coach, freaking do everything they say, and then stop and do more. That’s it. Champions…..My dad used to tell me this all the time, “Coach only takes you to this level. Champions are made right there.”

Alright, it ran over. I gotta get back to slides. Alright you guys, appreciate you all. Thanks so much. I know I’m preaching to the choir for a lot of you guys, but for the other ones, if that stung a little bit, I’m talking to you. So thanks you guys, talk to you soon. Bye.

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How we’re creating systems so that everyone can focus on their unique abilities.

On this episode Russell talks about being worth $100,000 a day in his business, but not being worth anything as an assistant wrestling coaching. He goes on to say why it’s important to focus on unique abilities. Here are some of the amazing things in today’s episode:

Why Russell had to tell an old friend that he couldn’t come visit unless he paid him $100,000 a day.
How Russell ended up being an assistant wrestling coach for free.
And why focusing on our own and our team members unique abilities is a good way to grow your company.

So listen here to find out why Russell charges $100,000 a day for business consulting, but is an assistant wrestling coach for free.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys have an amazing day today because I’ve got something cool to share with you. Alright everybody, I’m heading back into the office. It’s been a couple, the last two weeks have been a lot.

Some of you guys, if you’ve been watching, last week I re-wrote the webinar from the ground up and it did really well. Over a million dollars in sales in the first week, which is cool. But the coolest thing, now that asset is done and created it will be placed in different places, including the home page of Clickfunnels. And it should, next year generate a lot. Anywhere from 10 – 20 million bucks.

So it’s like, you do the work once and it pays you forever. And now I’m writing a webinar this week for our new program called Software Secrets, which is a brand new thing. It’s always, the last webinar I wrote from scratch, but the offer was similar to what I’ve done in the past. So this one, this is a brand new offer, brand new everything.

And my kids started wrestling, and I don’t know if I told you guys this already, but the first day of wrestling practice happened and I didn’t know about it. I don’t know, we just got the dates messed up. So my kids went and that night I came home and I was all excited to see them, “How was wrestling?” and they’re all in tears, “We hate wrestling. We never want to go back.” And I was like, “What? No.” So I had to call the coach and a few minutes later I called to be an assistant wrestling coach. So now everyday at 3:00, I love it, I get to go to wrestling practice with my kids.

The only problem is that this week was planned to be the Software Secrets launch week, so I was going to have a whole week to build out the webinar. The problem is that now from 3 til 6 every night I’m at wrestling. So it cuts out, plus like drive times and everything else, it cuts out about 4 ½-5 hours every day. So I really needed to get this webinar, so I’ve been late nights. I was up at the office until 2 last night. I’m going to probably be there til 2 or 3 tonight and then do the webinar tomorrow morning live.

But I think conservatively, it’s an amazing offer. It’s really insane. I would be shocked if we don’t do a million dollars during the launch week, or this week, the webinar week, you know. And then that will go on and next year it could do, who knows, anywhere from 5-10 million bucks. So you do the work once and it pays you for the next 5 years, which is cool. That’s what I love about webinars. All that effort you put into it. So it’s worth putting in the effort.

It’s funny, as I’ve been doing this and thinking about it, I had an old friend from about 15 years ago call me and to start off, just kind of catching up and then, and I respect him for this, but as a good sales person does, he wanted to sell me something, and he’s like, “yeah, I could fly out to Boise and spend a day or two with you guys and show you all the stuff that we have.” And all this stuff right, and I was just like, how do you tell your friends this.

Awkwardly I’m sitting there and I’m like, “Hey man,” I was so uncomfortable, because how do you tell your friend, someone who’s known you when you were just a punk kid? “I don’t know how to tell you this nicely, but just so you know, right now I bill out, if you were to come in for a day of consulting I bill out an 8 hour day at $100,000. So for you to come out for 2 or 3 days, the opportunity cost for me, its 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars. So it’s really hard for me to just block out that time. I feel like such a jerk telling you that. But if you want to come out and we hang out as friends or something, I would love to see you again as friends, that’s super cool. To take 2 or 3 business days, the opportunity cost is not little.”

He was like, “What? Are you serious?” I’m like, “yeah.” It’s kind of awkward right. But that’s what we charge. You know, I saw someone the other day posting in our Facebook group like, “How come the guru’s don’t just charge $150 an hour so they can help everyone?” and it’s like, gall I wish I could. I wish there were more hours in the day. That’d be awesome. But I was like, literally I’m spending 3 days to create this webinar that will make me a million dollars in the first week. And anywhere from 5 to 10 million dollars extra, maybe more. Who knows?

So I’m spending 3 days, 3 days of focus time. And in my pocket goes 8 plus figures. $100,000 a day is actually super cheap discounted rate. You know what I mean? So I was trying to explain that, I was like, I don’t know how to say it nicely. I was like, even if you did want to pay me $100,000 a day, the first opening is probably 5 or 6 months away. My calendar is insanely booked. Anyway, so that’s kind of, that was this awkward moment. “I’m so sorry man, I just, I don’t want you to think I’m a jerk or anything, but that’s why I can’t just have you come out for 2 or 3 days to sell me something. I just can’t, I wish I could.”

So that was, there’s step one. And then so now I’m at wrestling practice with my kids and I’m sitting there and I’m spending 3 or 4 hours a day, every day, at wrestling practice, which again, I love. It’s so cool. I remember when I was this age, going to practice and my dad coming and watching and working out with me. It’s just cool. It’s been a really unique time with the twins, just such a cool thing to be able to spend time with them. Like I said, they haven’t liked wrestling, so I’m in there trying to make sure they’re liking it. I’m in there wrestling most of the time I’m drilling with them, I’m helping them and just making sure they have a good experience just so that they keep doing it. And for the next two or three years in the beginning programs, that they like it.

If they like, I just don’t want them to get hurt, or beat up, so I’m just there to make sure that they like it and teach them some moves so they start beating kids. Because if you start beating kids, then it gets fun. So I’m just like, trying to get them through this initial pain of the beginning. And I’m sitting there, I’m an assistant coach, I’m not getting paid anything obviously. And I was just like, it’s so interesting, in this area of my life, like in business, my time is worth $100,000 a day. But in wrestling my time is not worth anything. I’m not getting paid for the 3 to 4 hours a day that I’m spending, which is, I don’t want to get paid for it.

But I had this realization, over here I’m insanely valuable monetarily. Over here, I’m not. Best case scenario, if I was, even the best wrestling coaches in the world maybe, maybe clear 6 figures, probably not. Most of them probably $50-60 grand max. And these are like the best, these are the dudes like the Michael Jordan’s of the world, of the wrestling world. So it’s like, let’s just say I was at that level and I was getting paid that, I’d still be making $20 an hour, $30 an hour maybe. So for three hours it’s worth $60, $80, maybe $100 for my time. Whereas that time spent over here is worth $20 grand an hour. You’re looking at $20, 40, 60 grand for that same time, just where am I focusing at.

And as I was thinking through it I was like, that’s so fascinating how valuable I am here and not so much here. So I started thinking about us as entrepreneurs where how often do we spend our time, we have a unique ability that’s worth $100 grand a day right. To our company and to us and the people we’re serving right. But then, we go and start doing these $8 an hour jobs because it’s gotta be done, so I should be the one doing it. But you’re not worth that much there. It’s so expensive to have you spending time on $8, 10, 20 an hour jobs if you’re making $20,000 an hour doing your unique ability.

It’s been interesting, I’ve been working with Jeff Woods, from The One Thing, on building things out. One of the big things I’m focusing on, thinking through is we’re trying to re-systemize our business because it’s kind of to the point where we need to re-set and re-do all those things. And as I’m thinking through it I’m just like, I want to create the systems and my goal in these systems is to create the system so that it forces me, and forces everybody on my team to only do their unique ability. Because each of us has a unique ability where we’re worth $100,000 a day, and then we have things we’re good at where we’re worth $20 an hour.

It’s like, if I can get everyone focusing on their unique abilities where they’re worth $100 grand a day versus their non unique abilities where they’re worth $100 a day, man how much faster can we grow and can we scale and all those type of things? So that’s been my thought process.

So right now, we’re in the re-systemization of our company from now until the end of the year. After the Software Secrets launch I’m going to take, you guys will see me take a little bit of my foot off the gas, so I can recoup, restructure, get systems in place and then in January we’re going to go crazy, so it’s going to be fun.

But that’s why, I’m trying to figure out how to get everyone focusing on their unique ability and not focusing on the $100 a day jobs that they can do, and they are doing, but how do we get it so we’re all focusing on unique abilities? So for you guys who are thinking about it, what’s your unique ability? Think through that and then figure out, okay now that I know that, what are the people on my teams unique abilities and how do I create a structure where everyone is focusing 100% of their time on unique abilities? When you do that, you’ll start growing.

Dan Sullivan, at strategiccoach.com, if you guys go there he, I just bought every book on his website last week. It showed up in a huge box. Because I’m about to immerse in some Dan Sullivan, so I don’t just buy one book, I buy all of them because I love immersion. But in one of his books, it’s about unique ability, it has like a work book and everything. I haven’t read it yet, but I know it’s awesome, so check it out.

You guys, there is Garrett, and there is Scott. Those are our partner’s for Software Secrets, Lindsay, they’ve been up here for the last 2 days camping overnight with me getting everything ready for the launch tomorrow. So if you guys are watching the video you just saw Garrett, Scott and Lindsay. If not, you just saw me point in the air and didn’t see anything, if you’re just listening. So anyway, I’m going to jump in and we’re going to get this thing launched. I got 5 ½ hours before wrestling practice. After wrestling practice I’m going to come back and probably spend another 51/2 hours, so about 10 hours to get this webinar done before my body will shut down. Wish me luck.

And then tomorrow will be a million dollar day and then we’ll have an asset that’ll pay us for the rest of our lives. So this is my unique ability. So that’s what I spend my time doing. Spending my time managing, $100 a day job. Spending my time writing webinars, $100 grand a day job. So I’m focusing on my unique ability today, which will be good. So that’s all I got. Alright everybody, appreciate you all, talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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I use this in every webinar, every Facebook live, every sales letter, and pretty much every time I sell anything, and I’m going to give it to you for free!

On this episode Russell talks about a closing technique he learned from the first copywriter he ever paid, that he has been using ever since. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

Who Russell first heard use this technique and what’s cool about it.
Listen as Russell go into character to show how he does the sales pitch.
And find out why it doesn’t have to be all or nothing when people buy from a webinar.

So listen here to find out what technique Russell has been using for years to close.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. So excited to be here with you guys today. And today you guys are learn one of my top closing techniques that I use in webinars, and sales letters, and sales videos, and Facebook lives and over and over and over again. And I might even use it in other aspects of my life as well.

Alright everybody, I hope you guys are excited today. I’m heading over to my son Aiden’s school, he’s 7 years old and today I am the mystery reader. So what happens is in about 15 minutes from now I’m supposed to sneak up to his door and I knock on the door and they open the door and I get to come in and read a book to them. And he doesn’t know it’s happening, but they’ve been giving clues out about who I was all week long. So every Friday they do this and so it’s kind of fun, so today’s my day and I’m so excited. I got my book, got some Dr. Seuss with me.

He was cute, he was like, “Dad, if you are the mystery reader today, you should bring treats.” I’m like, “Oh, what kind of treats do you want?” and he’s like, “It’d be cool to make those oranges.” Those little oranges, whatever those little mini ones are called, and they’re peeled and you put a little celery thing on top of it, so it’s like a little pumpkin. So my wife spent all day today peeling little mini oranges and putting those things in. Oh man, he’s so cute we have to do what he asks. Just kidding, kind of.

Anyway, so I’m heading there right now and I had a few minutes I wanted to jump on and just share with you guys because as you may or may not know, I re-wrote a new podcast recently. I did it first live last week after less than a day of writing and there were tons of mistakes and errors, yet it still was our highest grossing webinar of all time. So it worked good. I spent the last week re-writing it and tweaking it, I spent probably another twelve hours or so re-working on slides and getting them just so. And then did a webinar yesterday and did awesome again, so it was fun.

And in that webinar, as I do in most webinars, I did a really cool closing technique that I love, so I want to share with you guys because I think it’s useful. So the first time I ever heard this, there was a copywriter, not was, there is a copywriter, he’s the first copywriter I ever spent money on. I gave him $8000 for a sales letter back in the day for a product I never launched, that was dumb. Yeah, I never even used it. It was called, a product I was creating called, Ezine Topia. Because everyone used to call newsletters list, like email lists back then e-zines. So I was like Ezine Topia, and it was going to be this email auto-responder that didn’t use email, it would be desk top notifications, and back then that was the buzz and I thought it was going to be the next, I thought it was going be Clickfunnels. It wasn’t, just in case you’re wondering. I failed.

But in theory it was cool and I spent a lot of money. Anyway, Ezine Topia, Johan Mock wrote the copy for it, and I used to love reading his copy. And one of the closes he used one time I saw, it was really cool. It was towards the end and it said something at the very end of the sales letter like, “Whether you buy this product or not doesn’t matter to me, I’m still going to be out eating steak and dining at fine restaurants whether you buy this or not. Because this is not about me, this is about you. This is something that will change your life. It’s not going to change my life whether or not you buy, so I don’t really care. But this will change your life.”

And I remember hearing that and I was like, oh that’s so cool. So I started incorporating that in a lot of places. In my webinars, I started using it in Facebook Live, start using it just all over the place. So if you notice when I’m selling something I do it almost every time now and it’s one of my favorite techniques when I get to the end. Because at the end, people aren’t buying are like, “Oh, it’s $2,000 or $10,000 or whatever the price is. Russell is just greedy, he wants money.” Or all these things. And so I just want to state to them, I want them to know, and it’s true, it doesn’t…..

Anyway, this is how I say it, I’m going to go into character, and I’m going to pitch it as if I’m pitching it right now. So yesterday I was selling a $2,000 course where you Clickfunnels, plus Funnel Scripts, plus Traffic Secrets, plus Funnel Hacking 101 and 201. It’s an insane offer, right. I honestly think anyone who doesn’t buy it is insane.

So basically I’d go say something like this, “So before we wrap up today I just want to say something right now because I know a lot of you guys are thinking this. But this investment, this $2,000, it is not about me. Whether you make this investment or not, it will have zero impact on the quality of my life. I’m not going to eat anything different tonight for dinner, I’m not going to change the way I dress, what I drive. It literally means zero to me, I couldn’t care less. But the difference is that this purchase, this investment, this could mean everything for you. I’m not going to notice whether you buy or not. It won’t change the quality of my life at all, but if you buy it’s going to change the quality of your life. I need you guys to understand that. This is not about me, this is about you. That’s why I created this, because I want to help and I want to serve you. So that’s what you guys need to understand, that’s how this works.”

I do it a little cooler when I’m live because I’m actually live and the stuff flows better, but conceptually that’s basically what it is. I want them to understand this investment, like if they spend $2,000 or even $25,000 doesn’t change my life at all. I don’t really care. I hope they do because extra money is always nice in the bank, but it literally won’t change, I’m doing well, I’m fine. It’s not going to change anything. I’m still going to go on my daily, the way that Johan Vox said it, I’m still going to go on my daily life. I’m going to be eating steak and sushi and hitting all my financial goals with absolute certainty, so it doesn’t matter to me if you do it or not, I could care less. But it should matter to you because it literally could change your life forever, I want you guys to understand that.

This is not about me, it’s not about if Russell’s going to make some money, or if Russell is going to whatever. This is about you. This about you making a commitment and having the blueprint, the vehicle, the things you need to actually succeed with that commitment. So this is about you, not me. So put it back on them and it helps a lot.

I use it a lot and I hope that’s a tool and a technique you guys can use as well. And it’s putting the responsibility back on their shoulders. Because when people aren’t buying they’re always trying to figure it out. Different ways to take the responsibility off and one of the ones they use is, “This is just Russell trying to get rich.” No, Russell’s already rich, he doesn’t care. The $2,000 you give him, he’s not going to see any of it. Half of it will go to an affiliate, half of it will go to support staff, half of it will go to building software, it literally does nothing for me. This is about you, not about me.

And that’s the commitment that I want them to understand and I want them to make. Because when they understand that, it’s like, “Wow, this really is about me. I gotta do this.” If I don’t buy it’s not going to make that mean old Russell salesman any different. It’s a personal decision, something that’s going to affect them.

Anyway, I hope that helps. One other thing I wanted to share with you guys that I thought was interesting today. So we did the webinar, the price is double now, the offer is like 10 times better, but the price is double. And it’s interesting because the conversion, I normally close about 15% and it was closer to 10%, so we made more net money when all was said and done, but what’s interesting, the more I think about it, if you create a product where it’s not all or nothing on the webinar. So I try to sell that but usually on the webinar you don’t buy the package I offer you, you still can buy Clickfunnels, right. So that becomes a two to three hour indoctrination of how powerful it is and why they should use it and why they need it and stuff like that. And I think that that is the key.

So I’m just throwing it out there for you guys to think through. If you’re doing webinars and they’re not buying, it’s not an all or nothing. Again, if you have a software program it’s easy because it’s like, you’re selling a higher version of software, they can use the software. Maybe it’s a membership site you’re trying to sell a year access, but they can still get the membership site, then it’s not all or nothing. Then it’s just like, even if they don’t buy it, they still now are moving closer towards you and more likely to invest in the other stuff you got. Don’t think it’s all or nothing. It’s not all buying or not buying, it’s indoctrination, it’s building relationships, building cultures and all that kind of stuff too.

Alright, well I’m at school, I’m going to bounce. Thanks everybody. I hope you had a good time and remember this closing technique will work for you and it’s awesome. So there you go. Thanks everybody. Bye.

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The second super power that you need to add that’s, unfortunately, invisible to the entrepreneurial eye.

On this episode Russell talks about being able to set long term goals to help you focus today and stop chasing all the shiny things that you see along the way. Here are some interesting things you will hear in this episode:

Why you should stop being distracted by shiny things by focusing on the one thing that you want to do.
Why being entrepreneurial is like having a super power and how being able to set goals and follow them is a second super power.
And how setting a someday goal will help you reverse engineer your 5 year, 1 year, 1 month, 1 week, and today goals.

So listen here to find out how to add another super power to your entrepreneurship.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about being an entrepreneur and sometimes it might not be good.

Alright everybody, so as you know, I love entrepreneurs. I am an entrepreneur; I’m obsessed with entrepreneurs. My entire goal in life is to help entrepreneurs change more people’s lives because I think that we are the only types of people that can. Because we’re the only types that are crazy enough to risk everything we have, our money, our time, our energy, our talents, the pursuit of creating something amazing that will change other people’s lives.

Some people think entrepreneurs are greedy, all they care about is money and I don’t believe that’s true. I believe some are, yeah, there’s definitely some that are. But I think that a lot of people, the entrepreneurial spark starts because of money, because of the desire for that, but I think for most of us, and you’ll find that out if you’re still in the path, as soon as you start making money it starts becoming stupid. You actually don’t care about it all because it’s really not that cool. So there you go, for those of you guys, I hate to ruin the surprise for you, but when you get there, nobody actually cares about money. It’s just the thing that you desire at first until you get it, and then you’re like, huh, that was actually not nearly as cool as I thought it was going to be.

But the cool thing is in the interim as you start doing that, you start serving people and you start seeing their lives change and you’re like, “Holy crap, that was actually awesome.” So that’s kind of the thing.

Like I said, I love entrepreneurs because they’re the people who care enough to risk life and limb, everything they got, all their time, energy, money, talents with the hope they can actually help other people. So first off, I love you guys. I’m going to stay there. Second off, I also realized that while we have super powers, kind of like the X-men. It’s funny because a lot of people talk about how entrepreneurs have ADD and it’s like this bad thing. And while I agree that most entrepreneurs have ADD and things like that, those things they are not disabilities, they’re super powers.

I remember watching the movie the X-men the first time, one of the multiple one’s in that franchise. I remember watching it and there’s these people, the X-men who they think can fly and they can disappear and do all these amazing things, but the mortal humans are like, “We need to get rid of their super powers.” And they’re trying to get rid of these super powers. And it’s just like, even some of the X-men are embarrassed of their super powers and are trying to get rid of them.

And it’s just like, you don’t understand, those super powers are what makes you amazing. Don’t get rid of those things. So I feel that way, a lot of times entrepreneurs are the people like, “I’m trying to get my kids not to have such ADD or quit fidgeting.” All these things. And it’s just like, dude, that’s why they’re great. Don’t stifle those things.

So I’m saying those things in caveat because I also understand there are some things that us entrepreneurs are not good at, especially me. Some of you guys know, if you listen to the podcast, I recently hired a consultant, Jeff Woods from The One Thing. It’s funny because when I first read that book, I kind of hated it. Because I was like, “I don’t want to focus on one thing.” And now it’s interesting as I progress in my career and my life, I realize more and more how important that, the focus on the one thing actually is. In fact, it’s essential to everything. I look at my entrepreneurs and most of them that join my inner circle. They come in 50,000 ideas and my entire focus for the year number one is to get them to kill all their babies, AKA their little businesses and focus on one.

It was just hard, it was hard for me. But I couldn’t go, I couldn’t break the 2 or 3 million dollar a year mark until I killed all my babies and focused on one. And as soon as we did, we went up from 2 or 3 million dollars a year to 70 or 80 million dollars a year, within, not a very long period of time. It’s crazy. Crazy. Within a couple of years.

So that’s one thing that I’ve learned. Entrepreneurs, we have these tendencies that cause greatness, but also tendencies that cause tend to kill us. One of them is we have a thousand businesses, we have all these babies we love and things like that. But during my consulting call this week with Jeff, from the One Thing, it was interesting, he kept telling me, “You gotta stop acting so entrepreneurial.” I’m like, “But you don’t understand. That’s my super..I’m a super entrepreneur.” And he’s like, “I know but entrepreneurship got you here. But to get to the next level, you have to start running and understanding and thinking like a business owner.”

And he keeps trying to get me to figure out what’s my goal someday. What’s this goal I’m out here for? And it’s tough because I started going through this exercise and I talked about it a couple of podcasts ago. It was weird because I realized that all my someday goals, I accomplished like 18 months ago. How weird is that? And as I’m going through this exercise, I told him “I’m really frustrated. I feel like I have perfect clarity and vision with what’s going to happen over the next 6 months, a year, maybe 18 months. After that it’s like a dark cliff.” And I remember as I told him that he kind of laughed. He was like, “Let me show you something.” Because it was a voice call, so he flipped his camera on Skype and said, “Let me draw a little picture for you.”

And so for those of you guys who are listening, I’m going to try to describe the picture, and for those watching, I’m going to try painting it with my finger. I’m in my car right now. But he said, “Look at this. This is a timeline right? So it starts at the left and you have this timeline. This is when you’re born, and this is when you wrestled, and this is when you started your business, and this is when Clickfunnels launched, and this is when Clickfunnels took off, and here you are today. This is the timeline. So we judge our time based on these landmarks that happen throughout time. Most entrepreneurs, we’re visionaries so then we look at the future we see all these possibilities.”

So if you look at this graph I’m drawing from the left to the right, it’s very linear and then it hits modern time and from here it shotguns out. So going up there’s one thing and then there’s another one. There’s like ten things shooting out from this. Almost like, it looks like a broom almost. It’s like a stick with a timeline and then it breaks off into this broom with all these possiblitites, all these things fanning out that I could go. And he says, “The problem with that, we see all these shiny objects, so we chase those things. Entrepreneurs become great when they’re able to focus on one thing. But what most entrepreneurs do moving forward, they get stuck because they can see forward 6 months. In 6 months there’s like 4 or 5 things that they could hit. These 4 or 5 shiny objects. And you go like a year and there’s more. The further out you go the harder it is to see and about 18 months it gets so….that fan of things going outward from where you are today, gets so wide it gets really hard to start seeing things. That’s why entrepreneurs are really good at seeing about 6 months to a year from now and knowing the steps to take and they’re running and doing all those kind of things, but you go past that and it’s kind of a black hole.”

“What we do with The One Thing and focus on is figuring out like a laser, instead of…..” I wish I could draw a picture so you could see it better, for those who are listening. But instead of having this thing fanning out where you’re trying to hit all these shiny object what they do is start with the someday goal. Where do you want to be someday? And getting crystal clear on that. Someday I want to be, and this is like in the future as far out as you can think. Where do you want to be, what do you want life to look like?

So I’ve spent the last 3 ½, 4 weeks trying to figure that out, which has been really, really hard. So just so you know, it’s not an easy thing. So you figure out, here’s the someday goal and from there it’s like, okay now we gotta reverse engineer timeline backwards of all the milestones we have to hit to be able to get to that one thing. So we reverse engineer. So okay, 5 years, where do I need to be in 5 years from now to be one track to hit my someday goal? And then, now I crystallized my 5 year goal. Now what do I gotta be in a year from now? And then where do I gotta be this month? This week? Today?

And then we focus on just the one thing that we’re going to accomplish that going to achieve that next landmine, not landmine. Landmines explode. The next landmark, and the next one and next one and next one. Man, it’s been a fascinating exercise. The business ones are harder to explain, but I’m going to show you really quick, one for my personal life. One of my thoughts in this exercise, what will it mean for me to be successful as a father? So I’m like, okay for me to be successful as a father, and obviously my belief’s may be different from yours. But for me, I’ve got three boys. I want my 3 boys to go on missions and I want all my 5 kids to get married in the temple. For me, that would be ultimate success as a father. So I’m looking at someday goals, is that.

So essentially it’s like, okay where do you gotta be in 5 years from now for you to be able to accomplish that? In 5 years from now, my boys who are 11 ½ almost 12, they’ll be 17. They’re a year away from preparing for their mission. At that point, where do I have to be 5 years from now, if they’re going to go on a mission by the time they’re 18? I’m like, oh my gosh, they’ve got to be able to….all these things. That’s only 5 years from now, which is crazy. Then I’m like okay, from there, 1 year from now where do you gotta be to be on track for your 5 year goal? 1 year from now they’ve gotta do…I don’t have my kids doing…. All the sudden it shifted my whole perspective. Based on that, what are you going to do a month from now, a week from now, and today? What’s the one thing I need to do with my kids today to be able to hit that goal 5 years from now? I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m not doing anything related to that.

I found the same thing in business as I looked at my someday goal, my 5 year goal, my 1 year, my week, my month, and today, I looked at my to-do list, there wasn’t a single thing on my to-do list that got me moving towards my someday goal. I was like, how fascinating is that? I have all these shiny objects, as entrepreneurs do, they’re good, they’re creating revenue and doing stuff, but none of them lead me to my someday goal. It makes me start rethinking everything, it’s so fascinating.

So what I want you guys to do, because we’re all entrepreneurs, and I don’t think about this naturally, none of us do. It’s all the different type than us. But Jeff keeps telling me, “you need to stop acting entrepreneurial. Stop acting entrepreneurial. Figure these things out. Reverse engineer, then you can go get them really, really easily. But right now, you have no focus, you’re accomplishing things, you’re making revenue but you’re never going to hit your goal because you don’t have one. You don’t have a target.” And it’s been interesting for me.

For me, I’ve been really spending, honestly almost a month now, what’s my someday goal for my business? And I’m trying to make sure, all my core people on my management team, my company, my cofounders, my partners do they have the same someday goal as I do? Because if my someday goal is to do this, and theirs is this, the direction we go is completely different. We were thinking, just yesterday, or Monday we had a meeting with my partners and I was talking about this, and I wanted them all to say their someday goal and they’re all like, “well we just want the same someday goal as you.” I’m like, “No, think about it. If it’s different….my goal is this, yours is this, this goal may require us selling Clickfunnels, but this goal requires us not selling CLickfunnels and if we have different someday we’re running towards and yours requires selling Clickfunnels in 3 years and mine requires us never selling it, or selling it 30 years from now, everything we’re doing is going to be completely different. We gotta be on the same page with our someday goals or else we’re all screwed.”

So that’s what we’re going through now, having all of them kind of figure those things out. And then next it’s going to be fun, start doing some of the people inside my team, “What’s your someday goal? Where are you trying to get to?” and then reverse engineer things from there. It’s just interesting. I’m doing it with my business, in my personal life, with my health, with spirituality, all the different things in my life because it’s interesting, as soon as you know where you’re trying to get to, you start looking at the to-do lists you have right now. It’s interesting how none of your to-dos actually advance you towards your someday goal. All it’s doing is killing all these shiny objects that you have sprouting out from where you are right now.

So he says our life should be similar to the timeline prior, where you’ve got, I’ve got I was born, I started wrestling, I launched our first company, we launched Clickfunnels, Clickfunnels took off, and here we are today, and this should be like, “okay, then we did this” We should be able to see that timeline moving forward in the future as clear as we can see it going backwards. As soon as you can see it as clear going forward as you can going backwards, that’s when you stop acting entrepreneurially, which I hate saying that. But you start acting with intention. And it’s like, these are the steps to get to that.

It’s so simple when you look at it now, but I’ve never thought of it that way. I’ve never looked at it that way. And it’s funny because I’ve always felt like I’ve been a visionary, I know where I’m going, I know the steps. And it’s true, I know the steps for 6 months, maybe a year from now, but past then it’s invisible to me. And now that I’m doing this it’s like, holy cow, I’ve got this clarity of this is what I gotta do this year, in five years, all these landmarks to get to that end goal.

Anyway, it’s been a fascinating exercise for me. Like I said, it’s been a month and I’m still trying to, I keep re-tweaking my someday goal and re-tweaking my teams. But I think it’s worth doing. Again, in your personal life, your business, all these different things, that way you’re acting out of intention and you know where you’re going as opposed to just being entrepreneurial and killing and hunting the stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s what makes us great, the reality is none of you guys would have gotten to the point you are now if you weren’t acting entrepreneurial. Because most people, they plan so much and they don’t do anything. The whole ready, fire, aim thing. I believe in that.

It’s like, okay, here are twenty objects, I’m just going to run and throw a bunch of crap against the wall and see what sticks. There’s that part of the processing that we needed to do to find what’s going to be ours. But after you know that and you’re on the path and you know those things, now it’s like okay now let’s start acting intentionally and really get to what we want.

You know when I was wrestling, it was easy. I was like, “I want to be a state champ.” That was so clear in my mind. That’s all I cared about, thought about. You know, 8 drinks lefts, that’s all I did. I wanted to be a state champ. And then I hit it and then I was like, “I want to be an all American.” And then I hit it and it just became really, really easy. And I think it’s, again for me, as we started this exercise, all the goals I had in business had been accomplished 18 months ago. And for the last 18 months, I think that’s probably why this year was crazy for me, I did a lot of stuff. We launched two books, Expert Secrets and the Funnel Hacker Cookbook. We did 5 events. It’s been crazy and it’s because I don’t think I had a focus, so we were just trying to do more.

While that can be good, it’s very entrepreneurial, it can wear you out and can make your life suffer because you don’t know where you’re going so you’re filling all the void with stuff, to-do’s, tasks, ideas, projects, books, holy crap, you see my list. While these things sometimes fill you up, it doesn’t get you towards your goal necessarily. Not that they’re bad, they may have still been landmarks that I needed to do to get there, but I probably would have acted a little differently.

In fact, it’s funny I was doing this one thing, I can’t ruin the secrets, but this next project that I was going to try to get done this year, I’m like, it’s not, my ego wants it done this year, but there’s no purpose. So we set a date for next August to do it. I’m like, “What? That’s almost a year away, I’ve never had that much….” But strategically planning it out, that’s when it fit, that’s when it actually made sense. That’s what got me towards the next goal. It’s been fascinating.

I wish I could show you all the aha’s I’ve had personally with my own business, but it would take forever. Hopefully you’ve had one or two for yourself and as you do the exercise, I promise you guys, it’s fascinating.

So there you go, I hope that helps. Quit acting entrepreneurial, not 100% though, we need you. We need you to be a little crazy, that’s what creates the change and the stuff. I don’t want to take that super power away from you, okay. That’s your X-men super ability, but understand that maybe you can fly right now, but think if you had laser eyes too, now you got two super powers. So maybe it’s not stopping acting entrepreneurial, it’s getting your second super power.

Yes, yes, that’s what it’s called. Oh, this is the second super power, that’s way better. Keep being entrepreneurial, we adding a second super power. I’m titling this podcast that. There you go guys, appreciate you all. If you enjoyed this episode or it helped you at all, please share it. If you’re in iTunes I just found out that there’s a little button that you click and there’s a thing to share an episode, it gives you a link. Take that link, it direct links to this episode and you can go share it with your friends, family members, anybody else who’s an entrepreneur, anyone on your team, in fact, your team, your partner, your employees, so all you guys can focus and figure out where you’re going. Thanks you guys, appreciate you all, and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

View Details

Here’s a behind the scene’s glimpse of the chaos that ensued in the 24 hour webinar.

On today’s episode Russell goes over what happened when he planned and executed a new webinar in under 24 hours. He recounts what went wrong, what went well, and how it did overall. Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:

What things went wrong during the webinar, such as software freezing, and slides not being completed in time.
Why a guy that actually pays Russell for coaching has no business critiquing the webinar.
And why you need to just do it if you are planning on launching a webinar. What are you waiting for?

So listen here to find out how Russell’s webinar went and hear what he’s changing when he redoes it later this week.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I am actually in the car. Don’t worry I’m safe. Don’t yell at me, “Russell you’re going to die.” I got my phone mounted so we’re safe. I’m just going to be talking, I’m not even going to look at the camera unless I stop. Then I’ll look at the camera.

But I’m excited for today, in fact, I’m heading to a doctor’s appointment. Hopefully I can find that. I’m a little late, but that’s kind of typical for me. Anyway, a lot of fun stuff happening now, and I just wanted to share some stuff because hopefully it will help some of you guys because I’m sure all of you guys are going through some stuff right now as well.

So a couple of things. Yesterday I saw, it’s funny, somebody posted in one of our groups a message about, critiquing the webinar I did last week. So some context on the webinar, this webinar that we had the idea on Tuesday. I had to write brand new slides from scratch on Tuesday. I had all day Wednesday and half a day Thursday. So I had a day and a half to do all the slides, it ended up being like a hundred and sixty slides. I made a registration page, we had to promote it. All this stuff in under a 48 hour period of time. A lot of stuff.

I can’t remember if I told you guys much about it. But when all was said and done, we launched it and we had an 81 1/2 % opt in rate after over 10,000 opt in’s, which is insane, highest converting one I’ve ever had. Number two is we are selling a similar offer, but we are kind of changing it some, to our old funnel hacks. We are changing it, increased the price, we changed the training a little bit. So it’s a similar offer, but it’s different. So I have a lot of stuff going against me. Most of the people on our list have heard me do the webinar selling them the main thing probably, I don’t know a hundred different times.

So I needed and wanted to make a new version. So this I did this whole new thing that showed a bunch of stats and analytics and it was just a really cool thing. So we did the whole thing and put it together, I literally as I ended up with over 10,000 people registered and I’m cranking out slides all the way up to the point where the webinar starts, I think it was 3 eastern, or 3 mountain time it started. I probably had 75% of my slides done at that point. So I didn’t have time to finish, I probably needed another 3 or 4 hours to actually get it done, but I ran out of time. So literally as the clock hit 3 I am copying and pasting all my slides from my old presentation to my new one because I have no time to actually finish it, which is crazy.

So then we start the webinar and we start going, and I never used….we never had a webinar that had that many people register. So we used Zoom instead of Go to Webinar, which I was nervous about because I always used Go to Webinar, it’s like good old faithful. But we decided to try Zoom because Zoom has the capacity to do I think 3 or 5 thousand people live, plus you can stream into Facebook. So you can do Facebook Live or Youtube live and things like that. So I was like, let’s try it. I know it’s scary to try something huge, especially something that you have this many people registered for, but I was like, we keep talking about trying it but we’re scared it’s not going to work at scale but the only way to find out if it works at scale is if you just do it. So we’re like, alright let’s just do it. If worst case scenario we’ll lose millions of dollars.

So we do it, and I start Zoom and at first it’s all frozen up. It’s not processing very well at all. And finally I’m able to get on and people can hear me but I can’t see questions and every time I try to just hover over the thing, there’s just a spinning circle, but people could hear me. So I was like, alright. And we’d already clicked record and it was already streaming to Facebook, so I’m like, I just gotta go.

So I started the presentation, and there’s like 30 people in my office. Not 30, I’m exaggerating, there’s probably 8 people in the office who are trying to get things setup and working and they’re talking and I’m trying to be like, “Don’t talk, I’m doing the webinar now. I’m stressing out.” And the slides aren’t done and in my head I’m all mad about that. I haven’t had a chance to even go through the slides yet, I have no idea if the transitions are working.

All the stress of the moment is just insane. So I start kind of going and man, I totally am fumbling as I start because I’m kind of overwhelmed because the slides aren’t working. I’m overwhelmed just because of the stress of it all. The first probably 15 minutes and I’m just fumbling and I can’t get my rhythm. You know how that feels to get the rhythm. It took me probably 15-20 minutes before I finally started getting the rhythm. But then even with that, because it was a new webinar, I didn’t know super well where it was going. I kind of remembered because I had just created it. But I hadn’t really done it before, so I don’t really know where I’m going, I’m trying to do it all right.

Anyway, I do my best in the confines….some reason I have this weird thing where I set these crazy confines for myself. So we had probably a day and a half total time to…no actually excuse me…..it was the night before, I started on slides at 4pm and the webinar was the next day at 3. So I had 24 hours total, but I had to sleep in the middle there. So I think we were up all that night until like 2 working on slides. So it was less than a 24 hour period of time to do all 160 slides for a new presentation I’d never done before and then give it live in front of all these people.

We ended up having about 3500 people on live and I think we had 11,000 that watched it on Facebook, but that kind of ebbs and flows. I think we had on average about 4 or 500 people on Facebook. So it was crazy.

So I do the webinar, do the presentation, do the pitch and again it’s the first time doing the pitch, there’s all sorts of confusion and questions and things coming up that I didn’t even have time to plan for because I was going to pitch it this way, but I was using slides from my old presentation. It doesn’t even make any sense. But then the powerful thing I did, the night before when I was planning to do this, I messaged like 20 different people in my inner circle that were just people who were killing it in Clickfunnels in different markets and different industries. I was like, “Hey, could you guys jump on tomorrow for like an hour and just tell your Clickfunnels story?” and they were like, “Oh sure.” And amazingly they all show up.

So I get on the webinar and I’m trying to do the interviews but my computer is frozen, the zoom on my computer is frozen up, so I can’t actually interview anyone. We have all these amazing people who took an hour out of their life to be here and I can’t even communicate with them. It took us like 10 minutes to figure out…On my computer we couldn’t do it, so we had to switch the presenter to Mark’s computer, on our team. So then we were on his computer, and then we’re…so crazy.

So then I got it work, so I’m doing the Q&A through his, but then people can’t see the screen, so I’m trying to do call to action’s throughout, and no one can see the countdown clock and it was just kind of like, it was all sorts of messed up. So many problems, so many issues.

But we’re doing the live Q&A and that part, it went for an hour, but it was really good. People’s Q&A’s were so good. I’m praying, please let the Zoom recording stuff work because we want, I need to use these recordings somwehre else. Please, I want to use them again. And luckily the recordings came out. So we do the webinar, it finally ends, it’s like 3 ½ hours from start time to this point. I haven’t slept literally more than a few hours in the last 24 hours. I’m tired, I’m worn out. It was like a thousand degrees in my office because everyone was in there.

It’s just done, I’m soaking wet from sweating, and I was like ugh. We finally end the whole thing and we couldn’t figure out how to actually end it. I’m like, “Don’t talk guys.” Because Zoom’s frozen on my computer, we can’t even end the event. And it was just crazy. Finally we figured out to take it off and end the event, and it was done and wasn’t streaming on Facebook anymore, and then everyone starts cheering and clapping. I was like, “Did we sell any? Because I have no idea.” Who knows.

So finally, we get done and we look at the sales and it was crazy. The highest grossing webinar I’ve ever done to date. I’ve done a couple of webinars in my decade and a half in this game now. So it was really, really good. And obviously there were things that I need to fix and want to fix and change and all that kind of stuff. So I sent emails basically telling everyone, “Hey, the webinar replay crashed,” which is kind of true. I do have a backup but I don’t want to show it to everyone. I want to go actually finish the slides and all that kind of stuff.

So this week, actually in two days, we’re going to redo it again live for all these people, hopefully I’ll have my act together, and you know, it will probably not convert as well because I’m all polished now. But I want it cleaned up and get all the things in the right order, the right place and do the presentation right.

So we’re doing it again Thursday. But it was the highest opt in we’ve ever had, highest grossing webinar I’ve ever had. So many amazing things. We’re super proud of ourselves and all sorts of stuff. Then yesterday, I’m about to leave the office and I login to Facebook just to check out what people are posting on the book of faces. And some dude in one of our coaching programs, he posted this long post about my webinar was fugly and how he watched it and how sick to his stomach he got and I broke my own rules and how it wasn’t truly a blue ocean, it was a proven offer. And then he had a 30 minute video critiquing everything.

And in the video he’s like, “To quote Russell, he said this, yet he blah, blah, blah. And CLickfunnels, we know it’s good, but it’s not great.” And just totally, for 30 minutes…This is somebody who paid me to coach them to teach them how to do webinars. So I want to put the context, he’s in a coaching group specifically dedicated to teaching people how to do a webinar. Now in this comment he also said, “I tried to join your inner circle, but I couldn’t afford the 25 thousand.” So he’s someone who’s paying me good money to learn to do webinars, doesn’t have enough money in his bank account to pay for my coaching program, so instead what he decides to do is spend how many hours of his life critiquing my webinar and telling me why it was the ugliest webinar he’s ever seen, and all the things I did wrong, how I broke my own rules, on and on and on, and all these kinds of things.

And I read this, I didn’t watch the whole video because I was so just annoyed. I was just dumbfounded. I’m just staring like, I don’t even know how to respond. Should I be angry? Should I be happy? Should I be grateful? Should I be…all these emotions. So I go through the whole range of emotions from pissed, I’m going to flat out kill him, to thank you maybe, or no…all these things in between. And all that kept ringing through my head was the quote from Theodore Roosevelt, and I’m driving right now, or else I would read it for you.

But it says something like this, “It’s not the critic who counts. It’s not the man in the arena who points out how the doer of good deeds has messed up, it’s the man who’s in the arena who’s face is marred with dust and sweat and blood and tears, who maybe he fails but at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his position will never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory, nor defeat.”

And that’s my paraphrase of it, Roosevelt said it way cooler than me, but you get the gist. So in my response, I just copied that and I pasted it and I said, “Hey man, here you go.” And I posted it and then I left one other comment and I’m sure that it was missed by him and probably most people, but what I said was, “If I just watched somebody do a million dollars in an hour, the last thing I would do is critique them on what they could do better. What I would do is zip my lips and I would take notes.”

I look back on the decade that I went through trying to learn this craft and this business. I was speaking at events every single weekend and I was doing my presentation. I was watching other speakers. And I watched some speakers that were horrible, but I watched their presentation and how they do it and be like, “Wow, notice how they did that cool thing, that was awesome.” And I would take that piece and add it back to my thing. I’d notice something and like, “Whoa, that was cool.” And I would….. I never once looked at someone’s presentation in a critical route to try to figure out the things they did wrong so I could coach them through how to do it better. That was never, that thought never crossed my mind in a billion, infinity years.

The only thought that crossed my mind is “What is this person doing that I can use? The way they did that, the way they made that transition, the way they closed.” There were people who sucked, who did not do any good, I still was watching and paying attention and figure out what were the nuggets for me? I think….I can’t remember the comment exactly, but it was something to the point of next someone does a million dollars…..I said “message me the next time you do a million dollars in an hour and let me know, because I want to watch that webinar and I’m going to take notes and not give you feed back.” Because that’s the thing.

So I just wanted to kind of put that out there because I think a lot of times we get too smart for our own good and we’re trying to critique people and that’s not your job, that’s not your role. If I…in all honesty, if I wanted your opinion I would have paid you for it, but I haven’t. Therefore don’t give me your opinion, listen. You paid me, and maybe I didn’t do it perfect. Maybe I did the entire webinar in less than 24 hours, maybe there was a billion things happening at the time. And in spite of all those things, it was the highest grossing webinar of all time for us.

So it’s like, I know there were things wrong. I’m fully aware, that’s why I’m redoing it this week. I didn’t even have a chance to finish my slides, the last 40 slides I copied and pasted from a different presentation, because I ran out of time. Yes, I can critique myself too, but until someone’s paying you for your advice, don’t give them your advice. Sit back and listen.

I’ve done a couple of podcasts on this recently. You as a student should be, you pick your mentors, so pick your mentor and then stop, listen, and then do what they say. Don’t be like, “well you actually said this.” Dude, that’s not your role. Stop, listen. And I say that at the same time that I want to always be coachable. And I feel like I’m a very coachable person. I have multiple coaches working with me in different aspects of my life, but the difference is that I paid those people for their advice because they are at a level beyond me of that thing that I want to learn how to do.

So I would never sign up for John Carlton’s copywriting course and when I was in there critique his sales letters and tell him how to do it better, in a billion years. I would say, dude, I’m paying you, and maybe there’s things I might do different and might do better, but I am listening because I paid you. I am paying attention, trying to find the pieces of gold that I can then apply back to my thing.

So I hope for everybody else who was watching that, you know it was an imperfect thing and hopefully first off, that was inspirational for you to see, wow Russell screwed up a lot and then still made a bunch of money. Maybe there’s something here. And second off, I hope you learn that you’re watching…I did an episode probably a year ago about watching the magician’s hand. I’m trying to, in my books and my podcast and these places, I’m trying to show, I don’t hold things back. I hope you see that. I’m like, here’s everything, and I give it to you so you see it all. But then when I’m doing the thing, watch, pay attention and listen. Watch the magician’s hands at work and see what they’re trying to do and try to understand it. Don’t try to critique. That’s not going to help you or them. Watch and learn.

And that’s all, that’s my message for today. Hope that helps. I hope you guys enjoyed this story. It was a lot of fun. I’m excited to do the webinar again on Thursday, and hopefully I don’t screw it up by fixing it. Anyway, that’s it. I’m going to let you guys go. Appreciate you all. I hope you have an amazing day. Go out there and change the world. Like I said, if I can do a webinar in 24 hours, I’ll give you guys at least 48 because I’ve done it a few times, you’ve got 48 hours to get your webinar done and launched.

We’ve got a bunch of people who have gone through our Two Comma Club coaching, which is all about getting their webinar up and launched and live and some people have gone through the training, we’ve done three cycles of it now. They’ve gone through three cycles of it and still haven’t launched their webinar. It’s like, just do it. Russell what if the webinar software crashes? Yeah, mine could have crashed too, I just did it. What happens if it doesn’t close right? Then just do it, who cares. Just do it again if it doesn’t close. Just do it. Just go out there and just do it. I’m going to go you guys. Appreciate you all, thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

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One of the traits of all the truly successful people in the world.

On this episode Russell talks about why he has a new coach and how he let himself and that coach down last week by not keeping a commitment. Here are some awesome things to listen for on this episode:

Why Russell is so coachable, and how that usually leads to success.
Why all people who make and keep commitments are successful.
And why Russell failed on one commitment last week and is going to try even harder this week to keep all of his commitments and be successful.

So listen here if you want to know how to be coachable and be able to succeed.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys are ready for some fun.

Alright everyone, I just dropped something off at my kids school because yes, once again, they forgot something. They sound kind of like their dad.

Anyway, I just want to jump on today because I, if you’ve been listening you know that I recently hired another coach in my life. I try to have at least one, if not multiple coaches at any given time to coach me through different stuff. Because I’ve found that, in fact I was telling my kids this last night. I said, if you want to be successful at whatever it is, pick the thing you want to be successful at first, it could be school, basketball, trombone, whatever it is and then number two is find a coach to actually coach you through it.

So that is what I told them last night when I put them to bed. And I told them I practice what I preach. I figure out stuff that I want to be better at in my life and then I go find a coach to coach me through the whole process and hold me accountable. A little while ago I was listening to a podcast from Ryan Moran and Jeff Woods talking about the one thing and loved it. So I called Jeff and hired him and he’s my coach through things. So I had my second coaching call today and I wanted to post this, make this video to walk you guys how to be coachable.

Because it’s shocking to me how uncoachable most people are. In fact, I did a Periscope about this 2 years ago or something like that. It’s funny because I remember when I was wrestling I started doing Freestyle and Greco and that kind of happens during the off season. I had this coach named Greg Williams, who is now the coach at UVU, he would go and teach me stuff and I remember between matches he’d pull me aside, he’s like, “Hey, you need to level change better, you gotta lower your whatever….” And just walk me through what I needed to do and then I’d walk back out and I’d just do the thing he told me.

And I remember because he told me afterwards, after I’d been in the program for a year or so, he said, “You’re one of the most coachable athletes that I’ve ever had. You’re not the most talented, but one of the most coachable.” I was like, “I don’t even…what does that mean, coachable?” he’s like, “Most people I tell them what to do and they listen, nod their head and then they don’t do it. With you, I tell you what to do and with the next match you go and do that thing. That’s not normal. Most people don’t do that. You’re really, really coachable.” I was like, “Huh, I assumed everyone just did that. If they have a coach that they believe in why wouldn’t they just listen to what they say and then do it.”

In fact, I had a podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about pick a mentor, listen and then do. Same thing. I look at, It was funny, Dan Henry, if you know Dan, he’s one of our inner circle members who bought the Dotcom Secrets book, read the chapter on Perfect Webinar, did a Perfect Webinar and within 5 months made a million bucks. So he went into the Clickfunnels group this weekend, he’s like, “Hey guys, Russell taught the Perfect Webinar, I did it and made a million bucks. Why aren’t you guys all just doing that?” He was very confused. Dan’s very coachable.

Then there’s like, as of this morning, 170 comments from people and it was basically 170 excuses of why people hadn’t done it yet. “Well I’m still working on my slides. Well, I’m not really a pitch person. Well, I can’t figure out my offer.” Just thing after thing. And he’s like, “Dude, just freaking do it. You’ve got the best coach in the world telling you….” And it was funny, because even one guy who was a coach was like, “Well I’ve coached my people and it doesn’t work for everyone.” Dan’s comment was like, “Well you must not be a very good coach then.” Which was awesome.

But again, the point of this is being coachable is just doing what the coach says. It’s been fun because I’ve had one coach for the last year that I’m working with on one aspect of my life and she’s been awesome. I’m not perfect at doing what she says, but I think I’m pretty good at doing that. And I assumed that I was with most people, but Jeff’s been coaching me and it’s funny because this was our second coaching call this morning and one of the things he wanted me to do, I didn’t have time to do it. And instead of letting me off the hook, “Oh, it’s okay. You can do it next week.” He was like, I wish you could hear it, it was in the first 30 seconds of the thing. He was like, something like, “What happened?” and I was like, “Oh, I’m actually doing it this week because Todd’s flying in today from Atlanta. Todd’s my partner in Clickfunnels and we’re doing a lot of planning and stuff like that.” And he’s like, “How do you think your planning would have been better if you would have actually finished this?” And I was like, “Oh crap. Probably better.”

Anyway, so it helped put my feet to the fire and then at the end of the call he was basically like, “Okay, next week these are the things you have to have done by…when are you going to have these done?” I was like, “Friday.” He’s like, “That’s not specific enough for me.” “Friday at 4:30 my time.” He’s like, “Cool, if you don’t get them done what happens?” I was like, “You’re going to punish me maybe?” he was like, “If you don’t have it done by Friday at 4:30 we’re cancelling the call for next Monday.” I was like, “Oh crap.” He’s holding my feet to the fire. So many things I could walk you through from a coaching standpoint what I’m enjoying about being coached by him.

But it was just making me make sure I do it. And I think one of the problems a lot of us have is we let ourselves off the hook. In fact, I did it and again, I’m a very, very coachable person. Even with that, this week I let myself off the hook. I don’t need to finish part of it because of this, yet I had committed to getting that part done. It’s just interesting. It’s funny because throughout the week I was proud. We kind of picked out the one thing I was going to focus on for the week. And from that, I had found the roll I was looking for, I found the person doing the interview process, going through the whole thing, and I was impressed by how fast I was moving, yet I hadn’t followed through on all my commitments. I had done most of them but not all of them. And it was just like crap, I gotta remember that. I gotta make and keep commitments.

People that succeed in life, there’s one really strange commonality between all of them, they’re good at not just making commitments, everyone can make commitments, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to make money. I’m going to blah, blah, blah.” Everyone’s good at making commitments, but people who are successful are good at making and keeping commitments. I failed at one of my commitments for this week and it sucks. It’s frustrated me because I know better than that, I’m someone who makes and keeps commitments and I didn’t on one thing. I did on most of them, but I didn’t keep this one.

So for those of you guys who want to be coachable and want to have success, understand that the big commonality is that successful people are making and keeping commitments. So again, find a coach or whatever it is and then make a commitment and keep that commitment and just do it. And don’t give it all excuses.

Alex Hermosi at the last inner circle meeting said that every sales call you’re on someone’s getting sold. Either you’re selling them on the product or service that they need, or they’re selling you on an excuse of why of they can’t get it. And it’s just like, dang, it’s so interesting. You’re either buying the excuse or they’re buying the product. And it’s the same thing for us. I just look at that thread of 170+ people, they each have their excuse of why they hadn’t done it yet. And Dan was like, “Dude, I did it and within 5 months was a millionaire. Why don’t you guys just do it.” And they’re selling themselves on excuses as opposed to just making a commitment and then keeping a commitment.

So that is my message for today. Make and keep commitments. All successful people do, they’re good at making them and good at keeping them. I failed this week. I made a bunch of commitments and I kept almost all of them but I did not keep all of them. So this week, I’m going to be better. I’m going to make and keep commitments to myself, to my coaches, and to the people that I love and care about, and that I work with and work for and that I serve, and all that kind of stuff.

So that’s my goal and game plan, make and keep commitments this week. I’m going to be very specific, going to write down all the commitments I make, I’m going to make sure that I keep each and every one of them and that is the path of success.

So there you go guys. I hope that helps. Make and keep commitments, write them down and make sure you do them and don’t let yourself off the hook, otherwise you’ll just keep making excuses and again, if you’re buying that success then you didn’t buy the thing you actually gotta do. So that’s all I got you guys. I’m heading in for the day. It’s going to be a fun week, I get to work all week. Todd’s in town, we’re going to plan, we’re going to plot, we’re going to scheme, we’re going to make Clickfunnels even better if that’s possible for all of you guys and try to figure out how to serve you guys better at a higher level. So I appreciate you all, thanks for listening and we’ll see you guys on the next episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

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It happened the day you took personal responsibility for a problem that wasn’t your own.

On this episode Russell talks about how every entrepreneur is someone who found a problem and took responsibility for it. Here are some of the enlightening things in this episode:

Why entrepreneurs are different than the rest of the world when it comes to seeing a problem.
Who some of Russell’s inner circle members are that are a great example of taking responsibility of a problem and fixing it.
And why when entrepreneurs take responsibility for a problem, it changes the world.

So listen here to find out how to be an entrepreneur by taking responsibility for a problem that you didn’t create but want to fix.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to a late night episode of Marketing Secrets.

Hey everyone, I’m about to head to bed but I listened to a podcast this week from Ryan Moran, from capitalism.com and he’s got the Freedom Fast Lane show podcast, which is pretty awesome. I love it a lot and he goes deep into the ecommerce side and also business investing and other things that I don’t typically focus on, which has been fun for me to kind of listen to him and world. But he said something in one of his presentations, it was a stage event somewhere, I don’t even know, a few episodes back. And I don’t remember how he said or what he said but it sparked a thought in my mind.

So I’m probably going to slaughter how he said it. He said it probably much better than me, but the concept was so cool. What he basically said is the difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of the world, yes we are different folk if you haven’t noticed. But what he said was interesting, he said, entrepreneurs are the people who see a problem and then take responsibility for it. Isn’t that weird?

I think about the world we live in today. The problem is most people don’t responsibility for anything. Even though they do things that are really bad or wrong or whatever, they won’t take responsibility. They want to blame it on their mom, or their brother, or their sister, or whoever. The world is all about blaming someone else for all the issues that it has. What makes us entrepreneurs weird is we see a problem and instead of blaming somebody else, we look at it and say, “I’m going to take responsibility for that problem, I’m going to figure out an answer.”

And when I heard that I was just like, oh my gosh, that is so interesting. Because most people don’t do that. Most people don’t see an issue, a problem and then be like, “I’m going to take responsibility for that.” I was thinking about this with Clickfunnels for example. For a decade we tried to build funnels and it was frustrating. And yeah, we could have blamed everybody else, I’m sure we did. Everyone else did that, it’s the tech designers, the developers, programming is hard, all the things. It wasn’t for us until we said, you know what it does suck and I’m going to take responsibility for it, this is my issue now. And then we figure out a way to solve it. And that’s when everything changed.

That’s so fascinating. For you, as an entrepreneur, or someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, I think if we all make conscious decision of what we are doing is consciously saying, “That problem right there, I’m taking on myself, I’m taking responsibility for that.” Instead of doing what most of us do, what’s our human nature. “Oh it’s them. Oh it’s her.” I didn’t fix anything because of this, because of this. We just want to pass the blame, pass the buck so often, but that’s what makes us weird. That’s what makes us different. It makes entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs.

We see those problems, we see those issues and we take a personal responsibility for it. I was thinking about this as I was looking at the Inner circle meetings over the last couple of weeks. I could go through all 100 of my entrepreneurs and share this, but just a couple of them off my head.

Pamela Weibold for example, she was a doctor and she started seeing all of her friends who were doctors committing suicide. Person after person after person. And she could have sat there and blamed this, blamed that, but instead she stopped and said, “I’m going to take personal responsibility for this issue and I’m going to save doctors lives.” And she’s gone out there and done that. She’s created a platform. She’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever seen. She’s literally spent every penny she’s ever made to go and save doctors lives. She’s like, “I can live on 20 grand a year, I’m good. Every penny I make goes back into helping save doctors from committing suicide.”

Because she took that as her own personal responsibility. That’s not her responsibility, it’s not her fault. Yet, she looked at it and said, this is my responsibility. That day she became an entrepreneur.

You think about another one, Annie Grace, who is so cool. She’s someone who her whole life drank socially. It got to a point where she kept drinking and drinking and she couldn’t break away from it. And she started looking around and it wasn’t just her, it was other people and she went on this mission and started saying….and again, drinking is not her responsibility. People struggling and trying to give up alcohol addiction, that’s not her responsibility, she’s got better things to do with her life.

But she looked at it and said, “This problem, I’m going to take responsibility for it.” And she’s gone out and changed thousands of people’s lives. Thousands of people she has helped break away from this addiction that’s robbing them of their freedom, their happiness. She took that personal. She didn’t have to, she didn’t need to but she decided to and that day she became an entrepreneur.

I could go through person after person after person after person, the day that they looked at this thing, this problem that wasn’t even supposed to be their own, but they saw it. And whatever it was, I don’t know if tuition, if it’s God, if it’s a spark, if it’s your brain. Whatever it is, you see it and there’s that spark saying, “That one’s mine. That is the problem I’m going to fix and I’m going to take personal responsibility. It may not be my fault, but I am the one who’s going to fix this and change it.”

And that’s what makes you different as an entrepreneur, and it’s fascinating and exciting. And if you wondered, how do I become an entrepreneur, how do I do that? It’s time to start looking at that and saying, “Instead of pushing responsibility on different places, different things, different people, different whatever, look at a problem and take on that responsibility yourself. And that’s the game plan, that’s how it works.

Anyway, I heard that three or four days ago and it’s been ringing through my head over and over. I keep thinking about person after person after person in my inner circle, and entrepreneurs I work with, and inner circle members, and Two Comma Club members, and I look at the people around me who are serving and doing stuff. Every single time I could link back to, that is the problem they took personal responsibility for. They didn’t have to, they didn’t need to, but they did. And that’s the magic.

So I hope that helps you guys. I hope that rings through your head and makes you start looking and being more aware of the stuff around you that’s happening and trying to figure out what it is that you’re going to take personal responsibility for. Because when you do that, that’s the day you’ll become an entrepreneur, and that’s the day you will literally change the world.

Thanks you guys, so much for everything. Thanks for your support, thanks for your effort. Thanks for your contribution to the world. We love you guys, we appreciate you guys, we enjoy serving you guys. And we’re so grateful that you listen to this podcast. If you like this podcast and learn anything from it, please go to iTunes and subscribe and share it with another entrepreneur who could help. Thanks so much you guys. Talk to you soon.

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The power of vulnerability, acting with urgency, and a whole lot more…

On this episode Russell gives some of the awesome highlights from the latest set of Inner Circle mastermind meetings. Here are some interesting things to listen for in this episode:

How everyone in the Inner Circle group has been able to grow together making $30-50 grand a month last round to making $100-200 grand this round.
Why it’s important to celebrate other’s success in order for them to celebrate yours.
And what makes being vulnerable so powerful with your audience.

So listen here to hear these and many other highlights from the inner circle mastermind meetings.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets. This is the day after the mastermind and I’ve got a whole bunch of secrets to share with you guys.

Alright everyone, inner circle mastermind just ended. We have been going, basically I’ve had 8 days of inner circle mastermind meetings with a week break. So group one came Monday, Tuesday. It was a group of 25 entrepreneurs. Then Wednesday, Thursday. Then a week off. Then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So 4 groups of 100, 4 groups of 25 equals 100 entrepreneurs, they’re my inner circle. It’s a cool group because its interesting watching how everybody within this group, year after year, everyone keeps growing together.

People first came in a while ago and everyone was trying to get their businesses launched and now it’s getting to the point where they’re doing, last set of meetings everyone was doing 30-50 grand a month. Now at this set of meetings everyone’s doing 100-200 grand a month. Everyone together as a group keeps leveling up. We’ve had a couple of members breaking the million dollars a month mark and now everyone else, that’s what they’re gunning for. It’s just so inspiring and so cool to watch what’s happening.

The businesses and industries are so different. We have everyone from, I’m trying to find the book right now. Dr. Wiebold, Pamela Wiebold who is helping doctors who commit suicide, helping to not commit suicide and literally saving lives, to people teaching business to people teaching dentists, everything in between. So many just amazing people. In fact, I’ve got from this meeting, those who are watching the video, these are my two notebooks, one got completely filled up and one got half filled up. That’s a lot for one set of meetings. Anyway, it’s amazing.

Obviously I can’t share everything, because it would take 8 days. But there were so many cool things. So I’m just going to kind of share a couple things as I’m flipping through here. Maybe over the next few weeks I’ll share other cool thoughts and ideas. So as I’m flipping through my pages, just some things I jotted down that were so, so powerful.

One of them was from Alison Prince, she was talking about through her course that she celebrates the people in her community. She said when she wins they celebrate me, because I celebrate them. I thought, how cool is that? As you’re finding more success, you’ll probably notice this, people around you, you think everybody would be happy for you, but instead it’s usually the opposite where they’re not happy and there’s this weird thing under where you’re like, “you should be happy for me. I’m having success.”

But when you’re depressed, everyone’s like “Oh me too.” And everyone loves you, but when you have success usually people aren’t happy and it’s weird. So it’s kind of cool within your community as you celebrate their success, they celebrate yours. So it gives you a spot to be able to talk about your wins and get people to celebrate with you. So that’s kind of fun.

What else? So many cool things. One thing from Alex and Layla, they were talking about in their ads, that they actually say what they’re really feeling. Most of us who write ads, we’re trying to be all postured like, “number one top secret blah, blah, blah.” And it was cool, what they talked about in their ads. They literally in their ads say, “Hey I feel like a cheesy person writing an ad, but I need to get this message out to you. I’m not going to….You’re probably thinking this right now and I want to make sure that you…..” Just kind of breaking down those barriers in the ad. Because it’s an ad and people know it’s an ad, so instead of being an ad, actually having fun with it. If you saw what their acquisition costs were, it works really, really good.

Another cooll thing, a lot of times we talk about in our company, setting KPI’s, Key Performance Indicators and things like that, but one thing that Alex Charfen said, “if you look at a sports team, there’s two things they all have. If you ask a football team, ‘what are your goals?’ ‘My goal is to win the superbowl and be in the Hall of Fame.’ There’s a superbowl goal, which is like their goal. Then there’s the legacy goal, which is the Hall of Fame.”

So it’s cool, we talked about for a company what is your superbowl goal? And what’s your Hall of Fame goal? And also within your organization, with working with you team members, what’s their superbowl, what’s a win for your company? Do they know what it is? I don’t think my team knows. I haven’t really sketched, “This is our goal. This is how we get to the superbowl.” It hasn’t ever been defined, this is the thing, this is how we get in the hall of fame. And I think now that that’s a thing in my head, I’m so excited to figure out what’s our company’s superbowl goal and what’s our hall of fame goal? When you have those it becomes more clear, more tangible.

David Derricks awesome, talking about a bunch of stuff. One thing is he just wrote a new book called the Dream 100, which is a big concept none of us ever…I talk about it all the time and nobody ever does it. And my quote at the top says this is the foundation for our entire company. If you’re not doing Dream 100 yet, it’s time to start. Go back and listen to any of my stuff on Dream 100 but it’s how we figured out what our market was, what our blue ocean was. How we figured out where our customers…..everything we’ve done was based on the Dream 100 concept. There’s so many good things here. I don’t even know where to…

Oh this is a good one. So Brian Bowman, such a stud. He had a really cool, emotional presentation. He talked about how he was working hard and moving forward and getting things done. And he had a coach who was one of Garret White’s coaches, one of the Warrior Week coaches. He asked, “What’s your target?” and he’s like, “This is what I’m going for.” And then he asked him, “Are you operating with a sense of urgency?” And Brian, while he’d been working hard and hustling and all these kinds of things, he’s like, “Am I operating with a sense of urgency?” And I don’t have permission to tell his story behind what and how, but as soon as he had that thought in his mind, everything shifted for him.

He went and instead of moving things toward a goal he was like, “I need to operate with a sense of urgency.” And I think how many times for us we’re like, “Yeah, we’re moving forward, moving towards things. I’m going to launch my product someday. I’m going to write my book. I’m blah, blah, blah.” Whatever our thing is, but it’s like that’s good, but are you operating with a sense of urgency? Is this doing…when is this….this needs to be urgent. If it’s not urgent, you’re never going to do it. So are you operating with a sense of urgency? That was just so powerful. How many times do we not do that? How many times are we just kind of wandering, doing our thing, and it’s not urgent. Because of that days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, months turn into years and sometimes we never get it accomplished.

I think one of the big reasons we’ve had so much success with Clickfunnels is because we do operate with a sense of urgency. I’m always stressing out, which maybe is to my downfall, it’s what makes me tired all the time. I just think it’s interesting, operating with a sense of urgency, having that as a thing we are thinking through all the time. So many good things.

What else, what else? Natalie Hodson talking about the power of vulnerability. How vulnerability is the ultimate human connector. So many of us, we try to be postured and perfect and that’s why, because we’re trying to get connection, we think people want to see us perfect and instead it actually pushes people away. How vulnerability is the big secret. It was interesting, Natalie just joined the inner circle. But she came to our FHAT event in February, five or 6 months ago and she was telling this story. She was creating, she’s in the weight loss, fitness market, and she was working out live on Live streaming or Facebook Live or whatever, she did a work out. She’s a mom, she has two kids and during her workout she wet herself, on camera, live in front of the entire world and how embarrassing it was.

And obviously that’s an embarrassing thing and most people would never talk about that again, they would leave the video, they would run away from it. But instead she realized that, “If I’m struggling with this, I bet other people probably are too. Maybe I can help them.” And she found a business partner or a content person, who that’s what they specialize in. Helping women to strengthen their pelvic floor so they don’t have those issues. And she created a $37 dollar book teaching the process and she put it out there and on a sales page she’s got pictures of her on a live stream with peed pants in front of the entire world. And she talked about this problem that she has and she knows all these other women have.

Anyway, from February until now she sold 50,000 copies of a $37 book. So over a million dollars in sales. And think about how many women’s lives she’s been able to affect because she didn’t posture herself and come off perfect all the time, because she was willing to be vulnerable. It’s just such a powerful thing. I look at the times in my life when I’ve gotten real connection with my audience, it’s not when I’ve been sharing the highlight reel, like we like to do. I think what’s good to do is sometimes to touch on the high reel. “Hey, I’m awesome. Just want to make sure you know this, but let me tell you the truth.” And then break it down. And that has been a theme.

In fact, the third inner circle group, I think I’ve never seen so many tears in a mastermind group in my life. The girls were crying, the men were crying, everybody was crying. But because people actually got vulnerable and shared and that’s been a big theme throughout the inner circle. You go to other masterminds and people are sharing the highlight reel and bragging about stuff, where with us everyone has to share, “Here’s what we’re doing awesome, but let me get vulnerable and share with you what’s actually happening.” And then we work at that level. It’s different and interesting and causes real actual change.

Anyway, it was amazing. I wish I could take all of you guys along on these journeys. But a lot of our inner circle members are going to be speaking at Funnel Hacking Live. The sales page for Funnel Hacking Live will be going live next week, it’s at funnelhackinglive.com and you’ll have a chance to hear Natalie talk about the power of vulnerability, a lot of these other people I pick are speakers for the most part, inner circle members. So I have a chance to see them present here in my office a couple of times a year. I get to know them intimately, I understand their business, I understand where it fits with what I want to share with our audience. So a lot of them will be speaking at this.

So if you don’t have tickets yet, when we go live next week, get them. We pre-sold out over a thousand tickets, I think we have another, I don’t know how many left. Not a lot. So if you want to be there, you know you need to be there and you do, now is the time. Funnelhackinglive.com, get on the waiting list and then wait. My guess is probably Tuesday it will go live. So by the time you hear this, it may be live. But make the effort to be there. It’ll be worth it, I promise you, it will change your life forever. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

So yeah, that’s basically the best spot to get the actual highlights, at Funnel Hacking Live. Anyway, with that said, appreciate you. Thanks so much for listening in today to the podcast, and we’ll talk to you guys again soon. Bye.

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A really cool lesson I learned from my new coach and how it applies to your funnel.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how his new coach has helped him figure out his someday goal and the steps he should be taking to achieve it. Here are some interesting things you’ll hear in this episode:

Why Russell needed to figure out a new someday goal, and how to take steps to achieve it.
Why achieving everyday goals with his someday goal in mind will help him get there.
And how having an end in mind will help you reverse engineer your funnels to meet your end goal.

So listen here to learn the steps to achieving your someday goals.

---Transcript---

Hey what’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets.

Hey everyone, hope you guys are all having an amazing day. I’m home from 2 days of inner circle mastermind meetings, which have been insanely cool. All the groups are so amazing, but this one was emotional. I think everybody in the group cried at least once or twice or something. It was crazy. So amazing. It’s an honor to be part of it and hang out with awesome entrepreneurs like that who are literally changing the world in so many different markets and industries. I wish I could just tell you guys all the stories from everyone.

But it was amazing and we got the last group, group 4 coming the next two days. So it’s been fun, stressful, exciting all wrapped up into one amazing thing. Also it’s been fun, I mentioned a little while ago how I hired a new coach, and it’s been really, really good. He’s one of the main guys over at The One Thing, his name is Jeff. It’s interesting because I read The One Thing book a while ago and I remember, I think when I read it I didn’t like it. I think at the time we had just launched 12 companies in a year. And I was bitter against it, but everyone kept recommending it to me. That book and the Essentials came out at similar times and everyone was like, “you gotta read them.” So I read them both and I was just like, “They want me to focus on one thing. I hate that idea.”

So I kind of didn’t like the books. And fast forward to last week, I just kind of got back into it in the last week. I went and listened to a bunch of podcasts from The One Thing, I started re-reading the book, I got the main dude coaching me Monday mornings and it’s really, really cool. What’s interesting is, since he started coaching me, I’ve had this big epiphany, big aha, big realization inside, and then as I’ve been coaching the inner circle the last two days, I’m watching the people who are leveling up really, really quickly and there’s a consistent theme behind all the people who are growing fast versus who…..everyone’s growing, but the ones who are really quick.

It’s interesting thing, it’s funny, the thing that I got in my coaching session was, it came back to Steven R. Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective people, which I read back in high school. It was start with the end in mind. It’s been interesting, as I’ve been going through the coaching stuff. Man the first, it feels like it’s been like a month because I move pretty quick on stuff. But the first exercise he had me do was figure out, what is your someday goal? Where do you want to be someday? So it’s not like 5 years from now, or 10 years, like in the future, where is it you really want to go?

It’s been interesting as I’ve kind of done this exercise, I can walk you guys through what it is, but it’s morphed, 3 or 4 times to radically different things and I one of the big aha’s I realized when I went through this exercise is that literally my someday goal, I achieved it like 18 months ago. So the last 18 months I’ve been wandering without really a focus or a goal other than just more, which is interesting.

So he’s had me keep focusing, what’s your someday goal? Begin with the end in mind. What are we trying to get to? So I figured out initially, here’s my someday goal, and someday goal can be about your business, you personally, your relationships, your spirituality, whatever you’re trying to figure out for yourself. Then he came back and said, “Okay, what do you have to had accomplished within 5 years to keep you on track for your someday goal?” So I was like, “Okay well, to have that I need to have this in place, these things need to be in place in the next 5 years.” And he came back and said, “Okay, what do you need within a year to be able to hit your 5 year goal? And what do you need by the end of this year to hit your one year goal? And what do you need by the end of this week to hit your yearend goal? Or your month goal?”

So as you do this it’s interesting because you start getting more and more clear on all the steps. It was funny because it was like, as I did that, as I identified, had the end in mind, I started going back forward and I got to the things I needed to do. I looked at my to-do list and none of the things on my to-do list actually got me any closer to my someday goal.

All the sudden I realized that I’m doing all these to-do’s that are good, they make me feel good, I check off the box, but none of them are actually moving me towards what I’m really wanting. I was like, well what’s the one thing I need to do today that’s going to help me hit my goal for the end of this week, which will hit my goal for the end of the month, blah blah, blah, all the way to the thing. And as I started asking those questions it blew my mind what the one thing was that I needed to focus on. It was not by any stretch what I thought it was going to be, what I assumed was the most important thing.

And after this exercise he wanted me to come back and refine it and change things. So I kept getting….my someday goal changed three or four times and I started realizing as I was looking at that, it took me a while to figure it out. In fact, I still don’t know if I have it completely figured out.

But the message I want to share with you guys is just that. Beginning with the end in mind. Again, the inner circle members having the most success is because they have a very clear end in mind. What is it they are trying to accomplish? And from there it’s easy to reverse engineer the funnels and make that happen. People who are struggling, they’re building funnels to be able to sell a product or a service, not with the end in mind. Does that make sense? It’s a little intricacy, but it’s interesting.

I’ve had this really cool experience over the last two days, to kind of reflect I’m listening to all my entrepreneurs talk and teach and share what they’re doing and really start thinking more and more, what is the end? I need to know really clearly for my business, I need to begin with the end in mind. Or is my goal to get people in Clickfunnels? Is my goal to get people in Two Comma Club Coaching? Is my goal to get people into Inner Circle? What is the actual end goal?

As soon as you identify it, that becomes the end goal and it becomes easy to see, well if that’s it, here are the funnels I need to reverse engineer to get people so that they will come up into that thing. For example, Dean Holland, he’s been in my inner circle for 3 years now. He basically over the last few months shut his entire company down and rebuilt it from the ground up but this time with a definite, very clear end in mind. This is where I’m trying to go. Because of that built out the funnels very simply in order, he launched and in the first 28 days built up $106,000 recurring income. Just because he began with an end in mind.

So I think most of us, including me. I’m guilty of this as well, that’s been my big thing for the last 2 days, what’s the end goal. From a business standpoint, from a life standpoint, but also the customer journey, the value ladder. I talk a lot about in the Dotcom Secrets book, this value ladder, taking somebody through. But I would say even my value ladder isn’t completely clearly defined. It’s morphed and changed so much and I’m really coming back now and figuring that out.

Dana Derricks when he was doing his presentation he was talking about his big aha. He said that us as creators want to keep creating and creating and creating. He said because of that, “If I look at my value ladder it kind of goes up a little and then it splits off in three different places. Some of those go up and some don’t and it gets really mushy really quick.” He realized he had to clearly define the value ladder. We’re going from here to here to here. So now he’s beginning with the end in mind. And what he said was interesting. It’s was funny because it’s something that I, a recurring thought I’ve had in my mind as well. Okay, I can’t keep creating new stuff that just spurts off my value ladder and shifts people all over the place.

If I need to get my creative juices out there and just create something, the things I create need to be on the front end of the value ladder. They should only be free plus shipping or they should only be low ticket things to get somebody in, but the back of the value ladder should never shift, never change. That should be just a thing that’s there. And man, I just resonate with that. I was like, okay I obviously have my value ladder, I’ve got things in place, but I need to really specify this is the path, the process, the order and then just focus on the front end stuff. So it’s exciting.

I’m working on something so cool, I wish I could show you guys. You will see it soon. I’m probably about thirty days away from rolling it out. It’s not a big product launch or anything, it’s a subtle, but I’m calling it an ascension funnel that is almost like a video game to send people through our value ladder. And to be able to accomplish, or get people to the end in mind, get them to that spot. So I’m crafting, we’ve got the design of it done and we’ve got the pieces and I’m figuring out the path. So you will see, you’ll probably start getting emails and you’ll, you may not be aware of it, so please watch. Watch what I’m doing. If you see an email and you click on it and there’s a cartoon thing, then you know that it’s being executed. I’m going to be sharing it at Funnel Hacking Live though, probably. As long as it works good, which I’m pretty sure it will.

Nobody talks about ascension funnels because no one’s really executed one that I’ve seen successfully for almost 5 1/2 , 6 years. And the one I saw was just because I had intimate behind the scenes access to the person’s business who was doing it. Anyway, I’m going to be mastering it, perfecting it and then we’ll be showing it at Funnel Hacking Live. So if you haven’t got your tickets yet, go to funnelhackinglive.com. The event sales page will be going live next week, but by the time you hear this, it’ll probably be live or close to live. We’ve already pre-sold 1200 tickets, so we don’t have a ton left, so if you want to come to the event…and I know you do. I would go to funnelhackinglive.com ASAP and get your tickets.

So that’s the game plan. The last thing I wanted to kind of say is, again so many of us start our business like, here’s a product and we start building funnels based on that product. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how most people do it. It’s how I’ve done it a lot of times. Because of that, I think we get lost in the weeds of where we’re trying to go and often times we never get there because we don’t know where we’re going. And again, as I’ve been working with my coach on this, which has been really fun. It’s been cool because I’m clearly defining my someday goal, clearly defining the end and then from there I can reverse engineer all the pieces I need to make that happen.

I think the same thing is true with funnels. It’s just begin with the end in mind. What’s the top of the value ladder? Where do you really want to take people? Figure that out and then reverse engineer, to do that here are the funnels I need. You got a path and a process. Anyway, it’s exciting. I love it. I love this game. I love my entrepreneurs. I love the inner circle. I love all of you guys. I love Clickfunnels. I’m having the time of my life. And hopefully, also I’m helping. I’m doing my best.

It’s funny, I was reading, somebody I care about wrote a really cool post about what we do. And I was reading it and in the comments 3 or 4 people who were like, “I just don’t like Russell. I can’t connect with him. I don’t like his energy. I don’t like…” Whatever. It just kills me. It’s tough because I’m always trying to give and serve and do whatever I can and I hate when I don’t connect with everybody. But that’s okay as well. Hopefully my message gets to you and you’re able to take whatever it is you share out to people. And people connect with you, people I would never connect with. Hopefully you can connect with them and change them. So that’s one of my goals. Hopefully I connect with you and if I do, that’s the key. Take your energy, get out there, share your message with other people and change the world the way you can.

Because unfortunately not everyone is always going to like me. And that’s the same for you. Not everyone’s going to like you. But the people who do, they’ll hear your voice and they’ll come to you and you’ll be able to help them and serve them and it’ll make the quality of their life so much better, which in return will make the quality of your life so much better. So that’s all I got tonight you guys. Appreciate you all, I’m going to go to bed and get ready for inner circle tomorrow and that’s about it. See you guys soon. Bye.

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Listen in on this unique conversation after a late night mastermind outside the Clickfunnels headquarters.

On this episode Russell talks about contrast with Dave and Steven. Here are some interesting things to listen for in today’s episode:

Why having contrast creates desire in customers.
And what kinds of things about contrast Russell, Dave and Steven learned from the Chatbooks viral video.

So listen here to find out why contrast in your marketing is so important.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell, I’m here with Dave and Steven, what’s up guys? Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast, we got a special edition happening right now.

Okay, so we just got done. We had a little Boise Mastermind group, they meet every month around different places, and we never had a chance to go. But we actually hosted it here in the Clickfunnels offices tonight. So we put the kids to bed and come here and we’re here for 4 hours or so, talking about tons of stuff.

So we just had a really cool conversation while Dave went back in to go to the bathroom and he missed it.

Dave: It’s Alex Charfen’s fault.

Russell: Alex did this podcast about the number one supplement for entrepreneurs and it ends up being water and then…

Dave: 3 gallons later.

Russell: It’s really convincing, you guys should listen to it. We’re all obsessed, have you listened to it yet?

Steven: Well I know enough that I’m just drinking a lot of water.

Russell: It kind of freaked us out so we’re drinking insane amounts of water. It’s like bathroom breaks every 30 seconds. Dave’s like, “I gotta go to the bathroom.” And then he missed this huge conversation. So I gotta retell it and I might as well retell it right now with you guys because it was actually really interesting.

So what we’re talking about…I got a black face, let me come here in the light. Let there be light. Alright so what we’re talking about. So those who are listening you have no idea what’s happening, but those watching the video, we’re in front of the Clickfunnels offices at nighttime, we’re under the streetlight.

So I was listening to a podcast that Ryan Deiss did on the perpetual traffic talking about the Chatbooks viral video and he basically played it, paused it, talked about the before state and the after state of the woman in that video. Which you guys have seen the video obviously. If you havne’t seen the video go to harmonbrothers.com and click on the Chatbooks video. Probably the best, I would say probably their best viral video, it’s really, really good.

But he’s talking about the before state and the after state and how good that video did. Here’s where she was at before, here’s where you’ll be after the product. Before, after, before, after. We started talking about how the big secret to copy and sales is contrast. I was telling them ten years ago I went to a course with Matt Furey, he talked about contrast. He said contrast is the key to everything.

Because you have the contrast of where they’re at and where they want to go and then your message in the middle there is what creates the desire for them to go from this to this. He talked about an email that’s like, in the course I was studying with Matt Furey it was email marketing, he was like, “Every good email has tons of contrast. Light and dark, happy, sad, fat, skinny, rich, poor. The contrast is what makes it interesting and then it’s what creates the desire to go from the before state to the after state.

That’s the whole key, the contrast. A lot of people never think about that, but as you’re writing the emails, think about the contrast. The before state, again the way Ryan Diess explained it, the before state and after state, which was brilliant. In fact, I had never watched the Chatbooks video through that lens before, but if you watch it through that lens of the before state and the after state you see it over and over again. You see that she’s in the tub at first and she’s the smiling mom in the bathtub, so it’s like, this is a nice thing. Then she stands up and she’s fully clothed and the kids in the tub with her and she’s like, “I fell in while timing him holding his breath.” There’s the before and it keeps transitioning back and forth.

So in any of your communication, whether you’re doing storytelling, or writing emails, or sales letters, or videos, whatever, the contrast is the key. So with the contrast you’re thinking about that, if you told a story about how fit you are, nobody cares, there’s no contrast. It’s like, “I was fat, I was sick, I was unhealthy, I was whatever.” You tell that first and then you tell the contrast to the other thing and the contrast is what creates the desire for somebody to change, which is what they need to have to give you money and that kind of stuff.

So the contrast is a secret, in the before state and the after state, that’s the magic. We gotta rewrite the Expert Secrets book, stop the presses. Let’s add in this thing. So yeah, we just kind of had that epiphany as we were talking. So there you go. Contrast, add it in everything you do to create the before states and the after states. And it’s really fascinating. So watch that. Watch it in the viral videos, watch it in email. As you’re watching good marketers, try to notice the contrast. Because the better the contrast, the more desire is created. So watch how they do it, watch how I do it, watch how other people do it, that’s the secret.

There you go guys, marketing secret number whatever we’re on, hope you guys like that. With that said, it’s time for us to go home and go to bed. So bye everybody.

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The fastest way to succeed in anything in life.

On today’s episode Russell talks about finding a coach and actually doing what they say. Here are some of the awesome things to listen for today:

Why Russell hired a new coach, and why having a coach is important to him.
Why Russell’s wrestling coach said he was one of the most coachable people ever.
And why you need to find someone you trust, listen to what they say, do it, and then you’ll have success.

So listen here to find out how to find success by finding a mentor or coach you can trust.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I’m really excited, I know I’m always excited, but today I’m especially excited because yesterday I hired a new coach. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for 5 years like you should have been, I’ve talked about this before in the past. But I’m a big, big, big, big believer in coaching. When I was wrestling I always had a coach, I usually had 3 or 4 coaches. I had a freestyle coach, Greco coach, nutrition coach, strength training coach. But sometimes we get in business and we’re like, “Oh we’re so smart, we don’t need coaches.” And no, you’re wrong.

In fact, it’s kind of funny because a lot of people I know who are really successful in this business for a long time who no longer are, they’re like the last people to go and get coaching. It blows my mind, because they think they know how to do it all. I’m kind of at the top of my game right now, I don’t know, maybe it’ll go higher, but I definitely think I’m 9 ½ minutes into my 10 minutes of fame, what it is 15 minutes of fame, 14 ½ minutes in.

So who knows when this whole thing will go down, but for me I’m at the peak of where I’ve ever wanted or dreamt of being. I’m still trying to find coaches to coach me in different areas of my life and different aspects and different things. I’ve had health coaches, business coaches, all sorts of stuff. Yesterday, actually two days ago I was listening to a podcast, actually the Freedom Fast Lane podcast by Ryan Moran, and he was doing a call with this dude, and the guy coached him through this thing on the podcast. I was like, that was insane. I said out loud that I want that guy to do that thing for me every Monday morning to keep me focused on what I’m doing.

And I’m not going to tell you his name, not because I wouldn’t share, but because I don’t want all you guys trying to hire him, because that’s not his core business. But anyway, the next day I messaged Ryan I was like, “Dude, I need this guys info.” And he’s like, “Oh.” And then I messaged 50 other ways and finally Dave got a hold of him and two hours later I was on a call with him. During this call he literally did a laser coaching thing with me and I was like, “This is so awesome. I want this every week.” And it’s kind of funny, this isn’t his full time gig, doing coaching like that. He’s like, “Well, where do you want to go?” I’m like, “I want to write you a big check for money and then you do this every Monday morning for me.” And he’s like, “Okay.” So I did, I wrote him a check. And now next Monday I have my first actual thing and it’s so exciting.

I’ve had different coaches in my life. I have a coach every Tuesday morning I meet with more on like, it’s Tara Williams, who is an energy coach, but it kind of goes in different directions, from spiritual to physical to mental to business to relationships, all over the place. So that’s one that touches on different areas of my life, but this is very specific on focus and intent and I’m so excited. I’m excited for that.

I wish you guys could see how I was jumping around, crazy. I was so excited to give someone money to be able to coach me. Because it gets hard, the different levels you get to, it’s harder to find a coach who’s there, who can take you through a different aspect, so it’s just exciting for me. I’m so excited. In fact, that’s why as a coach, I obviously coach a lot of entrepreneurs, I don’t want my students or friends, whatever you want to call them. I want to keep progressing myself so that they keep having something to tap into, if that makes sense.

I’ve had a lot of coaches throughout the years, that I came in and really quickly we met and then surpassed and I’m like, I can’t get stuff out of it. I don’t want my people ever feeling that way. That’s why I’m always pushing myself, pushing myself, pushing myself just so that I’m always as sharp as possible so I can keep serving and giving and coaching.

But anyway, I’m just excited and what’s interesting, and this is the point of the podcast, not that you guys care that I hired a coach. But more so it’s because at the last Inner Circle meeting last week, we had 4 days of Inner Circle and I got 4 days next week too, I’m so excited. But what’s interesting, I watched a pattern. It was such an interesting pattern.

First off, people in the inner circle are people who, they hear what I say, they do it and then they succeed. It’s really interesting. They hear what I say, they do it, and then they have success. Hear, do succeed. Hear, do, succeed. When I was wrestling, I remember one of my coaches telling me, “You’re one of the most coachable people I’ve ever had.” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well you hear what I say and then you go and do it. I literally between matches will show you your level was too high. You need to lower your levels, be moving more. Next match you’re doing that. Most people I tell them that over and over and it takes weeks or months or years to even attempt it. I tell you something and you just do it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, isn’t that how it should work?” You hear someone you trust, that you hired, that you are paying to be a coach, someone who is your coach, you hear them, you then do that thing, and you make money. Or you hear that thing, do it and then wrestle better. That’s the process.

So the key first off, you gotta tap into somebody that you trust. Someone who you know is not going to lead you astray, someone who knows more than you do. So when you hear them, you’re not second guessing should I do that, should I not? You gotta pick the mentor that you have 100% faith and trust in. It could be me, someone else, I don’t care, just pick somebody where you’re like, I have absolute faith in that person’s opinion. Therefore I will do whatever they say. I will hear and then I will do and then I’ll have success.

But what’s interesting is during this whole inner circle, again, I’m watching and most of these people, that’s who they are. They hear, they do, they succeed. That’s why there are able to afford 25 grand to come hang out with us a couple of times a year. That’s why they’re having success. But as I was watching, not all of them, but probably 60% of our inner circle members are also coaches in different markets, different industries, things like that. And what’s interesting is almost all of them said “I’ve got these students and they just hear what I say and do it and they have success. But I’ve got all these other ones who don’t.” And I was like, it’s so fascinating to me that people that have success what do they do. They heard, they did, they had success. The one’s who didn’t, they heard, they questioned, they thought about it, they flip flopped, they over analyzed, they studied something else, they did this, they….they get stuck in this thing in the middle that they don’t really hear.

And it’s just so fascinating for me. Yesterday when I heard, two days ago when I heard that podcast and the second I heard it I was like, “I heard it, now I’m going to go do so I can be successful.” How am I going to do it? I know I’m going to forget or it’s going to be hard so I’m going to pay someone so I can do it. So I heard, did, boom now I guarantee you guys will see in the next 6 months, the changes in my company and hopefully in me personally because of this coaching.

Again, I could have heard the podcast and thought about it and tried things, but no I heard it, I’m going to go do it and then I’m going to be successful. So if anything you get from this, there is a pattern of people who are successful in all areas of life. The pattern is number one, they find the mentor, the person, the coach, whatever they believe to get them where they are, and then they put on blinders. They hear, they do, they succeed. Hear, do, succeed. Hear, do, succeed. That’s it.

And if you’re not successful, something happened. Number one you picked the wrong mentor, so you picked someone you’re not really trusting or they have bad advice, bad strategy whatever. So if that’s the case, pick somebody that has the right strategy that you trust. That’s number one, so you do it. Number two, you have to listen to them. Now listening, I said this to one of my friends one time. There’s two types of listeners in the world, those who listen and those who wait to be heard. And a lot of you guys are hearing stuff, but you’re waiting to be…..You’re trying to inject this thing in the middle, and I don’t want you guys being the people who are waiting to be heard. You are hiring a coach so you can listen.

So stop, get the right person with the right strategy, pay them whatever it takes, then listen. Listen. Even if you think you know a better way, you read a blog post or a book or someone who has a different…it doesn’t matter. There’s a million ways to skin a cat. Pick a strategy from a person and then listen to what they say, and then whatever they say, do it. That’s it, just do it. And then what will happen? You will have success. Listen, do, succeed. Listen, do, succeed. It’s a pretty simple strategy. It’s somewhere between the listening and the succeeding we get caught up trying to think or over analyze or whatever it is.

In fact, it’s interesting, people that are really good at school typically, the reason I think they don’t succeed in this kind of world is because they listen and they analyze and think….it’s good to think for yourself, but you’re hiring someone who already thought through these things for you. Like this dude yesterday, I don’t know, I’m guessing he was surprised at how he said something and I’m like, “Okay, I’m doing it. Done.” I listen, I heard, I did. I’m not like, “Well, my company is bigger than yours and I did this…” or whatever. No, I listen, I do, I succeed. I trusted him enough to give him money, therefore I’m trusting his strategy with 100% certainty that this is the way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have picked him, I wouldn’t have paid him, I wouldn’t have whatever. I chose that person, therefore I will listen with 100%, I have 100% certainty that everything he says is going to be truth, therefore I will listen, I will do and I will succeed.

So this message is mostly for those of you guys who are struggling. My guess is that somewhere between this little chain that you’re missing. You picked the wrong person to tap into a strategy. But if you’re listening to this, you’re listening to me, so obviously you picked the right thing. So you got the right strategy to listen, do, and succeed. Boom, that’s it.

I look at Brandon and Kaelin, literally Brandon and Kaelin come to every event, they’re at everything we do. They listen to every podcast, they’re probably listening to this right now smiling and saying, “Russell keeps dropping our name again.” They listen to everything. They picked somebody they trusted, they listen, and they do. I will literally be onstage at an event talking about a concept and I get off stage, and Brandon’s like, “hey that thing you just said, I just launched it.” I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “yeah, While you were talking I did it.” He’s listening, he did it, he’ll succeed. That’s why their company is going…..

Everyone else in the room is sitting there listening, listening, taking notes, thinking about how cool it would be, and then they hang out in networking and they’re talking and….No, Brandon is there listening, doing and that’s why they’re so successful.

So for you, look at that chain, there’s four elements. Pick the right mentor with the strategy and have absolute certainty in what they say, listen to what they’re saying, again listen, not waiting to be heard. Listen, then do it. Whatever they say, don’t even… Just do it. Just jump off the cliff. I trusted this person, therefore I will jump off the cliff if they tell me to. Just do it. And then get success. That’s it. That’s it, it is really that easy. So easy. It’s insanely easy. I don’t know why we keep complicating this. So don’t complicate it.

If you do this thing and don’t have success, there’s somewhere in here, either you didn’t hear it right, or you didn’t do it right, or you picked the wrong strategy. If you get the right strategy up front, you listen and you do, then you’ll have success. It’s inevitable. You can’t not succeed.

So there you go guys, I hope that helps. It should help you, but it should also help the people you’re coaching. It should help, so many ways. Understand that guys, that’s the key. That’s all I got guys. I’m heading into the office today. It’s Wednesday, I got a lot more fun stuff to do today, I’m excited. Appreciate yo all for listening and subscribing to the podcast. If you’re not subscribed yet, go to iTunes.com and subscribe or I guess marketingsecrets.com there’s a link to the iTunes, that might be easier. And then please rate, review, let us know, share this, if you got any benefit from this. Appreciate you all, thanks so much for everything and I will talk you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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All the little things you’re not doing to get more traffic now.

On this episode Russel talks about the big theme in the company right now, which is going from ten million dollars a year to a hundred million. He talks about what they are doing to be able to build a blueprint to help others do what they have done. Here are some cool things in this episode:

Hear why Russell is obsessed with writing books right now in order to leave a legacy.
Find out which book will come after Expert Secrets in the series and what it will focus on.
And find out what is happening next with the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Listen to all this and more, and don’t forget to get your tickets for Funnel Hacking Live before they are gone.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast, formerly known as Marketing In Your Car. Right now we are back in the car, so I feel a little nostalgic. Going to a dentist appointment today, starting in 6 minutes. It’s probably a 10 minute drive and traffic is literally stopped. My wife told me not to take Chinden and I did anyway, it’s my own fault. Should have listened. Anyway, that’s what’s going on today.

Alright everybody, so I hope everyone out there is having an awesome time. It’s been really fun this week. If you listen along as we go, two weeks ago we had a FHAT event, and then the viral video event, which went awesome. Then last week I had 4 days of Inner Circle meetings and a one day consult, so last week I didn’t even get to do any of my own work. And yesterday was the first day I got to get back and actually do my own thing, which was awesome and exciting and amazing and I’m so grateful for it.

So it was fun to kind of get back to work. And it’s been interesting, as I’ve been talking to Inner Circle a lot, I keep telling people phases of this. It’s going 0 to a million, a million to ten, ten to 100, and if you listen to me talking about this, it’s going to be a big theme at Funnel Hacking Live this year. By the way, tickets for that are going on sale this week. So they’ll be at Funnelhackinglive.com, we should have some ticket sales. We pre-sold over a thousand tickets already, so we don’t have a lot of tickets left, but those are going on sale this week. By the time you’re listening to this, it might be live. So if you want to go to Funnel Hacking Live, go to funnelhackinglive.com.

Anyway, so that’s been the big theme in my Inner Circle, a big them in my company, everything like that. Yesterday was the first time I had a chance to really focus on the traffic part of it, which is fun because going from 0 to a million is all about figuring out your what and your how. What are you selling and how are you selling it? The sun is bright in my eyes, sorry. And after you figure that out, you know you figured it out because you go from 0 to a million dollars over night as soon as you figure that out. So figuring out the what and the how is the first phase.

After you figure that out, the second phase is scaling that. So it’s coming down to building out the infrastructure. Actually let me step back. 0 to a million is everything we talk about in Expert Secrets, finding out what you’re selling, who you are, what you message is, finding your voice, etc, etc. And number two is when you go from a million to ten, it’s all about basically the Dotcom Secrets principles, building out a value ladder, front ends, back ends, maximizing the journey and the process and all that kind of stuff.

So that’s the second phase. The third phase is going from ten to a hundred million, and that’s where we’re at right now. Some of you may or may not know, I bought trafficsecrets.com from John Reese, and that’s going to be, I don’t know if it’s the next book, but it’s the next book in the series. It’s going to be all about that part, how to scale the traffic, so going from ten to a hundred million.

So what’s fun is that yesterday was the first time we had a chance to sit down in a room all day and plan and map it and really build out that process. What’s interesting, as I look at our business, to this point. We’ve done well this year, it doesn’t matter. It’s grown really, really well. We’re doing some pretty good things, but what’s been interesting, if you look at how we’ve done things up to this point, the focus is all on the funnel. So we build the funnel and when that funnel’s done we go and drive traffic, we go and buy ads and do those kind of things like that.

Whereas this new phase, the sun is so bright in my eyes….The new phase we’re going into, which is scaling beyond, it’s all about getting more people into the front of the funnel. Because after you get people in front of the funnel, the structure, all the Dotcom Secrets, front end, back end funnels, value ladder, all that stuff’s already built out. You don’t need to keep adding stuff there. Now it’s just about dumping more fuel into the fire. So that’s the kind of phase we’re in now, which is an exciting, fun phase.

So what’s interesting, we were mapping this thing out. I wish I could show you guys all the pre funnel stuff. Most people are like, here’s my funnel, what’s the ad I’m going to buy? The process we’re working on and we’re building out internally is there’s four phases that happen before you ever get to the ad. There’s the research phase. There’s a whole bunch of research we’re going into, keywords, headlines, articles, who are we trying to be. Funnel hacking deep, so that’s the research phase.

From there we have a bunch of stuff, deliverables, based on that, here’s the 30 or 60 or 90 headlines we need to create videos for. Here’s the 15000 word article we need to create. Here’s the title and keywords we’re focusing on. And then here’s…..it’s going through all that stuff, the deliverables. Then after that, we have to produce all that stuff. So the third phase is going and, if it’s me, it’s doing a billion videos…. I got off the busy street…..doing a billion videos, writing the content, all this stuff is the production phase.

And then when the production phase is over, then it goes to the asset phase, which is like each video turns into 5 thumbnail, or 5 quote cards. A YouTube video, Facebook video, all the actual assets that need to be created. And then from there it’s handed to the promotional team, which is phase 5 and the promotional team takes all this stuff and uses it to promote the funnel.

So it’s crazy, so exciting. It honestly blows my mind that we built our company as far as we have, based on literally us building a really good funnel and turning on ads and that’s it. We’re missing…. again it comes back to the tip of the iceberg. We’re doing the tip, but we’re missing the rest. So now we’re coming back and doing the rest of it.

And I really think, outside of there’s a lot of infrastructure and people and other things we need in place as we’re growing from…to a hundred million and beyond. So we’re working on those kind of things. But what’s interesting, from the traffic side, that’s what we’re building out now. Building out the systems and it’s exciting.

It is a process starting right now, it started yesterday and it will culminate probably in the next 18 months in a book called Traffic Secrets, so it’ll be showing you guys behind the scenes of what it ended up becoming. Oh crap, I gotta beat this light…..So that is kind of what….sorry you guys see how good of a driver I am. I always get messages after this, “Russell, you shouldn’t be driving while you’re talking.” I’m like, I got my hands. I’m good.

Anyway, so that’s the exciting thing, as we’re kind of building this out. As I’ve kind of perfected the model, proven it, we’ll use it to go from 70-80 million to 700 million, then we’ll have a good blueprint to show everyone, this is Traffic Secrets, this is the foundation behind it, which is kind of cool. Anyway, that’s kind of what’s happening over here. And it’s exciting and fun. The only place we really talk about this publicly, some of you guys are in our Fill Your Funnel course, that’s where we’re really going deep into this and kind of mapping out the strategy and this process and this plan. But we’re trying to figure it out, all internally on our side.

So as we keep getting it better, we’ll be publishing it there, until we got it all perfected and it becomes a book. But I want you guys thinking more about that. Think more about all the front end stuff that you do to get traffic into your funnels. Most of its just, you spend all this time and effort getting the funnel right and then we turn on ads and that’s it. There’s so much more that goes into it before.

Anyway, that’s kind of what’s happening here. So a couple of other exciting developments. One thing is, if you’ve been listening to the Marketing In Your Car podcast for any amount of time, or Marketing Secrets for a long time before that, I have somebody, a secret spy right now, going through the past episodes….is this the right road I’m supposed to go on? I think it is…. Categorizing all of it, we’re going to be turning this crazy podcast, we’re going to take out all the crap and the fluff, the ones that were just me rambling incoherently, and finding all the best and putting them into chronological order, not chronological, the right order, and actually making a book called Marketing Secrets.

If you can’t tell, I’m kind of obsessed recently with making books. We’ve got the Expert Secrets book, which took two years of my life, the cookbook, which was The Funnel Hacker Cookbook. If you haven’t got that, go to funnelhackerscookbook.com or funnelcookbook.com, it’s actually easier to remember, funnelcookbook.com. And in fact right now, I think it’s $10 plus shipping or something like that, to get a 350 page, spiral bound cookbook, which is insane.

But I’m really into the whole book thing. I think books create legacy more than anything else. And at this point in my career it feels like that’s what I’m getting drawn to, stuff that’s legacy as opposed to promotional stuff. So you may see a couple more books coming out in the next few years, and hopefully they turn out good. I’ve tried to write two really good books, I think the first two turned out good, I’m proud of them. So hopefully you guys will like the other ones.

But this is one will be a fun book that will be kind of like an ongoing series called Marketing Secrets, where every three years I can publish a new book, it’s like okay here are the next 400 marketing secrets that came out of me driving in my car back and forth. Here’s idea after idea after idea.

You know the first two books, Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets have been very much process based. So it’s like, you have to go through step one, step two, step three, step four, kind of like that. Where Marketing Secrets the goal would be more like, flip it open and just grab it like, “What’s secret 27? Oh cool, urgency and Scarcity. I could use that here. Here is marketing secret 292…” Anyway, that’s kind of the game plan with that book, so it’ll be fun. So that will probably be the next book and then I got this other cool….so many cool things.

So anyway, that’s all I got you guys. I’m almost at the dentist. So I’m going to go hang out with him. Appreciate you all for listening, subscribing. If you’re not subscribed yet go to iTunes and subscribe. I think last time I checked we’re number 3 or 4 top business podcast in the world, so thank you for that, hopefully we can keep it ranked up high. But yeah, come listen, subscribe and hang out with us and we’ll keep giving you the goods. Alright guys, appreciate you all, talk to you soon. Bye.

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Listen in on live Q&A from Gary Vaynerchuk (Part 2 of 2)

On this special episode of Marketing Secrets Podcast you will get to hear the second half of the Q&A section of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation at the viral video launch event. Here are some of the questions Gary answers:

Why you should still invest in influencers to build your brand even if they are in a different niche than you.
How you support and strengthen your belief in your own intuition.
And What Gary’s number one business challenge is right now.

So listen to Gary’s insightful answers to these questions and many others as we finish up part 02 of this special set of episodes.

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Listen in on live Q&A from Gary Vaynerchuk (Part 1 of 2)

On this special episode of Marketing Secrets Podcast you will get to hear the first half of the Q&A section of Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation at the viral video launch event. Here are some of the questions Gary answers:

What he sees happening with artificial intelligence and robots in the next 5 years.
What Gary’s latest strategies are for shows on both YouTube and Facebook.
And What Gary recommends for taking your preferred platform and skyrocketing your numbers.

So listen to this first half of Gary’s Q&A and tune in for the second half tomorrow.

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The secret behind making the important become urgent.

On this episode of Marketing Secrets, Russell gives a recap of some of the events for the Viral video launch from last week. He goes into some rough numbers and stats and explains why they did it. Here are some of the highlights of this episode:

Russell gives some rough numbers of how the viral video went and some of the stats for the first 7 days since.
He explains what good things have come from the video launch and why they did the things they did.-
And he explains why he needed to make the important things become urgent in order for them to get done, and why he recommends others do the same thing.

So listen to this episode and find out how many views the viral video got, and what good things have come from it so far.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I want to welcome you guys to Marketing Secrets. I’m finally giving you a chance to hear behind the scenes of what happened with the viral video launch, the bubble soccer party, and everything that’s happening on today’s episode of Marketing Secrets.

Alright everybody, welcome back. I hope you guys have been doing amazing. This whole week I’ve been in inner circle meetings, so I’ve been dropping some cool stuff on the podcast, hopefully you’ve been enjoying it. If you’ve been listening to the audio version, I gave you guys a really cool call from Frank Kern, which was awesome. Sent you my presentation of how we went from zero to a hundred million dollars without taking on any outside capital, which was cool. Hopefully you liked that. And Now I’m finally having a chance to tell you guys behind the scenes.

So it’s been a fun week afterwards. Whenever something like this happens, we have no idea what to expect. What happens if we launch this video and it gets 500 million views, what if we launch it and it gets ten views? You have no idea what’s going to happen. So for me it’s always like, I think sometimes people get so invested in the outcome, they miss the fun and joy of what you’re doing.

I know that I’ve had times in my life where I do that as well. So consciously with this, as well as any launch, I set big goals and big dreams and stuff like that, but as they get closer and closer and closer, I start, I don’t know if that’s the right word, I delete the outcome goal in my head. I just, I don’t know what it’s going to be, and if I set one and I don’t hit it, I’m going to be sad. If I set one and I surpass it, I’ll be happy. But I don’t want that, because I did the work no matter what and I want to be able to celebrate it and enjoy it.

So I try to just get rid of the outcome in my head. So going into it, I didn’t have an outcome. Again, I was looking at things like, what’s the worst case scenario. So for us, Clickfunnels worst case scenario, a lot of you guys know we spent a lot of money. Harmon brothers charge about a half a million dollars for a video, plus we threw a big party, we hired influencers to come, when all was said and done, I haven’t looked at the numbers yet. It’s been a whirlwind week. I would say probably, all in, in this party promotion we’re probably in close to a million dollars, which is kind of crazy.

I think I told you guys before, it’s the first time I just put everything on black, or everything on red. However you say that, I don’t know the terminology, the gambling thing, just kind of rolling it. Typically with any kind of marketing, we’re very direct response driven. Where we test small, put a dollar in, get two dollars back out, and if that works we scale. That’s how we’ve grown our company. That’s how everything I believe is based on that.

So this was the biggest thing. We’re like, we’re putting a lot in without knowing ahead of time, but it’s okay because we’re looking at what’s the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario, average Clickfunnels member, lifetime average I estimate is 1200 bucks or something like that, maybe higher. In fact, I’m sure it is higher. We’ve only been in business, in fact tomorrow is our three year birthday, a lot of people have been with us three years. So that number keeps growing over time, but as far as we know now, it’s over $1200 a person.

So we’re like, worst case scenario, if this video brings us an extra thousand customers, it broke even, which is awesome. So that’s really good. But the bigger win on my side, there’s a couple of big wins. One of them is, when this video went live we needed to simplify our process. The signup process, the onboarding, all sorts of stuff like that. Because of that, I don’t know if you guys logged into Clickfunnels recently, there’s a bunch of new stuff.

There’s a Clickfunnels game, there’s new onboarding, there’s these things we call “Show me how” little walk-through’s that have video and written out explanation that show you how to do every single thing. We set up a way to get custom domains, where you click a button and get a custom domain. In fact, we gave everybody the first custom domain for free. We figured out all these things to simplify the onboarding process, so when this new onslaught of people came, we’d be prepared for it.

So one of the biggest things, that’s something we’ve known we needed to do for probably two years, we just haven’t had the time or energy to do it. This forced us to spend that time and energy. A lot of times we focus on stuff that’s urgent but not important. This one was super important, but it was never urgent so we never got it done. So by doing this, calling our shot and making this big video, it forced us to focus on the important that’s not urgent. It became urgent for us. So we, as a team, killed ourselves. You probably saw the week prior, we were here all night last week.

Our whole tech team and dev team, design team, everyone was here just killing ourselves to get prepared for it. A lot of evaluations, if we ever wanted to sell Clickfunnels in the future, one of the big things to look at is churn rate, so we knew what our churn numbers were at. For us it was like, if we could lower our churn by 2% that alone would be worth, tens if not in the future, hundreds of millions of dollars. But tens within the next 12 months.

So that was our goal was to reduce churn by 2 points. So it was a week ago today that the viral video went live. So we’re about a week. Obviously stats aren’t perfect, we don’t know the numbers, but based on the first, it’s been live a week, what’s it trending towards? I don’t know if it’s going to hold, so I don’t want to tie down to it yet, but based on the first 7 days our churn in the window and everything has dropped by more than 2%, which is amazing. More than 2%.

I’m hoping over the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days that sticks. If it does, that alone is worth more money than I could ever have dreamt of. In fact, the thing is right now, I could talk about this for a long time and explain it all. But basically where we’re at right now, as we’ve grown, we just passed 50,000 members last week, a week ago yesterday, 50,000 members. But as soon as we get to about 60,000 members, the new members we bring in and people we lose each day become about the same, so it gets really hard to scale past 60,000 members.

If we drop our churn by 2 percentage points, our next peak is at 100. So almost instantly we get to 100,000 members. So that alone is a big reason. Another big reason why we did the viral video is unification, if that’s the right word, connection, tribe building, bringing people within the culture, closer together and building that bond. We had hundreds of people throwing viral video launch parties in their homes. We had Julia Stoilin throw a launch party and invited the whole internet and she had people driving four or five hours to her house to come watch it with her.

It just brought our tribe as a whole together. We streamed live presentations from me, from the Harmon Brothers, and Gary Vaynerchuk last minute was like, “You should stream my stuff too.” So we streamed his. And we had 20,000 people live between YouTube and Facebook that watched this whole event go down. Think what that does for community, tribe, culture building within our audience, which was amazing. So that was another big thing. How does this become a bigger win for us as a community?

Second is how does this make Clickfunnels even more fun? We’re a software product. We’re competing with all these boring software products that are faceless, nameless and boring. Now we’re interesting to talk about. This video is something that people can talk about, they can share, show their friends and family. People come there and they’re like, “oh that’s what Clickfunnels does.” It gave us the ability and the timeliness to rebuild our sales funnel.

Typically I don’t like, here’s a brand new funnel, but we kind of had to. So it gave us a chance to sit back and re-tweak things and build things really differently. You’ve probably seen some of it. Again, it’s on the weekend, so I don’t know super good conversion numbers, but as a whole the conversions and EPC’s and dollars in are up, dramatically.

So doing this thing wasn’t just, “How many times has the video been shared, how much viral? Is it actually working?” But it’s all these other pieces that are more important to us, that it forced us to do. So I just want to put it out there.

It was funny, I was watching people’s Facebook the next day, I think we had like 300,000 views the first day and people were like, “Oh this didn’t go viral, Clickfunnels burned their money.” And all these things, and I’m just on my side laughing because you guys don’t get it. People see what they understand, but they’re missing the rest of it. That was my goal with this podcast always, to let you see the magicians hands. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Why is that important? Why was I willing to gamble and risk that much money on something that was that big of a risk?

Because it forced us to take the important and make it urgent. Which most business don’t ever do that, which is why they die. Kind of like my wife’s business, you should see the video. I buried it next to my first wife’s business, and my first wife. If you haven’t watched the video yet, go to Clickfunnels.com and watch the video. That way that joke will make more sense, along with the nude squirrels and everything else.

Other good things it did for us internally. We’ve always struggled to be recruited talent. People know Clickfunnels, which is the majority of our team come in. But developers and things like that, it’s hard. Where now, they see the video and they’re like, “Oh cool, that’s the company, that’s the culture, that’s what I want to be part of.” So it’s helping us already recruit talent. And on the other side it’s bringing in customers at an incredible rate.

So prior to this launch, depending on the ad sent and the landing page and stuff like that. For us to get a new Clickfunnels member on the low end, was probably $60, on the high end $120-130, to get a free trial. And that’s kind of the window we played with. It goes up and down and bounces all around, but that’s kind of been the window. Right now, the video is getting new customers at under $40 a piece on the pay side, but don’t forget there’s also the free side that’s bringing tons of free people.

So if you take the free and the paid and mix them together, our cost to acquire a customer right now from the video is probably, I don’t know, this is off the top of my head, I’d say probably $15-20, which is insane. Insane. Most SAASes in our world are $120-150. So there’s kind of cool things.

Also, as of today, should I check it? We were almost at a million views. A million people have seen our sales video and now are aware of Clickfunnels, which is crazy. I’m pulling up the actual thing to see. We were thinking today we may pass a million views, but it’s going to be a tight one. I don’t think by now, but by tonight hopefully we will have done that. We are at 927,000 views. So we’re getting close to a million and this thing will continue to drive leads, traffic and sales today, tomorrow and forever.

We knew with launching this it wasn’t going to be like Poopourri or Squatty Potty viral. To explain what Clickfunnels is takes more. In fact, they were stressed out at first, “This is the longest video we’ve done.” I think it 4 minutes, almost 5 minutes long. I was like, “Yeah, but it’s okay because I would rather have less people, but the people who watch it understand what we are and then they come in and actually become customers and they stick.”

Anyway, it’s funny, the people that….it’s just funny. I see all the trolls that are in, all be like, “The video’s too long, that’s why it’s not going viral.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t need it to go viral. That was the campaign we did to unite the community and get people excited so that people cared when this came out.” All the other things is why we did and why it’s already….it paid for itself in the first 30 hours. That part is done, now it’s this tool, asset that’s becoming huge for us.

So that’s what I want people to understand, in case they don’t. Because I know a lot of people don’t quite get all the pieces. So hopefully this kind of helps. Sorry I’m watching the video again, it’s so fun.

Alright so, what else what else was I going to share with you? So that’s some of the core things. A lot of people have been asking me about it. The last thing I want to talk about, it gave us the ability to throw a party. Why do I like throwing parties? Because we’re marketers and we should make an event out of everything. We had inner circle last week and we had James Malinchak, who if you know who James is, if you Google “Secret Millionaire” he was on secret millionaire 7 or 8 years ago. And I remember when he was on Secret Millionaire, most people would be like you’re on TV and it’s like, “Hey I’m on TV.” And that’s it.

But James is really strategic about it and he actually threw a big party at his house. He invited me and a bunch of other people out to his house and then did a whole launch around it. He had what’s his name, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? Robin Leach come to it. And he threw a big event around it and it made it fun for people like me to come to it and talk and share it. And it made me become friends with James and connect with him and care about him and his mission. Because he threw this big event around it. That’ why we did this as well.

It gave us the ability to throw an event that people, whether they could come to Boise or not, could watch it streaming live and see me and Gary and all these people. So many cool tribe building, culture building things that came from it.

Anyway, throw an event. I tell people if you’re going to launch a Facebook ad, throw an event around it. If it’s going to be good, invite ten other influencers to come to your house, launch the event together, launch the ad together. Whatever it is, make a party out of it and they have a vested interest in your success. They’re going to walk, talk, all those amazing things come from it. Everyone in my office is out clapping. We got some weird people over there. Sorry, if you’re wondering what’s happening over there.

I hope that helps you guys because everyone keeps asking me what happened? Has it been good, bad? And I just wanted to give you a recap, it’s been freaking amazing for us. Again, it forced the important to become urgent, it’s reduced our churn, it’s increased our….dropped our cost to acquire a customer, increased our conversions, our average cart sales, so many good things have come from it. We’ve built some amazing relationships, people who never would have known what Clickfunnels were, sat in a room for 5 hours with us and then played bubble soccer with us. We went in the Guinness book of world record playing bubble soccer.

We build connection, community, relationships, so many good things came from this thing. It’s been amazing. So yes it was good, financially as well as all the other things, and it keeps continuing to grow. I don’t know how many software companies have a sales video that has been seen a million times in the first 7 days. That’s rare. And it was the sales video that pitched the product really, really hard. You know what I mean? Sometimes they have these ones that are fancy. I don’t know if you remember Grasshopper, they had a really cool viral video about being an entrepreneur, it’s a big entrepreneur thing and everyone’s like, “Grasshopper.” And that was it. Yeah, it did that. But it didn’t sell the product. What’s Grasshopper. I go to Grasshopper.com, oh it’s phone systems for entrepreneurs. I didn’t know that.

This one is like a million people watched it and it’s pitching our product, you know what I mean. We got 5,397 shares, 19,000 emojis, a ton of comments, 1870 comments. It’s all good from a lot of different angles. So I hope that helps. I hope that gives you guys some visibility on what we did and why we did it. One of the big reasons why we do launched, as much as I hate them and the stress that goes into them, again is it forces important to become urgent.

So I recommend for you guys to look at, what are the important things that you have that you need to do? That you’re like, “I know I need to do that.” And how do you make it urgent? How do you tie in a launch or something, or an event or something that forces the important, that you know you need to do to become urgent.

For us the urgent was always launch a new funnel, launch a new thing, drive more sales, those things were urgent so we were always doing them. But it was like, if I can reduce churn by 3 percentage points, that’s worth more than 10,000 new customers to me. But I never did it because it wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t in front of my face all the time. So as soon as I made the important become urgent through this process, it became urgent and it’s been huge since then.

So there you guys go, it’s been 7 days. Like I said, I’ll probably do another recap when it’s been 30 days or so and kind of keep giving you more stats as I get clearer numbers on things. Like I said, I’m in the Inner Circle the last 4 days, so today’s my first day back and half the team’s gone. But I’ll get deeper into the numbers and stuff and share more as we keep going on.

But I hope that helps. Appreciate you all, thanks again for watching the video. If you haven’t watched it, go watch it, go share it, go comment, go like, have some fun, because that’s what we do. And tomorrow, by the time you guys listen to this, will be Clickfunnels 3rd birthday. Yes, we’ve only been in business 3 years. We passed 50,000 members, we’re going to change the world thanks to you guys. So thanks for everything. I hope this helped, appreciate you guys and we’ll talk soon. Bye everybody.

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My live presentation from the viral video launch party.

On this episode Russell gives a presentation at the viral video launch of how Clickfunnels went from $0 to $100,000,000 using growth hacking and sales funnels. Here are some of the awesome things in this episode:

Step by step how Russell was able to grow his business without you outside funds.
How he was basically paid to introduce people into the Clickfunnels world.
And why funnels are the key to growing your own business without having to take money from venture capitalists.

So listen here to hear this awesome presentation that can teach you how to grow your business using sales funnels.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am still planning on giving you guys a huge recap of the viral video event, bubble soccer, everything else that went down at the event, because some crazy stuff happened. I’m also trying to get permission from Gary V to let me share some of his presentation with you guys here. So that’s the game plan. If I’m able to do that, you’ll see it soon. And you’ll see my recap soon as well. But this week I’ve got my inner circle here, so I am in there locked away.

So what I did want to do is I got the video clip from my presentation at the event about how to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in sales, how we did that by using sales funnels and growth hacking. And it was a shorter presentation, but I think it was really, really cool. I’m sure I talked really, really fast. I was also really tired, I’d only slept one hour the night before. So if it doesn’t make any sense, that’s kind of the context of why. But hopefully it will give you guys some ideas about how to scale a company.

You hear me talk about the Dotcom Secrets book a lot. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins, and sometimes when you hear that it’s depressing if you don’t have a lot of money, so I’m not going to win. And that’s how I felt, especially when we launched Clickfunnels and we’re competing against two companies, one that had 40 million dollars in funding and one that had over 100 million. How do you do that? And this presentation shows you how we did it. So after we do a little Marketing Secrets intro here, I’m going pick right up with my presentation from the event, I hope you love it. Thanks so much and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

I put together this presentation because like I said, the biggest question I get, especially from people who are building their own companies is “how in the world have you grown Clickfunnels so fast without having any money, any capitol, any outside funding at all?” So I put together this presentation this morning. Like I said, I had one hour of sleep last night, then I got up and started working on this presentation.

But to kind of walk you through what we did and some of the mind shifts that I think are different that will hopefully help you guys as you’re growing and scaling everything you are doing.

So the title of my presentation is how do we use growth hacking and sales funnels to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in less than three years, we’re a week away, without taking any outside funding. So the first thing I want to go over really quickly, for those that didn’t know what I was talking about earlier, I’m going to go over what a funnel is really quick.

So what is a funnel? If you look at, actually let me step back. The reason why I want to talk about this is it’s been interesting, I’ve been doing this internet marketing game for 15 years now. This is my 15th year in the business selling all sorts of stuff, and it’s interesting because recently there’s been a whole bunch of books coming out on growth hacking, all these cool new ways to growth hack. And it’s funny because we get the growth hacking books and read them, it’s like, that’s all the internet marketing stuff we’ve been doing for the last decade. And now it’s like, real businesses are catching on, figuring out these things that are really, really cool.

So that’s kind of why, my thoughts on this presentation. Showing all these funnel things, this is the growth hacking, this is the movement, this is where things are going that we keep talking about.

So what’s a funnel? To explain a funnel, I think the easiest way to begin, is to show what a funnel is not. So this is a traditional style website. This is what Clickfunnels is kind of going against all the time. Most people have traditional websites, they have all sorts of ads. They’re paying for Facebook, Youtube, Google, all these things and they’re driving it into these websites, and it’s literally slamming a whole bunch of people into a brick wall.

I know that because this is how I got started. I was trying that thing and it did not work. I always say that a traditional website is kind of like having a really bad sales person who is shy and all they do is hand out brochures, and then pray the person comes back. That’s a traditional website. What a funnel is, is basically having the best salesperson on planet earth, come and meet the person at the front door, find out their name and walk them through the process. Find out what they want, how they want it and giving them exactly what they want.

So that’s kind of what a sales funnel is. My whole philosophy in business kind of, like I told you guys in the last presentation, when we started Clickfunnels three years ago, we had two major competitors that we were looking at. Number one had just gotten 43 million dollars in funding and number two had just had over 100 million dollars in funding. I’m coming in with me and Todd and we’re bank rolling it with our big old credit cards and we’re like, “Okay, we’re going against these huge giants that have hundreds of millions of dollars, how are we going to win?”

One of my first mentors, Dan Kennedy, he used to say this all the time. “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.” So I’m looking at these companies who have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and I’m like, I’m screwed. I’m not going to be able to win. These guys could out spend me every single day.

And I started looking at this more and more and I didn’t get it at first. It took me a couple of years before I understood this concept of whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. Like I told you before, I went to college here at Boise State, I wrestled here and I used to carry my buddies on back up and down the football stadium, every single day before practice, this is my hometown. Here in Boise, one thing we’re famous for, those who are not from Idaho, we’re famous for potatoes and the very first product I ever put together was a DVD teaching people how make potato guns.

You probably heard me tell this story before, but it was a DVD how to make potato guns. I set it up online, I was learning about internet marketing, it was really simple. I had a one page website, I had Google ads. That’s all that we did back in the day. So I went to Google, started buying ads, I was spending about $10 a day on Google ads, and I was selling a $37 DVD on how to make potato guns. So I spent $10 a day on ads and I usually averaged about one sale per day. So Russell as a college kid was making a whopping $27 per day profit, I was putting into my pocket, which was pretty awesome.

And that was kind of my beginning. And then what happened, a little while into this whole game, Google shifted how everything worked and I got in big, big trouble and literally overnight, my website was the same but I went from spending $10 a day in ads to spending $50 a day, overnight. So I was spending $50 a day and sending it to the exact same website, but I was only making one sale. Same thing. So I was losing $13 a day.

And my beautiful wife, after about 3 or 4 days of that said, “You have to stop. This is not a good business. This is really, really bad.” So we stopped and eventually had to cut up our credit cards and I thought I’d missed the bubble. I’m like dang it, we missed it. And those are actual pictures of us cutting up our credit cards, back in our first home.

About that time I had a friend who was also in the business and he came back and said, “Russell, I think I’ve figured this out. My little website..” He had the same problem. Google raised their prices, algorithms changed, and a bunch of my friends got out of the business. One of my friends came back and he’s like, “I figured it out. I started adding in these things.” He called them OTO’s which stands for one time offer, or basically an upsell. He says, ”I’m charging upsells to my products and I start making more money from every customer, and now I’m able to afford my ads again. I turned my ads back on.” I was like, “That’s cool, but I don’t know how…How can I do that? I don’t know how to do that.”

I was like, “I have a potato gun DVD. What should I do?” and he’s like, “Well, people who buy potato gun DVD’s, what else do they need? How else can you serve them?” And I was like, “Well, we could buy them, the next piece is they have to buy a potato gun kit, so they’d have to buy pipes and a BBQ igniter, all these other pieces.” And he’s like, “Well you should sell a kit.” I’m like, “Well I don’t want to make kits. That would be really not cool.” And he’s like, “See if you can find someone.”

So I ended up finding a guy in Northern Idaho who actually was drop shipping potato gun kits, did a partnership with him and I made my very first funnel. This is my funnel transition. So people who buy my DVD, I’d upsell a $200 potato gun kit and we’d send it out in the mail. So what’s cool is I’d turned the Google ads on back in the day, and what happened is I was still spending about $50 a day, but then one out of three people would start buying the potato gun kit. So we did the math on that, one out of three people, means I was averaging about $60 in additional sales with every DVD that I got, that I sold.

Which means I was spending about $50 a day on ads, and now I was making $102 in ads, and all the sudden it worked again. That was magic. Literally when I made that shift I went from losing money to making $52 a day in profit. I was like, this is it. Biggest thing in the world.

For me obviously, potato guns is a very small market and I didn’t stay there long, but the concept of that rang through my head, I was like this is how it works. And my moral that I learned from this whole experience was that funnels make me money, websites make me broke. So my obsession for the last decade of my life has been this. A lot of you guys have been to my events for the last decade, teaching this concept. Showing you guys, this is the key.

So when I started doing this and realizing it, that message I had heard from my mentor kept coming back to my head saying, “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.” That was the key. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. So as we came into this game of Clickfunnels and looking at people with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital behind them, I’m like how in the world can we compete with that? I was like, I can’t do it. Head for head they can all outspend me, but if I can build a funnel that’s right, I can change everything.

If you look at the reason why we have grown as fast as we have, is because we can literally outspend everyone. We get probably three or four times a week, different people trying to put money into CLickfunnels, and most of these we tell them no, but a couple we’ve entertained because it’s interesting and we’re curious what they think we’re worth, it’s really fun.

So we were at lunch this day with this group and I’m talking to the guy and he’s going over everything, and he asks the question they always ask on Shark Tank, “How much does it cost to acquire a customer?” And I hate when people ask this question because he’s not going to get what I’m going to tell him. I was like, “Well we’re running Facebook ads, for the home page, we’re spending about $120 to acquire a free trial member.” And he was like, “Oh that’s amazing, based on that, what I can do is go and put in $50 million in cash and we get this many customers…” and all this stuff and I was like, “Well, well, real quick. We actually turned those ads off.” And he’s like, “You turned those ads off.” And I’m like, “Yeah. I gotta pay for this out of my own pocket. I don’t want to lose $120 every customer.” And he’s like, “Well how are you guys growing fast?” and I said, “ The reason why is because we have funnels.”

And I explained to him some of my front end funnels, like my book funnels, some other funnels. I said, “Look, for every single person that comes to one of my funnels, if they buy one of my books, we spend on average about $10-12 on a Facebook ads, or other ad platforms to sell a book, but then through that funnel we average about $32. What happens is we spend $12 and get someone to buy one of our books, we make net, $20 of cash in our pocket, and then we introduce them to Clickfunnels. So every single customer, before we tell them about Clickfunnels, they actually pay us money and we put that money in our pocket.”

He’s like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” And I explained it again. And he said, “That doesn’t make sense.” And I explained it three or four times and he stopped and said, “If what you’re saying is true, that will change business forever.” I was like, “That’s my whole message. That’s what we do. That’s what funnels are all about.”

So I want to walk you guys really quick through this and then we’re going to have Gary come up here in a minute. But one of the key concepts you guys need to understand, and this a concept we call a break even funnel. Those of my inner circle members who are here, we spent a lot of time on this, but the break even funnel is a funnel where you break even, so you can literally get customers for free. When you have that, you can grow your company as quick, as big, as fast as you want. So we spend a lot of time on that. So this is a break even funnel, where I put a dollar in advertizing in and get at least a dollar back out, and if I’m good at it, I can get two or three dollars back out. Now I’ve got a customer, I’ve got some cash, now we can put them into the other things that we have.

A couple of examples of some of our break even funnels, I grabbed these from some slides this morning to show you some examples. This is my Dotcom Secrets book, this is a couple of months ago stats. We got about 5400 leads, we sold 23,095 books, our average cart value during that time was $30.81, so we spent $45,000 in ads, we made $52,000 in sales so our profit was $7,763. Most people would look at a company our size and be like, that is a waste. You just wasted a lot of….you just made $7 grand, that’s not a big deal.

But that was to get customers. We got 5400 people that then, the next week we would say, “hey, by the way, there’s this really cool thing called Clickfunnels.” And I got paid $7,000 to get those 5400 people onto my list. That was one of our front end products. This is a split-testing book, same kind of thing. We had 2,000 leads come in last month, 1300 book sold, average cart value was $12. Ads we spent $4000, sales was $18,000, so we made $13,000 but now we got 2000 people that we can introduce to Clickfunnels. So we got paid to get all these customers.

One more example is Perfect Webinar, same kind of thing. Leads, sales, I’ll go through this quickly. We made $4000 and got 1600 customers we introduced into Clickfunnels. Now if you walk through those three funnels alone, and we have about a dozen or so front end funnels that we use in different platforms and things, last month from this, basically our front end revenue was $96.000, our ad costs were $81,000, so we netted a whopping $14,000. Most people would be like, “Man Russell, with a company with 120 employees, you’re going to go broke fast.”

But what’s amazing about that, is that it brought in literally 30 or 40,000 new people into our world, who then we took them through the rest of our sequence. They’re introduced to us, now we can go and build a relationship with them, talk to them, serve them, help them understand what we do, what we believe, and introduce them to our other products and services. And for us, obviously that is Clickfunnels.

So if you look at that, what it means for us, is we literally get almost a thousand trials for free every single day, like clockwork. That comes back to what we talked about before. That’s how we’re able to grow so fast. We can literally outspend everybody in our market. There’s nobody else that can do that.

And what’s cool for you guys, whatever business you’re in, that’s the key. Remember whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins, and when you figure that out, it makes it so you can grow really, really quickly. Any kind of business, any kind of venture, anything that you want to do. So that, you guys, is how we use growth hacking and sales funnels to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in just three years without taking on any outside funding. Thank you.

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Cool message I got a few minutes before starting our viral video launch event.

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Russell’s thoughts as he enters the last phase of the viral video launch.

In this podcast Russell is worn out and tired but he talks about finishing what he started even when he’s burned out. Here are some of the awesome insights you will hear in today’s episode:

Who taught Russell the concept “99 yards doth not a touchdown make.” and what it means.
What other circumstances Russell has used that quote to help him get through.
And why it is so important to give it your all until you complete something, even when all you want to do is quit.

So listen here to be inspired to keep going and moving forward and finish what you start.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today’s episode is called 99 yards doth not a touchdown make.

Hey everybody, welcome again to the podcast. I’m glad to have you guys here. I’m doing this the day before the viral video launch. And if I’m completely honest, I feel like garbage. I didn’t want to get out of bed today, I didn’t want to move. To kind of give you some context of everything, everyone’s like, “oh you’re launching a video, that’s gotta be pretty easy. The Harmon Brothers did the video.” I’m like, “Yeah but there’s a lot of stuff on this side that happens.” Like we completely changed the entire online sales process. So new sales letters, new sales flow, everything, which when you see it, it’s pretty ninja.

That alone is usually a couple week project to get it right, and so that’s been happening and doing that all this week. Number two is we rebuilt our whole onboarding process. You will see if you go to Clickfunnels.com and create an account, or if you just login as of tomorrow, you will see the whole onboarding process. We’ve got online game, we’ve got these video walk through’s. I think I recorded 150+ videos for the new walk through process. So we’ve been doing that and getting all that programmatically created. Plus all the videos and copy and things like that. Boom that’s number two.

Then we’ve got the new online cookbook. We created a Funnel Hacker Cookbook, so that book is launching this week. That’d be a 350 pages cookbook. And then this week, I was like I need some training with this so we also happened to have had the FHAT event this week, it’s still happening. It’s a 3 day event where people come and we build out an entire webinar with them. So day one I spoke onstage with them for 3 hours, then went to lunch. Then after lunch I jumped in my office with a blank slide deck and power point and I ended up creating over the next 4 hours 222 slides for a presentation to teach the cookbook that night.

Then I went and ate dinner. After dinner I got it up, I set up the entire kitchen with a bunch of Lego’s that you will see. Then we taught, I did a presentation for 2 ½ hours teaching how to use the cookbook, how it works with Lego’s and it was really cool, because we needed that training video. Then we took that and we’re chopping it up into 74 mini videos, which Brandon Fischer was doing all of it yesterday, which is crazy. And then we still had this live event.

So yesterday, Steven was running the event, which was nice. So he ran the event all day. While he was running the event, I was working on the sales letter, the process and I realized that a bunch of the videos I had created for one purpose, for the onboarding, didn’t actually work for that thing. So I went and recorded 22 more videos yesterday for that. Recorded the videos plus had to work on all the other stuff. And then after that I had to run home, I’m a scout master, so I went to 11 year old scouts, taught the kids how to swim yesterday. Then I went back to the office and the FHAT event was still happening, and I got on stage from 9:00 to 12:30 at night, in the morning, teaching how to do the stack, which was awesome.

And I was just like so tired. And then today is happening and I woke up and I’m just like, I’m dead. Hosting an event and then launching an event, launching a cookbook, we’re launching an onboarding process, new sales letter, new demo pages, plus all the marketing sequence and automation I still gotta create today. Then tonight I have my family pictures. Why?

So I woke up today feeling like crap, I still feel like crap. I honestly, if I’m being completely honest, the last thing I want to do today is everything I’ve got to do today. But as I woke up this morning, I heard something ringing through my head. It was this quote I heard from a teacher, and it’s 99 yards doth not a touchdown make. The back story behind this, I went to BYU, Brigham Young University, my freshman year, I was a wrestler there. Towards the end of it I decided I was going to go serve a mission for my church, so I signed up for some missionary prep classes and my missionary prep teacher’s name was Randy Bott. He’s written three or four books on going on a mission and all that kind of stuff.

He’s teaching the class and he’s talking about how for Mormon missionaries, you’re out for two years and you go through this whole process. And for two years you’re out knocking on doors, you call home on Mother’s Day and on Christmas, you don’t get to date girls, you don’t get to watch TV, you’re just out there for two years and it’s tough. I remember he gave this lesson one time and he titled this lesson, 99 yards doth not a touchdown make.

He talked about how you go out there and you’re serving this thing for two years and he said that let’s say you served really good mission and the last four or five months you kind of just relax and take it easy and goof off or whatever. He’s like, if you do that, the destiny of your life will change because you decided to slack off. He said in a football game, you can work your butt off. Drive 99 yards all the way across the field, get to the one yard line and if you don’t kick that in, don’t cross the goal line, if you don’t make a touchdown you get zero points. It’s not like, oh well they did a really good job, we’ll give them three. No, you either make it or you don’t. 99 yards doth not a touchdown make, you gotta score a touchdown or you don’t get the points.

That was kind of the moral of that lesson. And I remembered that as I was on my mission, especially toward the end when I was tired and I was ready to get home and I remembered that ringing through my head. 99 yards doth not a touchdown make, you’ve gotta get in the end zone, you’ve gotta finish this strong. So I did.

I remember when I was wrestling, same thing. My senior year of wrestling, I was wrestling a guy, I think at the time he was ranked 7th in the country, and I went out there and I don’t think I was ranked at this time. I had lost some matches I shouldn’t have early, so I dropped out of the rankings. I’m wrestling this guy, and on paper I should not have beat him. I went out there and I remember wrestling him, and at first he came out really hard and strong and was beating me and then I came back and was fighting back, fighting back, fighting back and eventually I ended up tying him and we went into overtime, and in overtime the thought that rang through my head was 99 yards doth not a touchdown make.

I have come all this way and killed myself. I cut weight, I didn’t eat for a week, I did all these things. The match I was fighting and fighting and fighting, if I lose now, if I stop now, it’s over. I can’t stop, can’t stop. I went out there and I remember in overtime I took him down and I remember jumping around like crazy. And the news was there, it was so cool. The news captured that, and that night it was on the nightly news showing me taking this guy down in overtime, it was awesome.

It’s just interesting how that one phrase has helped me. Now I’m looking at today and I woke up and I just don’t want to do this. I want to go to bed, I’m tired and my nose is stuffed, I’m beat up. Today I’m going to go, I’ve got 5 or 6 hours to do and then I gotta get back onstage for two hours and present. When I get done with that, I gotta go home and get family pictures, then I’m going to come back…sorry, my nose is stuffed, as you can hear. I gotta come back and I’ll probably be here at the office until 2 or 3 in the morning tonight. Then tomorrow morning I wake up and gotta still do my presentation for tomorrow. Then we got 400 people coming and I gotta speak and entertain and I’m MC’ing the event. And Gary Vaynerchuk’s speaking, I’m speaking, the Harmon Brothers are speaking and then we’re going to launch the viral video and then from there we’re going to go down and play bubble soccer until like 10 o’clock at night.

So tomorrow’s going to be tough too, but 99 yards doth not a touchdown make. I think a lot of times in business and other things, people work so hard and get so close to the end and then at the end they take their foot off the gas and then what could have been amazing, ends up being good or not anything at all.

So for you guys, I want you to know first off, even I get burned out. Sometimes, like today, I don’t want to do this thing. The last thing on earth I want to do is turn this car off and walk in there, but I’m going to do it because I’m on the one yard line, and I know that the difference between champions and the people who aren’t, is this last piece, pushing it over the edge, getting it out. It’s the last execution where most people quit or they ease up or they step off the gas. Instead I’m going to step on the gas and we’re going to blow through thing and freaking make a touchdown. It’s going to be awesome.

So that’s what’s happening today. Hopefully this gives you some motivation for those of you guys who are struggling or tired or worn out. I understand, I’ve been there. Push through the pain, you’re almost there, you’re on the one yard line, just get through it, just push to the end. 99 yards doth not a touchdown make, that last yard is the one that matters. So don’t give up, you’re almost there. I’m almost there. I’m almost there, you’re almost there, let’s do it together. Okay, I’m going inside you guys, have some fun. I’ll see you guys on the other line, I’ll see you guys in the end zone. Bye everybody.

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My thoughts as I detox from Lucky Charms.

On today’s episode Russell talks about the effects of putting negative fuel in your body instead of positive. Here are some of the informative things you will hear today:

What started Russell on a carb binge that he couldn’t stop.
Why eating junk will make you feel like junk.
And why putting positive fuel in your body will help you compete in business and you’ll be more able to get a billion things done in shorter period of time.

So listen here to find out why putting negative fuel in your body could be making your work suffer.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? It’s a late night Marketing Secrets podcast out in the pool house before I head into bed. But I got something for you.

Alright everybody, it’s been a fun day, a long day. I am beat up and tired and ready to go pass out. But I’m out here trying to get a bottle of water because I am parched. We’re about probably 3 or 4 weeks away from our kitchen being done with the remodel so we can move back into our house, which is going to be oh so nice. I cannot wait.

So typically, it’s interesting, this is kind of off topic sort of. Still on topic though. So typically when I’m doing everything throughout the day, I do really, really, really, really good. I do intermittent fasting, so I don’t eat breakfast in the morning. I take about a billion vitamins and supplements in the morning and I feel like I’m glowing. I feel tons of energy and I feel really, really good. When I do eat during the day, Melanie, my assistant makes me this huge salad. It’s a, I don’t know, 1600 calorie salad with spinach and kale and salmon and peppers and oil and avocados and it’s the most amazing thing ever. I eat that all day long and then I’m full and not hungry the rest of the day.

Then at night I’ll eat just whatever my wife makes, I’ll eat just the meat and vegetables out of it, and that’s it. And I feel really, really good and I get through the day. It’s just like I can get so much stuff done. I was joking recently, on an earlier podcast about funnel years. How each day is a funnel year, anyway, how much stuff we can get done in a day.

Today was Saturday and my wife had a church thing that she was going to be at all day, so I was playing dad. So this morning I woke up and started good, and then my wife had bought Lucky Charms. Lucky Charms, I don’t know about you but that is by far the best cereal in the history of mankind. In fact, when I was a kid, we used to get Lucky charms, then we found out we could Marshmallow Matey’s which came in the bigger bags. Every year for Christmas we’d get one sugar cereal from Santa Claus. So we’d always want Marshmallow Mateys. So all the kids in my family would get our own bag of Marshmallow Mateys, and then get a salad bowl and fill the whole thing up with Marshmallow Mateys and spend like five hours eating all the oats out of it, and then at the end drinking all the milk with the marshmallows. It was insanely good. In fact, last year for Christmas I trained my kids on how to do that, because the tradition has now been officially passed on.

Anyway, for some insane reason, my wife didn’t just buy Marshmallow Mateys, she bought freaking Lucky Charms, which are the best thing ever. She bought two boxes of them. So today I’m eating my supplements and I look over and see a box of Lucky Charms, I’m like, I don’t got enough willpower to stop myself from Lucky Charms. I just don’t. That and cookie dough, I can’t say no. I won’t even attempt it, I won’t even try. So I’m like, done, boom. One bowl of Lucky Charms, two bowls of Lucky Charms. And then for me it’s a slippery slope. I’m like, I’m already on a carb binge today I might as well just go all out.

So then for lunch I was like, “Hey kids, let’s go out to eat.” So we went to a hamburger place and we had hamburgers and French fries and I ate everyone else’s French fries, they were really good. Then I came home and I was like, I could barely keep my eyes open and my whole body is shutting down. I’m like, I can’t keep my eyes open and my wife gets home and she’s tired because she’s been at this emotional thing all day, crying her eyes out and everything. And then the kids are like, “We’re hungry.” And I’m like, “Ugh.” And they’re like, “We want pizza.” And I’m like, “Sweet, get my phone.” And ordered Dominos pizza and chicken wings and that was amazingly good.

And then tonight there was a wedding reception so we went over and they had cheesecake, so today was a carb day. I pounded the carbs. But it’s funny because I am now walking back in and go to bed and I just want to, it’s kind of mostly for me, and hopefully for you guys as well. I feel like crap, my voice hurts, my throat hurts, my brain hurts, I have brain fog. I can’t focus, I can’t concentrate. I feel like ugh. My body hurts, my legs hurt, it’s just like ugh feeling.

And I know there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who are, that’s the fuel you’re putting in your bodies most days. If I put that fuel in my body, I don’t know how I could get anything done. I got nothing done today, other than playing with the kids. I feel like crap, like garbage.

Anyway, I just wanted to put it out there. First off, for me to remember what I feel like now. A lot of time we associate the pleasure on our taste buds, with the food we eat. We eat Lucky Charms and we’re like, this tastes so good. But I want to consciously remember this, that I feel right now, because I want to associate this with carbs so I quit eating them. Because they just thrash you and destroy you and make you feel like garbage.

So for those of you guys that I’m competing against, please keep eating crap. I love it. It makes it so I can get more done in a week than you can get done in a day. But for the rest of you guys who I’m coaching and consulting and I want you to succeed, look at your diet. Seriously shift how you are eating. If you’re trying to figure out how to eat for energy, a couple of things I would recommend. Number one, Google intermittent fasting. That’ll change your entire day around, even if you’re not trying to lose weight. Just shifting so you don’t eat in the morning, fats in the afternoon, and carbs at night. It will keep your energy high throughout the day, so you can compete and do well.

And then the Bulletproof diet is really, really good. Most of you guys know I’m Mormon, so I don’t drink coffee, but there’s different ways to make that. But anyway, Dave Asprey, his whole mission and stuff is really, really good. I love his stuff, minus the coffee. But you can do Bulletproof other things in the morning if you want, or you can do coffee if that’s what you like to do as well. But that whole concept of high fats, I strongly, strongly believe in that. It’s been a huge thing that’s helped me succeed as an entrepreneur.

The last one is Anthony DiClementi’s Biohacker’s Guide, which is another amazing book. It gives a ton of ways to eat for energy and other things for energy as well. So anyway, it’s just some help you guys. If you’re struggling, and it’s hard to get through the days and it’s hard to focus and have concentration and you just want to go out and thrash everyone, think about the fuel you’re putting in your body. Because this right now, how I feel right now is a testament of what Lucky Charms, the devil….I think I also had Lucky Charms for dinner. I may have had some for lunch too. Box number two is almost gone. Look at this thing. Lucky Charms, are you kidding me.

That’s why I don’t like my wife to go shopping sometimes. She buys all the good stuff that I can’t say no to. Anyway, so just think about that. The fuel you put in your body is effecting how you’re competing. This business is a game, it’s competition and I know that the athletes out there understand that, but a lot of people who maybe have not been in athletics, don’t understand that. You’re in competition, you’re competing with people like me who are obsessed with this kind of stuff. And what you put in your body does matter.

So look at that, figure it out. Even if you don’t want to lose weight. I doesn’t matter about losing weight, it’s about keeping your brain sharp for 8, 10, 12 hours a day so you can get a lot of crap done and accomplish what you want to do, so you can serve the people you need to serve. So there you go guys, I hope that helps.

I’m going to bed tonight, I’m going to crash and tomorrow I’ll be back on cue, because I got a big week coming up. If I survive this week, it’s going to be 90% diet, 10% motivation, 30% inspiration, and a whole bunch of happy thoughts in the middle. That’s not 100%, that’s way over. Anyway, it’s going to be fun. Alright guys, I’m out. See you tomorrow. Bye.

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What I realized that’s holding people back from taking the next step in their business.

On this episode Russell talks about what the secret is to go from a million dollars annually to ten million to a hundred million. Here are some informative things in today’s episode:

What advice Russell had for someone in his Two Comma Club when it comes to making more than one million dollars a year.
Why it’s important to opportunity stack instead of constantly opportunity switching.
And some of the things you can do to go from 7 to 8 figures per year.

So listen here if you want to be grow your business from a million dollars a year to ten million and even one hundred million!

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. You guys are catching me at a rare time where I’m actually doing housework. My wife is gone and a couple of my kids are at naps or birthday parties, and I gotta do a couple of chores. So I was working on them and listening to a podcast, thinking and all the sudden I was like, I gotta share this. So we’re doing an impromptu Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright you guys. I’ve got someone in our coaching programs who I love and care about and respect and someone who has had a lot of successes. Two Comma Club winner for sure, sorry my wife’s license plate thingy broke and it’s been flapping out and it’s been like 6 months and she keeps hinting toward the fact that it needs to be fixed. So I’m finally taking the hint, I get it hun, I love you.

Alright, so I’m fixing her thing while we’re talking. Anyway, this person launched a webinar and got it to a million bucks and then kind of transitioned to, and I think loved the market and the thing initially and then kind of fell out of love with it, and because of that transitioned to a new product. He created the product, did the ads, launched another webinar, had success there, and then another one and has kind of transitioned a couple……and that person is kind of frustrated because they’re like, “I’m stuck at a million bucks a year.” And they want to grow, they want to get to $10 million, not because of the money but because of the impact. They want to grow and there’s goals, and how do I get to $10 million a year?

And they’re frustrated and I was just thinking, and they messaged me yesterday so I was talking to them and thinking through it and then for the last day or so it’s just been in my mind, resonating. What’s wrong? This person has all the skill set, they have all the talents, they have all the abilities. Why are they not getting to the next level? What’s the thing?

So I started thinking back about what I’m going to be speaking a lot about at Funnel Hacking Live, but the process of going zero to a million, a million to ten, and ten to a hundred. Sorry, I’m such not a handy man, I can’t figure out how to get these things to work…..so that was my thoughts, we know that from going zero to a million it’s all about figuring out the what and the how. What are you selling that people actually want to buy? And how are you selling it? Are you doing it through a webinar, are you doing it through Amazon? What’s the thing?

And after you figure out the what, this is what I’m selling, and this is how the people want to buy it, what typically happens is then your business explodes really, really fast. I tell people that they know when they’ve hit their what and their how because they’ll go from zero to a million dollars really, really fast. Dan Henry is a good example. As soon as he figured out his what and his how, he went zero to a million in five months. It’s a pretty simple concept. But it takes a while initially. Some people spend their whole life figuring out the what and the how.

Sometimes they figure out what to sell, they’ve got the coolest product ever, but they can’t figure out how to sell it. Or they know how to sell, they just don’t have the right product. Things like that. So for this person, they’ve done that multiple times, they figured out the what and how and made it up to a million dollars, and then they shifted to the next thing. And I was in that cycle for like 12 years, so I’m probably a good coach for this, because I’ve done it, a lot. I had a lot of good businesses, but nothing that was great.

So, I can’t fix this license plate, I’m giving up. I tried, I get brownie points for trying right.

So the what and the how, I started thinking, I was like, okay zero to a million’s what and how, from a million to ten is all about the backend and frontend funnels. The frontend funnels bring more leads in, the backend funnels go deep inside that thing. All the sudden I had this epiphany. I was like, oh my gosh this is it. So I started thinking about Clickfunnels. Clickfunnels for example, as you guys know the thing, I had five or six different funnels that I had tried before we had the one that hit. And the one that hit was the Funnel Hacks webinar, it was just like boom and blew up.

Now if you look at fast forward now, Clickfunnels has been live for a little over three years. Almost three years, I don’t know. Something like that. So almost three years and what’s interesting, if you look at and do the actual math of the Funnel Hacks course, $997. We sold about 10,000-ish copies, a little more than that, but let’s say 10,000 for numbers sake. So that means ten million dollars we made from the webinar, which is awesome. Anyone else has a ten million dollar webinar, that’s great. But a ten million dollar webinar comes and goes. I’d say it’s probably one of the best of the best of our industry, but that wouldn’t have been that good of a story. “Russell made ten million bucks.”

If you look at that now, we will, where are we now, we’re in September. By November Clickfunnels will have passed a hundred million dollars in collected sales. I know because I have this countdown clock, where every single day my accountant lets me know how much further we are away from that. Because I want to know how long it took us to go from zero to a hundred million dollars. And we’re close, we’ll hit it this year for sure, it’ll be in November. So that’s exciting, right.

But I was looking, and the webinar only made ten million. That means the extra 90 million came from something else. So where did that stuff come from? And that’s when it came to going deep. Going from zero to a million is all about the what and the how. From a million to ten is about the frontend and the backend funnels. So frontend is more ways to bring leads in, so we had the books, Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets, The Perfect Webinar, things like that to bring leads into the business. Clickfunnels.com is a frontend, all this stuff like that.

Then you’ve got the backend funnels, you’re going deep. So what’s cool about it is I started selling other things related to funnels. So there’s so much stuff I could share with you guys, but if you read the Expert Secrets book, we talked about opportunity switch and then opportunity stack. So every business you only have one switch. So I switch people into funnels and I stack things within that market. And when we do this correctly we have compounding interest. I’m going to explain that here in a minute. But I switched over to like where someone comes into Clickfunnels, then we’ve got other products and services to help them better at that thing that we opportunity switched them into.

So we switched them into funnels and then we’ve got Funnel Scripts, we’ve got Fill Your Funnel, which is our traffic course. We’ve got our certification program, we’ve got our Clickstart funnel for people getting started in clickfunnels. We have Clickfunnels, we have software for crying out loud. We have all these other things, that are all tied back to funnels, so that’s how we were able to go super, super deep.

And for this person, the problem they had is they got to a million dollars and they just switched. And then they got to a million dollars and they switched. And they keep kind of switched opportunities on the person, they switched what they’re doing, they’re switching their focus, switching their branding. And I have nothing against that, I did that as well. If I would have stuck with the very first thing I would have done, we never would have Clickfunnels probably. Todd would have figured it out eventually, I’m sure.

But that’s the thing, you gotta figure out that what and how. Not only for your customers, because again, you figure out the what and the how for your customers, boom, you’re at a million bucks fast. But then it’s like, is this the business I want to be in forever? I didn’t want to be teaching micro continuity forever. I didn’t want to teach 12 Month Millionaire forever. All my first million dollar projects, there was a whole bunch of them. I think there were 7 or 8 that we had that were million dollar winners in the early days. We’d hit a million bucks and then it was kind of stale and I’d switch to the next thing and next thing and next thing.

And to get from a million to the ten to the hundred is about focusing deep. And one of the major reasons why, number one is because of compounding interest. Again, I’m not a finance guy, so my finance people out there know this way better than me. But some famous dude said that the greatest invention in the world is compounding interest. And the same thing is true with compounding customers. Every single person who buys the Expert Secrets book, or the Dotcom Secrets book, or watches the webinar, or buys Clickfunnels, I am switching those people.

All those, the goal of every single one of them, just to be completely transparent with no hidden agenda, the goal of all of those is to convince people that their new opportunity, their vehicle is funnels. So I’m convince, hey you’re an expert you need a funnel. Hey, you have an internet business, you’re a Dotcom Secrets book, you need a funnel. Hey, perfect webinar, you need a funnel. Hey Clickfunnels, you need a funnel. That’s my only goal. I want to be completely up front. All my frontend funnels, that’s the goal. To convince people that wherever I’m grabbing at, that they need a funnel.

In fact, I’m working right now on a report called NetworkMarketingSecrets.com, yes I own the domain. How cool is that? And that’s the whole reason for that frontend, to convince every network marketer on earth that they need a funnel. And I’m doing the same thing for other markets. That’s my whole thing.

Now as soon as someone believes that they need a funnel, which they do. Then I’m stacking, I’m compounding on top of that. So then I compound, if you have a funnel you need Funnel Scripts. If you have a funnel, you need Traffic Affiliate Funnel, you may need to become certified, you may need this…..So that everything else is just opportunity stacking within the opportunity I switched people into.

So if you’re looking at your business and you’re stuck at one to three million bucks, which is kind of where a lot of….I was stuck at for a decade. I understand this world. It’s because we keep switching our customers. We keep opportunity switching them. We’re switching them from opportunity to opportunity to opportunity, and what happens after a while, they kind of lose faith in you. They’re like, this person is telling me all these other things.

The reason why we’ve done more in the last three years than the prior decade, times like 5, is because everything I’m doing, people look at it and they’re like, “Russell’s still preaching the same thing. Funnels are the key. There’s this other thing, how to get traffic in your funnels. Oh that makes total sense. Oh, here’s the live event teaching more funnels.” Everything we’re doing is stacking upon that. So it’s not like I’m switching people from opportunity to opportunity, I’m saying, “Look, you chose the right road, this is the path, the new opportunity to focus on. I’m just going to give you more tools and assets to amplify your experience and make it better for you.”

That’s how went from a million to ten to a hundred is that part. Funnels are awesome but I make money off Clickfunnels, I make money off Funnel Scripts, I make money…..all these other pieces that lead more people into it.

That was what I told this person. I came back and said, “Look, I think the biggest problem is not that you don’t have the skills, you do. It’s not that you don’t have a great product, you do. It’s that if you were so passionate about that market when you hit a million dollars, you would have went deeper. Like what software can I create for these people? What certifications? What events? You would have gone deeper trying to think of those things, which are the backend funnels, which where the majority of profit, for me it’s where the other 90 million dollars came from.” But because they weren’t as passionate about it, the made the million bucks, they figured out the what and the how for their customers, but it wasn’t right for them.

If it was right for them, they would have sat there all day long and thinking about how they can serve this customer more? What else do they need? What else do they want? They would have heard the person’s voice over and over and over again and they would have known.

Clickfunnels came out of me knowing, we heard people talk about funnels all the time. All these other things are people telling us over and over again what they want, what they need. So we’re creating those things for them and that’s how the business grows and grows and grows.

I think that’s the key, figuring out the what and the how for your customer, but also making sure it’s the what for you. Because if it’s the wrong business for you, if it’s not something you’re geeking out about, you’ll keep switching, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to hit the perfect business the first time. A lot of times, getting from zero to a million the first time is about you getting the skill set and understanding the market and learning all these kind of things.

But at the same time if you’re going there and you’re at a million bucks and you’re like, “I’m not happy here.” That’s okay. It’s okay to back up and shut it down and figure it out. You’ve got all the skills, the hard part done. It’s easier to re-figure out. You just gotta figure out what it is that you’re so insanely passionate about, what market segment, what people, what problem do you want to solve so much so that it’s going to keep you up at night trying to figure out the next thing. What else do I create? What’s the next product? What software do they need? What events? What other training? If they bought this course, what’s the next thing they need?

And that’s, I think, the key. So anyway, I just got excited because I was talking to this person and sharing that with them, this whole idea of compounding interest. That’s the coolest thing. Every single person that buys one of my books, they come into my world and now they’re going to buy the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. You look at all the other revenue, it’s all free. I don’t have to pay for that customer. All those kind of things, so it just keeps growing and growing and growing. As opposed to when you have different things in different markets, things like that. It doesn’t compound.

That was my problem before, we had 12 companies we launched in a 12 month period of time. I wish it was once a month, but we were launching 12 at once. So it was even worse. But the interesting thing is just thinking about, anyone who bought the couponing product would never buy any of the other products, that was the biggest mistake. And then people who bought the weight loss product never bought the other ones. And it was just like, that was the issues. It wasn’t compounding. We had to re-create customers every single time.

I think the first time I understood it, I was hanging out with Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher, they had a whole bunch of businesses and I think I’d kind of strayed away from this because they went deep into the survival market, then they did it within survival and stuff like that. But what Ryan told me, “Anytime we launch another business, one of our rules is that our existing customer base, they have to be wanting to buy it. So that way we’ve got free traffic. Everything is compounding. If someone buys from this business they might also buy from this one as well.”

And while I agree with that, I would go a step deeper and not do it just in the same market, not just parallel markets, I’d just pick one market and then opportunity stack as deep as you can go.

Anyway, that’s what I got, it’s hot here in the garage. Hopefully it’s not too echo-y. I’m going to go figure out how to try and fix this license plate for my wife. So she’ll be impressed with me. That’s the goal. Just so all the women out there know, men’s only real purpose in life is to try to impress their spouse. That’s it. We’re good with everything else. So I’m going to try to do that so when she gets home she will be impressed. Anyway, appreciate you guys, thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye.

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My new formula for getting your message in front of the masses.

On today’s episode Russell talks about what he has done to be able to connect with a broader audience of entrepreneurs. Here are the awesome things you will find in this episode:

Why people like the Harmon Brothers don’t know what copy is, yet they write amazing copy.
What Russell did to be able to appeal and connect with a broader audience of entrepreneurs rather than just marketers.
And how you can connect with a bigger audience and how that could help you.

So listen here to find out how Russell connected with a larger audience and what the plan for the future with them is.

---Transcript---

Good morning, good morning everybody. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. We are now watching right now Studio C, which made me think of something really funny, and that’s why we’re kicking off this episode of this podcast.

Alright everybody, it’s a Saturday. We are less than a week away from our big viral video launch. There’s so many more pieces going into it, it’s kind of crazy. We’ve got, I’m a little stressed out, I’m not going to lie. We’ve got a sales page, the demo sequence, the onboarding, the offboarding, the gamification, the show me how walk through’s, all going live in the next six days.

The program too is coming out on Monday, which I’m excited for. And then in between there we also happen to have a three day event. It’s so funny. Yesterday we were filming a video thing for Funnel Hacker TV, we were talking about funnel years and how each funnel year is one day. So it’s like, oh we’ve got like four funnel years before the next live event. And we’ve got six funnel years before the viral video launch. We’ve got plenty of time. So start saying that guys, everyday in the real world is a funnel year because you more done in a year than most people get done in a day, if you’re using Clickfunnels.

I actually have something I want to talk to you about today. I’ve been watching, ever since this whole viral video thing, it’s been fun this whole new science of marketing that’s been opened up my mind, that was different before. It was funny, we were hanging out with the Harmon Brothers, and these guys are script writers and all sorts of stuff and I’m talking about copywriting. I was like, “Who’d you guys study?” They’re like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “I don’t know, Gary Halvert, did you listen to Vince Vanga? Who are the guys you studied for copywriting?” They’re like, “Who’s Gary Halvert?” I’m like, “What?” and they’re like, “yeah, I don’t know who that is.” I’m like, “What about Dan Kennedy? What about….” And I’m naming off the legends, all these things and they’re like, “Never heard any of them.”

I’m like, “How are you guys the best video copywriters on earth and you never heard of copy?” It’s just so funny. They’re like, “We just…” They get sketch comedy writers who are really funny and then they try to weave sales principles into it. It’s funny because it’s just interesting. One thing they said is that, “We just go Kickstarter and all the best Kickstarter campaigns and watch those videos. What are they doing? What’s consistently working?” If I was trying to train again in copywriting I’d be like, “Go to Kickstarter and watch like 8,000 videos and you’ll learn good copy.”

It’s interesting. Then one of our main writers for our script was Matt Meese from Studio C, which if you don’t know what Studio C is, that’s what I was just watching a minute ago. Go watch Studio C. It’s like the best show on TV, it’s like Saturday Night Live, but it’s a bunch of Mormons who do it, so it’s clean and family friendly. It’s awesome. You guys will love it, it’s awesome. But it’s the same thing. The guys who write the scripts for Studio C, they’re some of the best copywriters in the world and they don’t even know what copy is, they just know how to engage people and grab intention and interest and desire. They’ve learned it through a different format, which is cool.

Anyway, with that said, it’s been fun. I’ve been trying to think of different ways to grab people and get them. My first test is, it’s been interesting, this is my podcast you guys are listening to. So I do the podcast, and sometimes I do a podcast and I don’t hear much and other times I do a podcast and I get all these messages from people who are like, “Thank you. It was so awesome.” Sorry that’s my pool over there making a lot of noise, I’m going to come on this side.

For example, the entrepreneurial scars podcast I did, tons of, people messaging me from everywhere, “Thank you that was so cool.” Entrepreneurs struggling with vacations, that one hit. And there’s a whole bunch of them that people resonate with more than other ones for some reason. So I was thinking, podcast is a really cool format to teach and train and get inside people’s minds and I love it. But it’s not, podcasts are hard to share, it’s hard for them to go viral, those kind of things. So I was like, I’m going to start taking the podcasts I have that have the most impact and people connect with the most and I’m going to try to turn those into a video, a viral video that will call out my people.

If this is resonating with people so much so that they are able to get a hold of me, which is not easy. I have a lot of walls every direction, but if they get to me it means it was worth focusing on. The entrepreneurs struggling on vacation, when I was in Hawaii with my wife, I was like I’m just going to record a little video of this, and instead of it being off the cuff, like I am right now. I was like I’m going script it out and write a minute and a half, two minute video about why entrepreneurs suck at going on vacations.

So I wrote the script, set up a camera at the beach house, recorded this thing, got home and had Kevin on our team go through and make a little viral video thing, it had music and energy and just kind of…. It’s probably more produced than some of the others I’m going to test. Sometimes less produced do better. Anyway, who knows. But if you look at it, it was not me talking about funnels. Funnels is my world, but I needed to go a level bigger if I want to go semi viral, or niche viral, whatever they call it. I needed it to go one level bigger so that it would grab my people.

So for me, I want entrepreneurs who are selling stuff through funnels. That’s my dream to get people, but a lot of entrepreneurs don’t know that yet, so I gotta connect with them at a level we can connect at. So I’m going to call out entrepreneurs. So entrepreneurs, I think the video title is like, “Why entrepreneurs suck at vacations.” In fact, I had the audio a couple of episodes back, so you guys who are listening to the audio podcast heard it last…A week ago today actually. But you can just hear it, it’s me at the beach house, doing it. It’s calling out entrepreneurs, calling out my people and then trying to have them connect with me.

So I did the video, put it together, we launched it and you know it’s not like, 18 million views or anything like that, but I think we’re at 70 or 80 thousand views in the last 7 days, which is awesome. That means 70 thousand entrepreneurs have connected with me. And the comments are crazy. “Oh my gosh, you understand me. That’s how I feel too.” And they’re tagging their wives, and friends, and kids and all sorts of stuff. It’s just cool. It connected, all these entrepreneurs I’m connected with now, they’re like, “Who’s this weird dude that I connected with?” Now they shift from being just entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs who now read the book or whatever and get deeper and deeper with me, and eventually they are building funnels, which is where I want everybody to be. Because that’s how you change the world, you build funnels.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. I’m going to be doing more of those, I’m going to be doing, probably the next one will be entrepreneurial scars. I might go down to the courthouse or something and record it there, be like bankruptcy or I don’t know, I gotta write a script for it first.

I just thought it was a really cool thing. The reason I’m telling you this is I want you guys to think about this. Think about the thing that you’re selling. So whatever it is you’re selling, try to go one step broader. So that more mass appeal. Who are the people you would love to have buy your thing, even though they’re not ready yet, so go one level deeper. Who are those people? And then what message do you have that they would be like, “Yes, you get me. That’s me.” That’s what we’re looking for. And then try to make a little video speaking to those people, so they’ll connect with you.

So for example, vacations. Entrepreneurs suck at vacations because we want to get back to work. Entrepreneurs relate to that. That’s how I called out my people and they’re connecting now and it’s really, really cool. So for you, how do you call out your people? Who are your people, first off? You’re product, going one step broader than that, so people that don’t know who you are yet, but they would connect with you. Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense.

So for me, I’m not talking about necessarily marketers, I’m talking about entrepreneurs. Marketers are people who get what we do, they understand, that’s why Marketing Secrets podcast, that’s why all these things….You guys are marketers, you understand, you’re excited about selling it. You guys will resonate with the message no matter what, so I’m trying to go one level bigger so that it has the ability to go more viral, but also has the ability to connect with more people. Then bring them down into our funnels, into our world.

So this is what Fill Your Funnel, this is the front of the value ladder, this is how you’re casting a wider net and bringing them in. So you’re figuring out who are your people, calling them out and then what are things that you believe that they would resonate with. That the rest of the world would think is really, really weird. Honestly, it’s funny when I was making that video. I was really concerned because my wife was there, I was like, “I don’t want to offend her.” But that’s how I feel. And I know other entrepreneurs feel this way, I’ve talked to them about it. People tell me all the time. I go on vacation and people are like, “How was your vacation?” I’m like, “It was good, so glad to be back so I can stop stressing out.” Which is just, I know that that’s how I always felt.

So think about what are the things that you feel because of what you do, or because of who you are, that other people like you will resonate with, but the rest of the world will think you’re weird. That’s who you’re looking for, those kind of things. And then create something around that and just put it out there. Who knows. It may go viral, it may not. It doesn’t really matter, but just do it.

So for me, I’m going to try to do it once or twice a month. Try to pick a podcast episode I’ve done, or come up with an idea, or something that’s just like, here’s a cool story I can tell that the entrepreneurs will connect with and will get them to like me, follow me, friend me, whatever. And then through the process I can get them to buy the book, get into the culture, etc, etc, etc.

I hope that helps you guys. If you haven’t seen the video yet, again the audio podcast was a few episodes back, “Why Entrepreneurs Suck At Vacation” if you go to Facebook.com/RussellBrunsonHQ, that’s my fan page, you can see the video there for sure. Or at this point, probably if you Google, “Why do entrepreneurs suck at vacations” It’ll probably show up, who knows. But it’s worth watching and sharing and tagging your family and friends on it.

Hope that helps you guys. I’m going to go back in and watch some Studio C with my kids, because it’s amazing. Here it is, right here. You can see it back there if you’re watching on the TV show. Awesome sketch comedy gives you good idea for writing copy, and it’s really fun. So thanks guys, I’ll see you later. Bye.

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Against all traditional investing advice, this should be your number one focus after you launch your company.

On this episode Russell talks about paying your house off quickly so you can have the ability to risk more. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear in today’s episode:

Why Russell is giving the opposite advice as nearly every investor there is when it comes to paying off your house.
How Russell was able to keep his wife in the dark about some of the hardest times in the business.
Why having the stability of a paid off house gives entrepreneurs the ability to risk more.

So listen here to find out what would happen to Russell, worst case scenario and why he wouldn’t lose his home or family.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a late night, in the wrestling room edition of Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright, alright everybody. I spent almost 5 or 6 hours today with the kids in my little piece of heaven cleaning today. This is an external garage at our house that I decided to turn into a wrestling room, for those who have never seen it before. It’s awesome. I got wrestling mats, gladiator walls, Bulgarian bags, paintings of my favorite wrestlers back here, throwing dummies, the girl stuff here for the girls. These are actually the wrestling mats I used to wrestle on in high school, they were on my back deck growing up. So there’s a little nostalgia for you, that’s cool.

This is the weight room side of it, so this where we do what we do and it’s awesome. And as I was working today, we’re out in the middle of nowhere so there’s lots of spiders and bugs and stuff, so we got all these bugs trappers and stuff. So probably every three or four months I come and do a deep clean where I have to get the vacuum out and throw away all the dead spiders and re-clean it, and it’s kind of a nightmare. But it’s really fun that now it’s clean. It’s so clean right now, I love it. It makes me want to work out.

So during all this craziness today of cleaning and having fun like that, I was checking my phone a couple of times throughout and I saw a post from Julie Stoian, and I thought it was interesting because she asked, “Should I pay off my house or should I pull the money out and use that for other investments and things like that.” It’s funny because I gave my answer and it was like, the exact opposite of what I think a lot of people thought I would think. I think it’s good, so I’m going to give you my advice right now.

Because I know when I was a little kid, my dad, who is an entrepreneur and has a couple of businesses and is someone who first got me all excited by this whole thing. He used to always tell me, “You gotta pay off your house, you gotta pay off your house. Pay off your house as quick as you can.” I remember because I was like, that’s good advice and then when I got older I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and other investment books and they always talk about how a house is a bad investment and you need to keep the money as low as possible and use that to pay off….you know keep your house just down in the minimum. Pay your monthly payments and then keep that money and go and invest in other things that can produce more money.

And logically, that makes sense. If I was an investment dude, teaching people investment I’d be like, “Yes, you should not pay off your house, keep the equity in there as low as possible, strip the cash out because you can use that in other investment vehicles.” So it makes sense as an investor. But I don’t consider myself an investor. Now I am dabbling into crypto currencies, Todd Dickerson, my partner in Clickfunnels is making insane amounts of money so he’s showing me the ways of the crypto world. But I still don’t consider myself an investor. I consider myself an entrepreneur.

It’s funny because when I first started reading those books, I started believing that and believing that. And then I talked to my dad and I was like, “Dad why don’t you pull all your money out.” Because my dad’s like, buys house pays them off, cash flow. Buys houses, pays them off, cash flow. And he has his own house. I was like, “Dad, what are you thinking? You’re crazy.” And I remember one night he kept telling me, “Russell, you have to understand, there’s something about knowing your house is paid off, knowing that worst case scenario, your house is there and that gives you the ability as an entrepreneur to go and risk.”

And I was like, huh. I don’t think I really got it. You know, I heard him and I’m like, young son thinking he knows everything, but I don’t think I got it at first. I was just like, okay whatever. Then the next decade of my life started happening after that, and in that decade I’ve seen some really big ups and some really big downs, and some really bigger ups and some big downs. And right now I’m on an up cycle. And there may be a time where I go back down and that sucks. That’s scary, and I have a lot of fear and anxiety around that, just because I’ve cycled twice and I know that feeling. I know the fear and all those things. I have a constant, I think part of what drives me so hard, and people always ask “Why don’t you slow down dude, you’re doing pretty well.” And it’s because I have this internal fear. I remember what that was like to cycle and I’m trying to protect myself through the hustle or I don’t know whatever that is. So I think that’s a big driving force for me.

But during these cycles, and luckily we recovered from them. But a couple of things that I noted. Things got really bad a couple of times, but at the same time, I never, this is probably wrong, but I never told my wife about a lot that was happening, and she found out later. Actually, she was at the last Funnel Hacking Live where I did the presentation on all my failures, as you guys saw a few episodes back. And she was like, “What? I didn’t realize it was that bad.” I was like, “Well, I didn’t really tell you. I’m supposed to be the man.”

But for her, I knew that I had to have security. So I knew how much, there was an amount of money every single month that she got that would cover our house payments and our bills, stuff like that. I just knew that as long as I could make at least that, I was okay risking and trying and doing things. As long as, worst case scenario, my stability, my foundation was set. That was it.

During those rocky, scary times, I knew that worst case scenario, I could always produce enough money so that nothing at home was effected. It gave me the ability to risk, to roll the dice and try things. So for entrepreneurs I think sucking the cash out of your house and investing it in other places is the worst advice ever. Because then you’re on this unstable foundation. Sure you have more money to invest and in theory you can make more money and all these sorts of things. But it takes away your ability to risk.

Risk is what makes an entrepreneur great. We have to go out there and risk and jump off cliffs all the time. But risk is scary. The only way for us to be able to increase the level of risk tolerance we have, I think is also increase the stability tolerance on the other side. Paying off your house is smart because worst case scenario, if everything, all the crap hits the fan and everything falls apart, if you’ve done that and paid off your house, worst case scenario, you still have the stability of a home for your wife and kids and whatever.

That is the key. That gives you the ability to go and do the crazier things. So that’s my advice for all you guys. Pay off your house. Pay it off fast. Pay it off as quick as you can, because as you do that, as the stability, the anchor gets stronger and stronger and stronger on this side, your ability to risk over here, without the fear of losing that, it gives you the ability to risk more and do what you need to do. Because entrepreneurship is a lot of literally rolling the dice.

This viral video we’re doing, I keep telling everyone, typically my investments in our business are very strategic, we create a funnel, invest some money, get it converting, then ramp it up really fast. I’m not risking a ton. This is the biggest one, where it’s like, to create the video we had to write a $500,000 check. There’s half a million dollars, right. Put it all in black. With the launch party, with everything we’ve done it’s probably another 3 or 4… I mean it’s close to, when all is said and done, it’ll be close to a million bucks. All on black, okay let’s go and hopefully it will work.

But the nice thing is because of the stability on other things we’ve set up, I can take that risk and it’s okay. Because worst case scenario, it’ll be okay. I’ve talked about this on other episodes of the podcast. The thing that so often keeps entrepreneurs from success is the fear of the worst case scenario. You have to be able to look at the worst case scenario and be okay with that. And if you are, then you can jump forward. Some entrepreneurs may never look at the worst case scenario. They’re just always, we don’t want to look at the thing that we’re scared of.

So we see the thing we want and we’re kind of going forward, but there’s this nagging thing in the back of your head. Worst case scenario, what if I go bankrupt, what if my wife leaves me, what if my kids think I’m a bad dad. All these fears that are happening and we try to ignore them, but because we’re ignoring them, they’re still buzzing in our ear, in our subconscious mind. So because of that they keep coming and keep coming.

I always tell entrepreneurs, if you want to be free and able to risk you have to stop, look back and be like, “What’s the worst case scenario back there? If everything goes to crap, what happens?” and until you’re okay with that, it’s so hard to move forward. So a lot of us we have to stop and say, okay, what’s the worst case scenario?

And I remember that. A lot of times I’ve had a couple times the worst case scenario was bankruptcy, worst case scenario was losing my house, and those are scary. At the beginning you have to have that initial risk and you have to be okay. If I lose my house, it’s okay. If I go bankrupt, it’s going to be okay. But as you start rolling up into bigger opportunities, bigger risks, bigger things like that, it’s nice to look back and say worst case scenario, I lose my money on this deal. I still got my house, got my wife, got my kids. That security gives you the ability to risk big.

So pay off your house, there’s my advice. It goes against all the famous investing dudes, but I think they’re wrong. I think most of those aren’t entrepreneurs like us. That’s what we do. We’re entrepreneurs, we’re risking, we’re making the world a better place. I mentioned this on the entrepreneurial scholars podcast, the episode a few back. If entrepreneurs don’t risk, the whole world comes to a screeching halt. The government put in bankruptcy and all these laws and things to protect us so we can risk. So that’s why it’s vitally important. It’s awesome.

So there you go, here’s the mirror. What? Here you guys are, we’re all talking together. How cool does that look? If you’re listening, you have no idea what I’m doing, but if you’re watching the video at marketingsecrets.com this is what you see. Alright you guys, appreciate you all. I’m going to go back in and put my kids to bed, it’s been a fun day. Doesn’t it look good? It looks clean. Ready for some workout, ready for some people to bleed out of our muscles. It really hurts sometimes. Anyway, appreciate you guys. Pay off your house, it’ll give you the financial stability you need to risk everything and change the world. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.

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If you want success, the first step is STOP STOPPING!!!

On this episode Russell talks about getting his stalling kids ready for bed and yelling at them to stop stopping, which reminded him of what Setema said at Funnel Hacking Live. Here are some of the awesome things to look for in this episode:

Why yelling at his kids to stop stalling, made him think of people who need to stop stopping when it comes to business and life.
Why it’s always important to keep moving forward even when you hit roadblocks.
And why its physically impossible to have success when you stop from every roadblock that gets in your way.

So listen here to listen to Russell say “Stop stopping” a million times to burn it into your brain so it motivates you to always move forward.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, it’s Russell Brunson, I’m about to go to bed, but I want to talk to you about something. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets.

Alright, so it’s been a crazy week. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little tired. We’re coming up on the big viral video launch, which has been early mornings, late nights doing a lot of things, a lot of stuff working, a lot of stuff not working. We’ve had some let downs, it’s been nuts.

It’s been fun, I don’t know about you but I just love this game, I love the journey, I love everything about it. And it’s been so much fun, but I had a funny story tonight. Actually what this came from initially is Setema, some of you guys heard him speak at Funnel Hacking Live, he’s been in Inner Circle, he was in the Inner Circle last year. And he gave this one presentation it was so cool.

He had four or five points he was going over and I remember one of them that had a big impact on me. I never found my notebook. All I remember is he said, “You need to stop stopping.” And then he started talking about people who go and hit roadblock and then they stop. You need to stop stopping. He said that things happen and then people stop. He’s like, “you gotta stop stopping.” And he kept saying that over and over again.

It was funny tonight, we got back after a long week, we had this big party at one of the neighbors houses tonight. It was probably about 250 kids at this thing, it was nuts. My kids are out there swimming and partying and Collette and I came and took the younger kids home and then I just went back to go grab them. I grabbed them and they’re all cold and tired and hopped up on sugar. You know how it is. Summer parties, I guess end of Summer parties.

Anyway, so I go and get them loaded in the car, drive them home and came into bed and Dallin, my oldest, he’s getting ready for bed and he has this thing where he kind of stalls and stalls and stalls and he kept stopping. And tonight, after the 5th or 6th time I’m like, “Come on bud, let’s go. Let’s go.” And then he was putting his shirt on and he kind of stopped there and he’s just sitting there and I was like, “Dallin, you have to stop stopping.” He’s like, “What Dad?” and I’m like, “Stop stopping.” He’s like, “Wait, what?” I’m like, “Stop stopping.” I kept yelling it and he starts laughing.

Anyway, I was getting Bowen for bed, and he kept doing it too so I’m like, “Bowen, you have to stop stopping.” And he was like, “Wait, what Dad.” And I’m like, “You have to stop stopping.” And he’s like, “Oh that’s really cool.” And I’m like, “I know.” And then I did it to Ellie. Everyone else was passed out. Collette passed out a little earlier too, with Aiden. And Norah was long gone.

Anyway, as I had fun doing that and yelling at the kids and telling them to stop stopping, I just kind of realized how powerful that is. I was like, I gotta grab my camera just because I think that this is why most people don’t succeed. And not just in business, this is like any part of life. Good relationships, people just stop. In business they stop. In development, in sports, how many times do people just stop.

I’m not perfect either, I’m guilty of this as well. But I think one of the reasons I do have success in this avenue of my life, in business and stuff like that is I just stopped stopping. You hit something and you keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going. So for any of you guys who have a habit of stopping, you start working on a project and you stop. You start doing this thing and then you stop, and then you start doing something else and then you stop. You get stopped by whatever. It could be Facebook, phone, friends, food, something, all F’s. A bunch of….I was going to say something inappropriate, anyway, they’re all F’s.

You gotta stop stopping. I think that’s it for most people. You get a little turbulence and you stop. You gotta stop stopping. So this is it. I’m going to say it ten more times so it gets rung into your head so every time you’re moving forward on something, you’re getting direction, you’re getting momentum and start moving in this thing, you hit something and you want to stop, I want you to hear me yelling in your ear, “Stop stopping. Keep going. Stop stopping. Go, go, go, go. Keep going. Yes, it’s a trial. Stop stopping. Yes, it’s a hurdle, stop stopping. Yes, that’s frustrating, stop stopping. Yes, I know there’s pain associated with that task, you don’t want to do it. You gotta stop stopping. Just keep moving forward. Stop stopping.”

So there it is. There’s my rant for you guys tonight. Stop stopping, keep moving forward, that’s the goal. If you do that, you’ll get what you want. If you stop, you won’t. It’s physically impossible if I want that thing over there and I start walking towards it and I stop, I can’t get it. I’m like, but it’s hard, or I’m tired, or I’m hungry, or I’m blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank with your excuse. If you stop you’re never going to get there. It’s impossible if you stop. You gotta stop stopping and just walk and keep going despite all of the fear and stress and pain and all the other stuff that happens with it. Because I know it’s there, I’ve felt it before, you’ve felt it before.

But I think about all the things in my life that have been great, it’s because I stopped stopping. Wrestling was hard, I didn’t eat most days. I would way in Monday, this was in high school, I’d be at 160 and Thursday I’d be at 130. I couldn’t stop, I had to keep going forward, I learned how to stop stopping and literally stopped eating. But yes, I stopped stopping and kept moving forward. I became great at that.

Business was the same thing. I would stop because we’d get hit and didn’t move, and after years of doing it, I figured out how to stop stopping and keep moving through all the pressure and the pain and noise and keep going. There’s other aspects of my life where I haven’t been as good, where I’ve stopped. This is good for me too. There’s two avenues in my life where I’ve stopped. I gotta stop stopping too.

So this may be for you but it’s probably for me. So Russell, stop stopping. You, whoever you are listening right now, it’s time. It’s time to stop stopping. It’s time to move forward, let’s go. I’m going to go and stop stopping if you commit too. Alright? Cool, stop stopping. See you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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On this episode Russell goes over the final step of the Clickfunnels onboarding process and helps you understand why the copy, or the words within your funnels, are so important. Here are some exciting things in today’s episode:

Learn why good copy is just as valuable as a good salesperson is offline.
Hear what kind of resources are available to help you write copy successfully.
And finally see how all the training you have received in these last four episodes fit together to help you be successful with funnels.

Listen here to the last step and help yourself have even more success with Clickfunnels.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell again. Welcome to the last of this sequence in the Funnel Hacker Onboarding process. This is the Marketing Secrets podcast and if you missed videos 1-3, this is number 4. Go back and watch those, it’s part of a sequence to help you understand why you need funnels, what’s the micro internal value ladder you’re creating, what is the offer you create in each step inside the value ladder, and this one is all about the copywriting. How you sell each one of the offers so you can provide value to every single step inside of your funnel.

Hey guys, this is the last of the onboarding videos, I hope you enjoyed and had a chance to watch all of them, because we’re going to go into copywriting. This is salesmanship, for some reason people understand this in the real world, they have to sell something. But for some reason, I don’t know what it is, when we get online we forget all these amazing, important principles.

So this is all about copywriting, about selling your actual product. You’re not just a product, you’re selling it every single step. You’re selling on the ad, you’re selling to get them to click. You’re selling on the landing page, to get them to give you their email address. You’re selling on the sales page to get their credit card. You’re selling on the webinar registration page to get them to register. You’re selling on every single piece of this and so many times we don’t value or remember that.

So this is the last of the onboarding videos here inside the new Clickfunnels onboarding process that I wanted to share you guys here on the Marketing Secrets podcast because I think it’s important, and I hope you love it. So watch this video right now and hopefully it re-commits you to mastering selling at every single step inside of your funnel.

Alright, welcome back. We are moving on to the last step in your initial funnel education and this is one of the most important and yet what people understand the least. It makes me laugh because if you look at traditional selling of a product or service, people know this. How do you sell the product or service? We call this online, inside of our funnels we call it copywriting. It’s the words on the page, the headlines, the words in the video, the words on the webinar, all those things. It’s the words.

It’s funny because in traditional business, let’s say you are starting a vacuum company, going door to door selling vacuums. If you come to the door and knock and say, “Hey, I got a vacuum, it’s $800.” Nobody’s going to give you money for that. Yet for some reason in our funnels, that’s what we do. We have a picture of our thing and we have a price and an order button. And that is not how things are sold. If you want to make a lot of money selling vacuums door to door you hire a really good salesperson to go and sell the product.

Good salespeople can make a lot of money. I’ve got friends selling vacuums, selling knives, selling pest control, selling alarms door to door, and some of these guys make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year selling door to door because they’ve gotten really good at selling.

So inside of our funnels we have this value ladder we’re taking people through. We have the value at each step, we have the offer at each step, but the last piece is we have to sell those things. We have to actually sell them. Just because you have a picture of a vacuum cleaner with an order button, nobody’s going to buy it unless you actually sell that thing. And that’s one of the disconnects for some reason that people know offline, but they forget when they come online. So that thing, those words, all the stuff on the pages is what we call copywriting.

Copywriting is something, you can hire people to write copy for you and really good copywriters charge a lot of money, or you can learn how to do it yourself, and there’s a couple other ways to do that. A couple things I recommend, number one is if you haven’t read the book, Expert Secrets, the reason I wrote this book is because a lot of people after they read the Dotcom Secrets book, they understood funnel structure. Here’s page one and page two and here’s the right order and those kind of things. And I watched as the Clickfunnels community started building amazing funnels and so many people would drive traffic to those funnels and they never made any money.

They come back to me and say, “Russell, why is this not working? You said funnels were the greatest thing in the world.” I look at their page and literally it’s like the landing page and here’s a picture of an ecover with an opt in box. I’m like, “What’s that?” and they’re like, “Well if they give me the email, they get that.” And I’m like, “I wouldn’t know that.” Again, they’d have their product with a picture of the product and a $300 order button. You need to sell the products.

So the reason I wrote this book was to help people understand how you actually sell things. How to position your offer, how to make an irresistible offer. What are the words and phrases and how do you tell the stories in a way to sell your product. So I recommend getting this book, if nothing else, to understand how to put all the words on the pages the right way.

Inside this Expert Secrets book, some people think it’s only for if you want to be selling information products, but the concepts in here are true for whatever it is you’re selling. Understanding how to tell a story in a way that sells your product or service. The best salespeople, online and offline, are people that are really good at telling stories. And this book walks you through how to tell stories, a stories structure, all those kind of things. So if you read this it will help you understand how to actually present your product in the right way without having to learn all the techy, copywriting stuff that’s honestly hard and confusing and to be completely honest, it’s kind of boring.

The Expert Secrets book will make this exciting and live for you and show you how to tell your story in a way that gets people excited about buying your vacuum cleaner, or coaching, or consulting, or supplements, whatever it is that you are selling. So that’d be number one, get this book and study the sections on how to tell your story.

Number two, one of the short cuts that we created because a lot of people struggle with this piece. They create the funnel and they send people and they don’t make money and they’re just like, “Russell, how do we do it? We’re providing value, we’ve got really good offers, but it’s still not working.” Again, the last step that makes this all magically work, is the copy.

So what we did, Jim Edwards is one of our partners here at Clickfunnels, he went through the Dotcom Secrets book and took all the sales scripts in here. He went through the Expert Secrets book and took all the sales scripts and storytelling scripts inside of here. And we created a separate company, we created a software program called Funnel Scripts and what that is, is a really cool tool where you’re like, “hey I need a headline for my page.” And you may not know what to do or what to put in, so you answer four or five questions, you click a button and it’s going to pop out 150 of the best headlines in the world wrapped around your product and your service.

If you’re like, “I need a video and I don’t know what to do.” You fill in a couple of pieces, you click a button and boom it gives you the entire video script. All of the scripts and copywriting for all your pages are done in there and it has helped so many people save so much time and have so much success. It is an external product, you don’t have to have it to be successful, but I recommend looking through it and getting a copy because it’ll make your job so much easier.

So with that said, what your homework is for today, it’s going to be kind of fun, a hybrid of different levels you can take it at. When you click the button down below it’ll take you over to the video, there’s a video of Jim Edwards and I talking about copywriting, helping you understand how it works, how the scripts work, and that training alone will give you the foundation you need if you want to go and start writing your own copy.

Number two is I highly recommend getting this book so you understand how to tell your story on each of the pages inside of your funnel. And then the third thing, if you’re able to invest in it, there’s the software called Funnel Scripts, again it’s a separate company. But Funnel Scripts is a really good software that will write all the scripts for all the pages in your funnel. There will be a link there for a webinar, you can watch it. The webinar will show you how Funnel Scripts works, it’ll explain the whole process, you can see demos of it and then you can decide for yourself if it makes sense or not.

But if your funnel is struggling or you’re struggling writing all the words and the headlines and all those things that are typically not second nature to people, Funnel Scripts will make that process so easy. I’ve seen people who in the past would spend four or five weeks trying to write all the copy in their funnels, get that process done in a like an hour, hour and a half sometimes. It’s very simple and it’s very easy. So that is a shortcut that will dramatically speed up your success.

But the copy is probably the most important part of the funnels. You have the value ladder, you got the offers, and the last thing is the copy to actually sell those things. And you’re selling everywhere, you start at the ad. Someone sees the ad, what’s the copy on the ad? What are the words, what are the things that get people to click on the ad? Then they come to the first page of the funnel, what are the words to get them to want this offer so you can provide value to them.

Then they opt in and go to the next page and it’s like, what are the words that make them want this offer so they get value and they want the next thing from you and that’s the last piece. It’s so vitally important, I want you to understand. Copy is the key to make these funnels tick, lights them on fire and gets people to take action when they come into your process. So I want you guys to understand. So again, click the button down below, watch the training video to help you understand copy better, then read the book to understand how to tell your story, and then number three if you’re able to get Funnel Scripts, go and get it because it’ll speed up the process so much for you.

So that’s kind of the game plan. With that said, that is the end of this walk through and this should hopefully give you the foundational information you need to understand why funnels, and why offers, and value and all these different pieces that are essential for you being successful. Now you understand the core basics of funnel marketing and hopefully, my goal with this was to help you not just become really good at Clickfunnels, but to help you understand the marketing behind it so you can have success with your funnels.

We have a philosophy, a motto, whatever you want to call it, here inside of Clickfunnels we talk about with our customers all the time. You probably heard me talk about it, but it’s a concept of you’re just one funnel away. The key to making that funnel hit, is this. It’s all the pieces we just went through. It’s understanding the value ladder, creating offers, having the copy, all those pieces, those are the keys. And one funnel, again you hit one funnel and it’ll change everything for you. And I want you guys to understand that. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this training and congratulations, we’ll give you your badge now, and now it’s time to make your funnels profitable and making you some money.

View Details

On this episode Russell goes over the third step in the new Clickfunnels onboarding process, which is creating an offer. Here are the amazing things you will hear in today’s episode:

Why creating an offer is one of the most important, yet least understood parts of the process.
What the difference between having a product and having an offer is.
And how to create an offer that is sexy and attractive to a customer.

So listen here to find out why creating an offer is so important.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell again. Welcome to the third of our onboarding videos here in the funnel hacking series. This one is obviously in the Marketing Secrets podcast so this, if you’ve been watching the last two days these are clips from the new Clickfunnels onboarding process to help you understand the core concepts of how to get your business, idea, product, service off the ground inside of Clickfunnels.

If you missed 1 and 2 go back, these are part of a sequence, there’s a series of four. The titles inside of Marketing Secrets will be the Funnel Hacker Onboarding 1, 2, 3, and 4. So go and watch 1 and 2 first and come back here for number 3. Number 3 we’re talking about creating an offer.

Alright, so this is probably one of the most important, yet least understood parts of this whole game, it’s how you actually create an offer. It’s one of those things that I think I have done so often over the last few years, I forget what goes into it. It’s been interesting as we’ve launched Two Comma Club Coaching, Steven’s been working with all these people going through it and one of the biggest questions people have, and I don’t think people say it like, “I don’t know how to create an offer.” But they’re struggling, their offers are really bad. So they’re stuck at that point, so we’re like how do we fix the offers. And we’ve been going back and forth brainstorming how you explain this.

This video you’re going to watch is part of the new Clickfunnels onboarding process, it’s all about how to create an offer the right way. And hopefully this gets the wheels in your head spinning. More so you understand what an offer actually is. If you understand, and some of you think you know what an offer is but you’re still not doing it. If you understand it I think it’ll help. So let’s watch that video right now, it’ll help you guys actually craft your offer the right way.

Alright, welcome back. This is a concept that is one of the least understood, yet one of the most important. I’m hoping that I can do this justice so you understand. This is a concept that we call creating an offer. What is an offer? An offer is, if you were asking somebody for their money or their email address or their phone number or their attention, you’re trading it with them. It’s all about trading something for attention, money whatever.

And it comes down to an offer and why a lot of people struggle in this business is that they don’t understand the concept of making offers. Now, what I learned when I got started over a decade ago was that you have to create a lot of offers to find out what people actually like. What is an offer? An offer is not a product. I see a lot of people who move from selling things on Amazon and they come over to CLickfunnels and they’re used to on Amazon selling a product.

The problem with selling a product is that typically if you’re a product, you’re a commodity. When you’re a commodity what happens is that everybody races down to the bottom. For example, when I had my supplement company, I was selling my supplements as an offer and there were people selling the exact same supplement as me on Amazon and we were selling ours for $67 a bottle, and they were selling theirs for $19.95 a bottle. I was making way more money than them because I had created an offer.

So an offer is taking things and combining them together. If I’m just selling a supplement bottle, it’s only worth whatever that thing is. And then people are going to price shop and figure out what’s the cheapest and they’re going to go for it. If I sell, if someone’s selling a supplement bottle and I’m selling the same supplement, but instead of just the supplement mine comes with a weight loss guide, food calorie tracker or whatever, these are things I can bundle together into an offer and now this worth way more than the other thing over here.

If you look at companies like Groupon and Living Social, I’m not a big fan of people running their businesses into those things, but if you look at them, they’ve become really good at creating offers for local businesses. A lot of local businesses I saw prior to Groupon would run ads that were just like, “Hey we’ve been in business for 49 years, we’re family loved and locally owned.” That was what they were selling on their pages, but that’s not an offer.

An offer is like, “Hey, if you come to us we will give you this thing.” Now most of Groupon and Living Social offers, they are big discounts. Come in and normally it’s this much money and you’re going to get this much. And that is one way to do offers, by giving it a really good offer, a special offer discount price. But then a lot of you guys don’t want discount prices, which I understand as well. So an offer doesn’t just have to be discounting prices. It can be bundling things together.

If you think about this from a, if you’re a doctor or something like that, an offer, a product is like, “Hey we do adjustments.” Or “Hey we fix eyes.” An offer is like a treatment plan. “Hey when you come in you’re going to get this and get this and we’re going to put together this cool thing.” So your ability to have success with funnels and any kind of business is your ability to create really good, irresistible offers. What’s an offer that people have to have so bad that they’re like, “Oh, I have to give this person my email address because I need that thing.”

What’s the offer that you have? We talked about before the value ladder, we’re taking people through the steps of the value ladder, so I’m trying to give value to people, but with that, the way that I get that value is that I create an offer for them. Sometimes offers are free, sometimes they’re paid. Let’s say for example somebody comes to, in fact, the offers starts clear back on the ad. The ad is not going to say, “Hey, we’ve been family owned and operated for 49 years. Click here to find out more.” That’s a horrible offer. That’s the worst offer ever.

But if it’s like, “Hey are you struggling with whatever, this kind of pain or whatever? If so, find out how we can get rid of your pain in the next three weeks.” Boom, that’s an offer. They’re like, “What is that?” so they click on the page, they come to the next step in the funnel, the very first page they land on and there I’m making them this offer. “Hey, so if you want to figure out your pain, I wrote a report, it’s a 6 page report, and it’s going to walk you through the fastest ways to get out of pain. If you give me your email address, I will trade you this thing.” Okay, I just made them an offer. That was an offer.

So then they trade it and on the next page, I’m like, “Cool, we just sent you the thing, but if you’re still in pain, we’re a local client here, we’ve been doing this for 50 years…” and what most people would do on this page is be like, “Hey we sent you the guide, we’ve been family owned and operated for the last 29 years. Blah blah blah, you should come into our clinic.” The problem with that is there’s not an offer, you’re just bragging about yourself and nobody cares about you.

What do they care about? Them. We used to have a saying, WIIFM, what’s in it for me. So what’s in it for them? So instead of saying, “Family owned and operated.” The offer’s like, “Hey, thanks so much we just you the pdf in your email and it’s got your 6 ways to get out of pain. But right now, I’m sure you’re hurting and I want to make you a very special offer. What we’re going to do is if you call the phone number right now, I want to get you out of pain immediately, so call this number or buy this thing, and when you do that we’re going to give you this, this, and….” And you create an offer for them.

Come into our clinic and we’re going to give you natural headache medicine, we’re going to give you an adjustment, we’re going to give you a free massage, or whatever that thing is, you create an actual offer for them. They buy that, the upsell then is to give them another offer. But every single one of these steps in your funnel, from the ad to the landing page to the upsells, the downsells, to the registration, anything you’re doing in any kind of funnel, it doesn’t matter which one it is. It’s all about creating really, really good offers. And that’s how you provide value for people as you’re moving them through the value ladder.

A lot of people they think about offers from a standpoint of this is the product I’m actually selling, but again it’s not just the selling of the product, it’s every single step. The offers on the ad, the offers on the landing page, and the offers are shifting as you’re providing more value through the value ladder.

Now one way to do this, there’s a concept we talk about a lot here in Clickfunnels, our internal community we call this funnel hacking. What funnel hacking is all about it going out there and seeing what other people are doing and getting ideas for other offers. And sometimes you’re looking for offer ideas from people that are in your same industry, so say you’re a dentist, let’s say you’re selling information products or whatever, you can look, how are other people creating offers that irresistible, sexy offers. We’re looking at those type of things and funnel hacking other people and saying, “On their landing page they offered me this and then on the upsell they offered me this.” And just getting ideas of different ways to structure offers.

Now if your funnel’s not working, there’s usually a few reasons why one might not work. One is the traffic might be bad, but if the traffic is good and they’re coming to your funnel, one of the biggest things to look at if it’s not working is, nobody’s opting in because your offer sucks. We gotta talk about this internally. If your offer sucks, you need to crank it up and make it more sexy. “My offer right now is to come into my clinic and you get three visits for the price of one.” And if nobody’s coming in, it means your offer’s lame. Nobody wants it. You gotta change the offer, make it better and make it better.

A lot of times I might make 4, 5, or 6 different offers before I find the one that people resonate with, that’s the one they’re excited for. Now they start coming in. You figure out the right offer, everything else is taking care of itself. So that’s what I want you guys kind of thinking through. Again, it’s something that’s kind of counter intuitive because most people in business are used to going to Amazon and seeing a picture of the bottle and the five bullet points of why it’s awesome and here’s how you can get it super cheap and we got two day delivery.

That’s not an offer. People that compete like that, people like me come in and we destroy them because it’s like, let’s create a sexy offer that makes it so this product is worth way more, even though it can be a similar product, but I have these other things that I bundled together and made it an actual offer, it’s worth more money.

I can charge more money, and if I can charge more money, what do we know? Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. The reason why my supplement companies blew up, again because these guys I was competing against on Amazon, they were able to spend up to $20 to sell a product, where my bottles were $67 and we upsold them bigger bundles, we had other things, so I could spend 2 or 300 dollars to get a customer, where they could spend $19. It’s all about creating offers and understanding that.

So I want you guys thinking through that. How can you create an offer, what could the offer be on each of the steps inside of your funnel? This is your homework. Take the funnel you created from the funnel cookbook walk through, look at all the different pages, on the last video you kind of looked at value ladder. What’s the value I’m trying to give them here and here and here? And now you’re figuring out what’s the offer I’m going to give them in each step in this process? What is the thing that we’re trading here? I’m giving them value, they’re giving me something and I’m giving them an offer and they’re giving me something, email or credit card, or registration or whatever it is for your funnel and then think about the next page. Now that they’re on the webinar, what’s the value I’m going to provide and what’s the offer? And then the next phase.

And so, hopefully you see how these things are tying together, you have the value ladder, how you are giving value at each level in the process and then what’s the offer that we’re wrapping that around to actually give them the value and then that’s the next step.

And then the next video we’re going to go through is actually going to talk about, what are the words, we call this copy. What’s the copy on each of the pages in this process to actually sell that and get them excited about giving you their money, or their email address, or whatever the thing might be. So that’s the next step. That’s your assignment for right now, so go do that you guys. We’ll see you on the next training.

View Details

On this episode Russell talks about the second step of the funnel hacker onboarding process, the value ladder. Here are some cool things to look for in this episode.

You will see how the value ladder works.
Find out how to get your customers to ascend the ladder.
And see why providing value to your customer will help you get what you want out of them.

So listen here to find out how to get customers to ascend the value ladder so you can get more of what you want out of your customers.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to video number two here in our Funnel Hacker Onboarding series inside the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed yesterday’s podcast talking about why funnels, why they’re important. Today we’re talking about the value ladder.

Alright so with that, before I show you the video, a lot of times when people think about value ladders, because I think the way I explained it in the Dotcom Secrets book, I talk about going from funnel one to funnel two, to funnel three which is true, but for most people, they spend so much time mapping out the value of, “this is where I’m going to go in the next 20 years. Eventually I’m going to do high end coaching and then I’m going to coach the president of the United States. Then I’m going to become the president of the United States….” They’re going so deep in this huge value ladder, which is good so you understand where you’re going, but it comes down to the micro. What’s the value ladder here, when someone hits my landing page? What’s the value of getting them here, when they opt in, what’s the value?

So that’s what this training is about. It’s kind of micro level of value ladders and how they kind of work together. So let’s watch that clip right now, I hope you guys enjoy it. We’ll see you on the next episode:

Alright welcome back. In the last video we talked about what is a funnel. By the way if you haven’t had a chance to read the Dotcom Secrets book, I would recommend it because this what we go deep into. What is a funnel? The whole concept of whoever spends the most money to acquire a customer wins, is all talked about in here. We talk about funnel structures and it’s a really good book to help you understand the strategy behind funnels if you don’t have it yet. So click on the button down below, there’ll be a page where you can go and get the book, I think it’s $7.95 shipping and handling. But that’s what this is all about, to help you understand funnel structure better.

Now one of the core concepts inside of here that I want to share with you, because it’s such a key to understanding how funnels work is a concept called the value ladder. The way the value ladder works, if you look at this image right here, on the left hand access you have value. This is how much value you’re giving someone. As the arrow goes up, the higher the value is. On the bottom access it has price. And as you go to the right the price gets more and more expensive.

Now most business owners, the most ideal thing would be able to provide the most amount of value for somebody and get the most amount of money. For example, we have a coaching program that we charge a million dollars to create somebody’s funnel for them and that’s amazing. In a perfect world I could go to every single person and be like, “Hey, its a million dollars, I’ll create a funnel for you and it’s going to be awesome.” And the problem, if I walked up and saw you on the street for the first time and I was like, “Hey my name is Russell Brunson, I know I look like I’m 11 years old, but if you give me a million dollars, I will build a funnel for you.” You’re going to think I’m insane because I’ve provided zero value to you at this point.

Yet that’s what a lot of us as business owners are doing. We’re coming and we’re pitching our most expensive high thing and shooting for the fences but people have not received value from us, so they don’t want that. So if you look at how businesses work, they move this thing called a value ladder where initially when someone first comes into your world, they’re kind of testing the water and feeling things out. So what you want to do is try to provide value for them, right there, for free. And if they get value, if they dip their toy in the water and they’re like, “Wow, that was really cool. I had a good experience with so and so.” And they receive value, us as humans will naturally want more.

We’ll start ascending up and say, “That was a really good experience, what else do you have?” and we’ll move up the value ladder where you have a chance to offer them more value, but they’ll give you more money. And then if they receive value at that level, they’ll naturally want more and they’ll keep moving through this ascension until you either stop selling them something or until you offend them.

And that’s how business works, so you understanding the process of this value ladder, and you know this in the real world. If someone came to you the first day and said, “What do you do for a living?” You would tell them and try to explain some stuff and try to give them something like, “Oh cool, that’s awesome.” And you build some rapport and there’d be some value there and then the next thing you do is offer them something else.

It’s the same thing, if and when you met your spouse. The first time you met them, the first thing is you ask them on a date. And you provide value. If you have a good time on the date then you go on a second date and it keeps going on until you get married. There’s this logical progression. Yet, for some reason online we all forget that. All these common sense rules fall out of the world because we’re like, “They’re pixels and things and it’s traffic.” No, it’s people and you have to understand that.

So what happens is every single funnel is a value ladder. When somebody comes to my very first page I’m saying, “Hey, my name is Russell Brunson. I want you to give me your email address.” If I stop there, you receive no value. Why would I give you my email address? If you come to the page and I’m like, “Hey, my name is Russell. I wrote a really cool report called blah blah blah…” Whatever it is and say, “I’ll give you this report for free, just give me your email address and I’ll send it to you.” And you’re like, “Huh, okay.” You give me your email address, I send you this report., you get the report and get some value, you’re like, “That was really, really good. Russell’s a cool dude.”

Then on the next page in the funnel it’s like, “Hey, I sent you the report. Go check it out. I think you’re going to love it. But while you’re here I want to make a really special offer to you…” And try to provide value again, “Normally I sell this thing for blah, but I’m going to give you a special discount because you’re here right now.” Or whatever that thing might be. Because you’re a first time subscriber, normally the first thing I want to sell you is this thing. A lot of times in my business we do books for really cheap, or we do, if you’re an offline business maybe it’s a free exam, whatever it is. Something you’re providing value. If someone gets that, they buy the next thing.

And then the next page is like, “hey you just bought my book for $7.95, the book’s coming, you’re going to love it but some people like to learn in a classroom situation. I have a home study course that’s this.” Or whatever that thing might be. Same thing works in ecommerce. People always tell me, “That works in information but not in ecommerce.” But the same thing works in ecommerce. One of our number one Clickfunnels sellers right now, he built a huge funnel, it was one of the most successful funnels I have ever seen and it started with a flashlight. “Hey this is a tactical flashlight. Would you like to buy it?” and people bought the flashlight and they started thinking, how else can I provide value to this person? He started bringing them through a value ladder.

He said, “Look, you bought a flashlight for this price, how would you like a second one at 50% off?” and boom, like half the people said yes. He’s like, “Hey, now you got this flashlight do you want a kit? Like a carrying case we can put it in?” and people were like, “Oh yeah. Sure. Yes.” And boom, it took them to the next thing. And he kept thinking how else do I provide value? “Do you want rush shipping?” “Yes.” “Do you want this?” “Yes.”

So the value ladder is always thinking about that. So every time I’m working on a funnel, I’m thinking about this. Somebody, they see an ad, they see something, they click on something, they come to my page, the first page in my funnel and I’m thinking how do I provide this person value? What do I want in return? I want their email address or maybe their credit card, want them to register for a webinar, whatever the action is on that page, I’m thinking how do I provide value to this person?

And if I do it in a cool way and they connect and have a good experience, guess what? They’re going to want to buy again and again. And that’s how you build a business the right way.

So as we do more and more of these trainings, we’ll go more into value ladder because the value ladder is happening in a bunch of different places. It happens inside your funnel. Every page in your funnel is the next step of a mini value ladder. Also, we’ll talk about this in the next major training, after someone goes through your first funnel, usually we have a second funnel and that’s a bigger piece of the value, it’s kind of like the micro and the macro. These things are happening all the time, but for right now I just want you thinking about that.

Every single interaction you have with somebody, you need to provide them value. And then if they like that they will naturally ascend up and want more value and I can charge them more. If they like that I can provide them more and we keep taking them through this process. That’s how I can go right now and get people to pay me a million dollars to build a funnel for them, because I’ve provided value at all these levels.

I provide value through my books, through my software, through my training, through my events, now when it comes to them it’s like, “Yes, I trust Russell. I have rapport with him. He’s awesome. I believe that he will do what he’s going to do.” And now they’re willing to invest the big money.

For your business it’s the same thing. You gotta start thinking through that. I want you guys to understand that concept of the value ladder. Your homework for right now is map out a value ladder. This is not talking about all the products and services you might sell over the next ten years, I’m talking about just this initial funnel. The funnel you started building in the last walk through, you have all these different pages right, depending on which funnel you picked inside the cookbook.

I want you thinking, if someone lands on this page what’s the value I’m providing them in exchange for whatever is happening, their email address? If I go to the next page, what’s the value I’m providing in exchange for them to give me their credit card? What’s the value I’m providing to get them to buy the upsell? What’s the value to get them to register for the webinar? Whatever that thing is for your business, I want you thinking through that and writing out every single, look at all the pages in that funnel and think through what’s the value ladder I’m taking them through inside of this funnel?

And that is the key. In the next video we’re going to talk about now that you got the value, how do you structure the offers. The next video will be about the copy to sell the things on the pages. But right now I just want you conceptually thinking what do you have to offer people? Of all the products and services and ideas and the things that you have, what’s the logical progression you can take somebody through to give them more and more value, so they can build a relationship with you? So they can buy your products, buy your services and you can change their life. That is the goal.

So that is the assignment right now and the other thing is if you don’t have a copy of this book yet, I highly recommend the weblink down below to go get it. And again, this will teach you all about funnel structure, it’s going to teach you about value ladders, a whole bunch of other things. This will help you understand the strategy of funnels in a much deeper way. So get the book if you don’t have it yet as well. Thanks so much. See you on the next training.

View Details

On today’s special episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast, Russell shares a video for the new onboarding process in Clickfunnels. He talks about the four core things you should know and goes into detail on the first one, which is what a funnel is and does your business need funnels? Here are some awesome things you will hear in this episode:

What the four core concepts are that you will need to know to use Clickfunnels effectively.
What the difference between a website and a funnel are.
And hear about Russell’s first experience using a funnel and if it worked well for him.

Listen hear to find out more about the first core concept you need to know for the Funnel Hacker Onboarding process.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’ve got a really special episode, actually the next 4 episodes are kind of some special episodes I want to share with you guys, that I think you’re going to love. So let’s get into it.

Alright so, on this first episode, I want to give you some back story on what’s happening and why I made these four special episodes for you. Right now inside Clickfunnels we are working towards our big viral video launch on the 15th. With that we are trying to change a whole bunch of things, fix the onboarding process, make thinks simpler, simpler for people. Because if we get a huge influx of customers, especially people who don’t really know our marketing, or understand what funnels are or how they’re doing it, we have to really simplify the process.

So that’s what we’re doing, a simplification of this whole thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, our Clickfunnels support has gotten so much better. We shifted from it taking on average, a little less than an hour to get live response, now we’re at a 3 minute medium. So many cool things we’ve been doing trying to prepare for this thing, which is now like two weeks away for us. It’s kind of stressful, not going to lie.

One of the cool things we’re having is this really cool gaming, badging system so when somebody comes into Clickfunnels there’s like this gamified onboarding process. You’re doing things, you’re moving throughout it, it’s going to be really cool. So by the time some of you guys are listening to this, it’ll actually be live so you can go and see it.

But in there, a couple of things with Clickfunnels. With Clickfunnels we’re teaching how to use the software, but also people have to understand the marketing behind it or else they’re not going to be successful with the software, so it’s kind of interesting. So I tried, how do I teach all this funnel psychology and stuff in a very short, compressed period of time? So we did that with one of the little badges that people will win here inside of the onboarding process. So that’s kind of what’s going down.

So with that I basically created four different videos that are the core foundational things to get people onboarded to understand the marketing behind funnels very, very quickly, very rapidly. So that’s what these episodes are about. I’m actually going to just play those four video clips. Now in the video clips I’ll say, “Click on the button down below.” And “You’re going to get this thing over here.” And “This is your homework assignment.” Just know that those are from the onboarding process. If you actually want to get the homework assignments, if you want to see the things I’ve talked about, you do actually have to login to Clickfunnels and go through the onboarding to get those.

But I want you to understand because I think, it hopefully made sense. Maybe it makes no sense. But I tried to really simplify the process of four core things that are the four things to really understand. Number one is why do we have funnels? Why is that important? Number two is the value ladder. A lot of times you think about value ladder from a high level, like first I’m going to do a book, then I’m going to have an event, then we’re going to do one on one coaching. But I want to talk about value ladder from a micro standpoint, instead of the macro.

So it’s like landing pages, how do you give value on that. And then what’s the value on the sales page, and the upsell page. How do you do that? So we go into the value ladder in video number two. Number three then is how to create an offer which is something, it’s funny in my mind, I think this common sense to me, or intuitive or I’ve done it so long I don’t think about this. But it seems like as we’ve been doing the Two Comma Club Coaching that one of the biggest problems and questions people have that Steven deals with everyday is how do we create an offer. So I’ve never really talked about that.

I guess I assumed, I think I assumed that people understood and I found out now that they don’t. So I go deep into how to create an actual offer, which I think is cool. Hopefully it was good, maybe it’s lame. But hopefully it turned out good to help you understand, “oh that’s what I need to be doing. I need to be creating lots and lots of offers. That’s the key to this whole thing.”

And then the fourth step was understanding copywriting because copywriting is like the last layer, it’s how you actually present the offer. So we have why you need a funnel, inside the funnel what is the value you’re providing each step inside the funnel. Then from there what’s the offer you’ve created in each step inside the funnel to actually provide that value and then the last one is the copywriting, which is how you actually sell the offer, which provides the value, which is how you get someone through your funnel. That’s kind of cool.

So anyway, that’s what I’m going to share with you guys. So over the next four episodes we’re going to go over that. So this first one we’re talking about why do we need a funnel. Some of you guys have obviously been funnel hackers forever and you know this stuff. Some of you guys might be like, “What the dump is Russell talking about?” So that’s what we’re talking about now, why funnels. I’m going to show you guys that clip and that’ll be what’s happening here on this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey this is Russell again and today I’m excited. Because today we’re not just talking about Clickfunnels, which is one of the coolest things in the world but for you to really utilize Clickfunnels and really have success from it, I think it’s vitally important that you not only get good at using the software and using the tool, but you actually become a marketer. Clickfunnels was built by marketers like me, for marketers to be able to market their products and services.

Sometimes people come in and have a product, they have a service they want to sell and they throw it into Clickfunnels and build a funnel and then they’re like, “No one’s buying it, nobody’s coming to my thing, no one’s giving me their email address. Why not?” It’s because it’s not just something you put up there and hope that the best happens. It’s something where you have to understand the marketing behind it.

So what I want to do during this walk through is to help you understand some of the core, fundamental concepts of marketing that are essential for your success inside of funnels. Because if you understand these things when you’re building funnels, your funnels will become profitable, they’ll actually make money and you’ll have success with Clickfunnels. And that’s our number one goal for you. So that’s kind of the game plan.

So to kind of step back, because I know that a lot of people when they first get into Clickfunnels, they don’t even know what a funnel is. So depending on where you’re at, you may know exactly what it is, you have a hazy idea, or you have no idea at all. Most people obviously have heard of a website. When I got started in this business 15 years ago, websites were the thing. And It’s funny because I remember back then everybody would come and they’d say, “Do you think I need a website? Everyone’s talking about websites. Should I get one?” and now we kind of laugh about that because there’s no business, I don’t think, that doesn’t have a website. You have to have a website to exist.

So we just kind of assume it now and that’s kind of what funnels are today. Funnels are the future. They are the evolution of websites. It’s where everything is going. People always ask me, “Well do I need a funnel for my business?” And I always kind of chuckle because they don’t understand the strategy, when they do it’s like, “Oh wow, there’s no point to a website, the only thing I need is a funnel. It’s where everything’s going.”

So that’s what I wanted to really help you guys understand. I think the best way for you to really understand it, I’m going to tell you guys a story about how I kind of got it. And when you understand this, it should hopefully make more sense inside of your business.

So first core concept you have to understand, I learned this initially from one of my very first marketing mentors, his name is Dan Kennedy, and he said this, “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.” Now when I first heard that, it didn’t make perfect sense to me. I was like, “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would I want to spend a whole bunch of money?” And I remember hearing that and it didn’t really resonate with me. But bear with me as I share this story with you, it’s going to make, you’re going to find out, this is the key. The most important thing to understand in business, in marketing, in funnels. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.

So let me tell you my story. When I got started in this business back 15 years ago, I was in high school and I’d built my very first website selling potato guns. Now I’d created an information product, I setup a website, I’d done my best and back then the way everyone got trafficked to the websites was by using a website called Google. So I went to Google and started buying my very first Google ads. Now as a college student, I didn’t have a ton of money, so I was able to invest about $10 a day into Google ads. The good thing for me is I was selling this DVD for $37 and what happened is on average, for every $10 I’d spent, I’d sell about 1 DVD.

So you do the math on that, I was spending $10, making $37. So I had $27 profit that I was putting inside my pocket. What happened is a little while later, Google shifted their algorithms and kind of changed how things worked. And the price for every single click started going up and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. What happened is one day I woke up and the ads that I was running were exactly the same. I was getting the same amount of clicks, the same amount of people on my website. But now instead of spending $10 a day to get the same amount of traffic, I was spending $50 a day.

If you do the math on that, you spend $50 a day, make $37 a day, I was losing $13 every single day because of my website. Now I don’t know about you, but I really quickly, my wife and I realized that we couldn’t keep doing that and stay in business. After four or five days I had to turn off my website and it was over for me. And unfortunately for me and for so many entrepreneurs that’s where most entrepreneurial dreams die. You’re spending money and you can’t be profitable and it just falls apart.

I started learning this lesson. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. I couldn’t spend more than $37 a day, because that’s all I was making. I was capped at that. And that’s if I just wanted to break even. And so a few months later, I had a friend who was in a similar business to me and he called me up and said, “Hey Russell, I think I figured out this secret. I started adding upsells to all of my products.” And I was like, “What do you mean upselling?” he said, “Well, it’s kind of like McDonalds. You’ve been to McDonalds?” I said, “Yeah.” “You know when they you offer you a hamburger..” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Did you know for them to sell that hamburger they actually lose money? The money for the ads, the promotion, the marketing, they actually lose money. So they sell you a hamburger for $2 or $3 and it costs them $4 or $5 to get you there in the drive-in.”

“But they added a little sentence on there. They said, ‘Hey, would you like fries and a coke with that?” and the majority of people say, ‘Oh yeah. Throw that in there.” and they did that, the fries and coke is where they make their money. So they spend $3 or $4 to get someone there, they sell a hamburger for $2, they lose a dollar, but they ad fries and a coke and all the sudden, boom. They’re profitable.”

When he said that, the light bulb went off in my head and I said, “okay, well how do I do this?” and so he showed me his website and he had similar websites to me selling little information products. He said, “Look, what I did is I started having upsells, trying to sell the next thing that someone would need if they bought my first product. “ And I said, “How would work for my potato guns? I don’t know.” And he said, “Well, when somebody buys a potato gun DVD what’s the next thing that they need?” and I was like, “Well, the next thing is they’d have to buy the pipes and the glue and the BBQ igniter and all those pieces that you have to go the store to get.” And he said, “You should make the kit and just upsell the kit.”

So I was lucky, I found someone up in Northern Idaho who actually sold potato gun kits and we did a partnership and started adding those as upsells. So I transitioned up my little website into my very first funnel, I didn’t know that’s what it was called at the time, but it was a funnel. So someone would buy my DVD and then the next page we’d upsell them a potato gun kit.

Now if you look at the math how this all worked, I was still spending $50 a day on Google, that didn’t change. They didn’t lower their prices for me. They were still charging me the same amount. And I was still averaging about one sale a day of my DVD. So I was only making $37, so I was actually losing money. But then, what was cool is that one out of every three people who bought my DVD ended up buying my upsell and buying my kit.

You look at the math, my kit was $197, that means one out of three, I made an extra $65 dollars for every DVD I sold. That means I spent $50 a day and I was making $102 a day. So you do the math behind that, I was actually making $52 every single day. Now that is when the whole light bulb went off in my head. That’s the secret. If I can spend more money to acquire a customer, then I win. That’s when I realized that websites made me broke, but funnels actually made me money.

When I started my career, after I did that, I started getting excited, I started realizing wow, there’s so many ways to do funnels and I could put funnels into any business. And I started doing that and started going into really competitive markets where there’s tons of competition. I would look and see these people, all they had was a website selling a product and I would take that concept and start upsells and downsells and adding different things in there and start competing against these people. And what’s crazy is they could spend however many dollars a day in advertizing. I could spend two or three times as much money and still make more money and very quickly I started beating out all my competitors in every market we went into.

That’s when I realized, just like Dan Kennedy told me, that whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And that’s why funnels are so important. Especially if you’re struggling in your business right now. If you have a business and you’re break even or you’re losing some money, a funnel is the secret. That’s what gets you from breaking even to becoming profitable.

If you’re doing well but want to grow, a funnel is the secret. It’s how you start taking your business and scaling it. You make more money for every single person who comes into your funnel. The funnels are the secret to growing business and getting your message, your products, your services out into the world. That’s why we’re so excited about funnels.

So I wanted you guys to understand the concepts behind those things. Obviously there are lots of different types of funnels, as you learned in the earlier walk-through, inside the cookbook we had 22 different types. So some of the funnels are specifically for selling a product, like my potato gun DVD, where I sold a DVD and then I upsold a potato gun kit. Some funnels aren’t for that. Some funnels are for generating a lead, then you can send emails to them and sell them things in the future. Some are to generate applications so you can call them on the phone. Some are funnels to get people into your actual location.

It doesn’t really matter, there’s different funnels for different situations. But all a funnels is something where you’re taking somebody, and you’re taking them through this process to get the end result. What’s interesting is that I think a lot of people think that funnels are this mysterious thing, yet it’s happening every single day right now. In fact, if you run an offline business, I promise you, you already have a funnel. It may be a really bad one, but you have one. Think about this.

Let’s say you’re a chiropractor, or a dentist or something. Somebody sees an ad, they drive by and see your billboard, they see your place, they get a referral, something, and they come to your location, they walk up to your door, what’s they first thing they do? They open the door and walk in. Something’s happening, they’re coming into this funnel and they’re greeted by somebody. It could be your front desk receptionist or whoever. They’re saying something, they’re trying to get them to schedule an appointment or set up a call or whatever the thing might be and then after that happens they take them to the next step and the next step and every business has it. There’s some kind of funnel, some kind of process you’re taking people through all the time.

The online funnels are the same thing. People think its something different, but it’s not. If I’m driving an ad from Facebook, they’re going to come somewhere, to a page, and maybe on that page I’ll try to ask for their email address, or maybe I’m selling them a product, I’m taking them down a path, just like I would if I was selling somebody face to face.

So the coolest thing about funnels is it’s not something new or different that you’re not used to, it’s the same thing you’re used to just in an online format. When you start realizing that, you start realizing funnels are happening everywhere around you. For me, I started noticing them over and over and it gets me so excited to see it and now it’s coming back. How do I do this for my business online? So that’s kind of the game.

Now, I’m going to be walking through a lot more of these things through the next training videos down below, but I wanted you guys to understand, that’s what a funnel is. I want you to understand the one core concept. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. That’s how you grow a company, that’s how you beat your competitors, that’s how you sell more products, that’s how you get your ads more out there, that’s how all the things you wan t in business, all come off that concept. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And the way you’re able to spend more money profitably is by having a funnel.

So I hope at this point I’ve sold you on funnels. They are the key to everything in life, at least related to business. So I hope you understand that. With that said, your assignment right now is just to kind of think through that and understand that and understand the power and importance of funnels. Think about your existing business, think about the business you’re in right now. Let’s say you do have a regular website, how do you take all these things and how do you restructure them into an actual funnel? Where are you seeing funnels right now? If you have a regular business, do you see the funnel right now? What does that look like? What’s the process somebody’s coming through? And then what can you do to fix those things. And just start thinking about those things because it will get you excited about funnels. With that said, thanks so much and I’ll see you guys on the next training.

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Bonus Episode - Why Entrepreneurs Suck At Vacations

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How to recover quickly, when you keep on getting knocked down.

On this episode Russell talks about spending his day putting out giant fires, so he can get up and do it all again. He explains why it’s important to get back up whenever you get knocked down. Here are some of the awesome things happening in today’s episode:

Find out what kind of issues Russell had in one day and how he was able to get up and move forward.
Hear Russell’s backstory of how he learned to roll with the punches and continue to move forward even when facing obstacles that seem insurmountable.
And find out why you too should get back up and keep going whenever you get knocked down.

So listen here to hear Russell’s inspirational story of how he makes it through the kind of challenges that would keep a lesser man down.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to a late night Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. It is a beautiful night. Do you hear the crickets out there? It’s kind of creepy when you get to the darker spots. I hope you guys are doing awesome. I wanted to make you guys a video and run a podcast today about something I think really, really, really important. There we go, there’s some light for those who are watching the video version. If you’re on the podcast, it doesn’t matter. You can hear my voice.

Alright, I want to talk about something interesting that I realized today that I think is what keeps a lot of people back. It probably kept me back a lot when I was first getting started. One thing, I’m sorry I’m looking for, I’m at the pool house, I’m drinking some Keto OS because I love the stuff, so I have one every morning and one every night. It is my sweets and that is what I’m doing. That’s what I’m looking for, if you’re wondering what I’m doing and why I’m talking weird.

What I want to talk about today, for example, we had a lot of crap happen. Not little things either, huge things. Things that are devastating. Thing that in my past would have crippled me. I would have stopped and been like, “Ugh, ugh, ugh.” And it’s interesting because I see people now days who are in business and they’re moving forward, moving forward and trying to do stuff. And not just business, honestly, it’s all aspects of life. It’s their personal life, it’s their family life, their relationships, it bleeds in a lot of different things.

But for this purpose it’s business, where something really crappy happens. You have these plans and things you think are going to be happening and then you hit this wall and you’re like, you throw your hands up in the air, I don’t know what to do. So you just stop, right. You just give up.

Like I said, I think there was a time where I probably did more of that. And I think I’m lucky. When I grew up, I was a wrestler, as a lot of you guys know. One thing that happened with wrestling is and it’s probably a good thing, I was really bad at first. I’d get beat a lot. In fact, my brother Scott, who is going to be editing this video, when we first started wrestling, he’s my younger brother and he was beating me at first. As a big brother it was really embarrassing. Luckily, I loved wrestling and he didn’t so I was able to pass, but he would have been beating me my whole life, which would have been really embarrassing.

But because I was getting beat at first, I wasn’t like the best kid so I got beat a lot, and then I came back and I learned how to beat people. Probably the best example of this, my junior year in high school, my goal was to be state champ, I thought I was going to make it. What’s interesting is, as I was going for it, my first match my junior I wrestled this guy named Nick Fresquez from Hunter High School. Sorry there’s the ice coming out. Anyway, I told everyone I was going to be state champ. I was talking all the conference stuff, and my very first match wrestling Nick Fresquez, who is returning, he’d taken second place at State a year earlier, he’s returning back and he beat me. My very first match the whole year, I was devastated.

Luckily for me, my dad filmed the match, so what we did for the next four months, every single night we watched that match and then we’d practice in how to beat Nick Fresquez. And then I never saw him, I never wrestled him the rest of the year, but then at the end of the year, sure enough he was on the opposite side. He was ranked first in state and I was ranked second and we came against each other in the finals, I wrestled him. In the finals I beat him because I knew his moves. I practiced them every day for four months. In fact, I actually beat him, I think I told you guys this story before. But I beat him with the same move he had beat me with, which is kind of fun.

So I was used to getting beat up and then coming back and learning how to win. Getting beat up, come back and win. So that has helped me through my life. I think in business it’s the same thing. I would start and get hit with something, sometimes it’s like hitting a road block. How many of you guys have felt that? Or like hitting a wall and you’re just stuck and you’re like, I don’t know how to overcome this. This is an insurmountable object and I don’t know how to overcome this. And we hit those things.

So that happens all the time, like I said, in business. And what’s interesting is most people don’t get past those. They hit the wall and then they freeze up and stop and then they go watch the TV or quit, whatever those things are. It’s interesting because I see that a lot with our entrepreneurs, who a little road block or hiccup will come and then they just stop. And it’s like, don’t stop, keep going. Keep going.

But I think what happens, is the more you do it, the more your capacity increases. Your ability to handle those things and take them and plow through them and keep moving forward on them, you know what I mean?

So today we had so many things. We were supposed to watch this viral thing, if you go to….who knows if it’s still live when you watch this, but cfgoesviral.com was this really cool thing. What I wanted to do, I wanted to make where somebody, they opt in to this thing and then they get a referral link and they refer other people, and they get a dollar for everyone they sign up. And it was going to make this huge viral thing that would grow really, really fast. So we spent the last 2 weeks getting all the things put together, creating the video and sales page, the structure and the flow and the funnel. Everything was working, we tested it, and I wanted to build it inside of Clickfunnels, but we couldn’t because it’s this feature we don’t have right now and Todd’s like, “We could build it in the future, but we don’t have time to do it, because all this crazy stuff is happening for the launch.

So we didn’t, and there was this third party service we decided to use. So we used this third party service, we start trying to test it and all these things aren’t working. We got it working so it pretty much worked and we did the launch and sent emails out and we started a Facebook Live. It was all exciting and instantly all these people started coming and then guess what happened? Boom, the whole thing crashed within minutes.

We called the guys up, the service and we’re like, “Dude, our sites are down.” And they’re like, “Uh, we’ll call you back.” Okay, that’s not good. And the whole thing is down 15 – 20 minutes it’s down. And finally we see, everything goes offline, they reset their servers, it comes back up and it’s working, but we had to pause emails and everything at the time, so he comes back like 15 minutes later and he’s like, “It’s been 15 minutes, nothing bad has happened. You’re good to go.” We’re like, “Dude it’s because we stopped everything. We stopped the ads, we stopped everything. If you look at this…” I think we had 5% of our emails sent out and we just crushed their servers and it was just done. And we’re like, “Dude, you don’t understand. We’re trying to 100 thousand opt in’s in 7 days. To get that, there’s probably going to be a million to a million and a half, maybe two million people that are going to come through your links. Can you handle that?” and they’re like, “No, we can’t handle that.”

We’re like, “We told you numbers ahead of time.” And they’re like, “Well people always tell us numbers but no one ever hits them. We didn’t believe that was going to happen.” I’m like, “We just launched this viral contest. People are signed up, they’re sharing links. We can’t stop this now.” But the service wasn’t working. And it’s just like, most people, and me 5 or 10 years ago would have been like, “We’re screwed. What are we going to do?” But it was like, “Okay, we gotta keep moving forward. What are we going to do? What do we gotta fix?”

So I messaged Todd and Todd’s like, “Alright, I’m pulling an all nighter.” So he went and Jamie Smith came in and they spent the whole next 4 or 5 hours coding this whole thing out and rebuilt from the ground up the entire company software that we did and then built it into Clickfunnels. The testing is all done and they’re going to roll it all out first thing in the morning and then we’re going to relaunch the viral campaign right afterwards and hopefully get the same impact. But that could have been devastating.

That was one thing. And it was like 4 or 5 things like that just today that happened. Insane. The bigger a company gets, the more fires there are. I’m like, there are like 4 huge fires….no 5. 5 huge fires that I put out today. That was one of 5 huge fires.

One of them was some yahoo causing fistfights and threatening to kill people in our Facebook group and it happens to be a friend. He comes in and then we block and he starts threatening me and all sorts of stuff. That’s happening and then the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. All these fires are happening at the same time. I can’t stop because we still have this launch happening.

I spent probably 4 hours today working on the new sales letter for when the viral video goes live, which is so cool. I can’t wait for you guys to see it, I’m so excited. And then on top of that, I gotta record like 40 videos tomorrow, so I was writing the scripts for those and mapping out the sequence and timeline. Plus we’re working on the event funnel for Funnel Hacking Live. So I had to go through and finish another round of edits for the schedule. Then message all the potential speakers, invite them to speak, get the flow done. And then the viral video party, we had to shift the whole timeline, so we’re calling Boise State and trying to shift…..

It was all these fires, fire after fire. Any one of those should have crippled us, or me, or our entire team. They should have stopped, but we didn’t. We kept going forward. I don’t know why I’m sharing this, other than I think most people stop way too fast. And I don’t know if it’s just from doing it so many times and so often.

It’s funny, I remember somebody told me once… I think Dan Kennedy told me, “Once every quarter an entrepreneur will face a crisis that will either make or break his company.” I’m like, “Once a quarter? Dude, we’re getting that 4 times a day. 4 quarters of the day and consistently.” And the bigger we get, the more those things are. The one nice thing is that typically, you don’t have the company blow up overnight. So I’m lucky that I had 10 years of cutting my teeth and trying this thing and bankrupting two companies and going up and down and all sorts of failures, so that when I had the big success my capacity has increased and I’m handling things pretty well.

I screw up a lot. Just so you guys know. There are public screw ups, where a whole affiliate system that we built out crashes in the middle of the launch. Anyway, there’s just things that happen but most people just stop too fast. It’s kind of like lifting weights. The only way to keep moving through those things, because some of you guys hit those things and you stop and I know your….hopefully one or two of you guys hearing this are saying, “That’s me, I hit and obstacle and I freeze.”

So what I want you to understand, it’s like lifting weights. You’re pushing and pushing and you can’t do anymore and it freezes and it can’t keep going. That’s good, it’s tearing your muscles and they repair and you gotta go back again, you gotta go back again, you gotta go back again. And if you keep doing that, your capacity will increase and you’ll get better and better until someday you will have so many problems like me that you’ll have them four or five times in a day and you’ll just shrug it off and it’ll be fine.

That’s just, I don’t know the exact process to doing it, it’s just doing it. It’s just like when the thing hits you and you’re like, “Gah, that sucks. Alright let’s go.” Boom. If you’re in a fight and someone punches you in the face, you’re like, “Oh, that hurt so bad but I’m in the middle of the fight. Let’s go.” And you just go right back in. That’s the kind of attitude you’ve got to have when the thing punches you in the face or it knocks you down or whatever. Because most of those things, it’s like you’re this far away from success.

In fact, on the new sales letter for the Clickfunnels page, you’ll see it. Some of you guys know the viral video is about a Gold miner and all this stuff. So there’s an image we have and it’s a drawing and it says “The miner who quit too early”. And it shows this guy pick axing and he’s digging into this huge mountain and he turned around and he’s walking away and then you look at the side picture, a side cut of the mountain and you see he’s an inch away from all this gold.

And sometimes that’s how it is. We get punched in the face and we knock back and we’re like, “dang, I don’t want to do that.” and you just stop. And it’s like, ugh. All you gotta do is step back up and get back in that fight one more time and then you’re there. You’re so close to it. That’s what most people don’t get to. Because it’s the closer you get, the more resistance there will be to the thing you want. As you’re coming closer and closer and resistance is coming, is your ability to get back up and keep going.

There’s a song in high school in the 90’s that we used to play, in fact I played it today after getting hit in the head like 5 times. I was like, “Hey guys, I gotta theme song to keep us going right now.” And it was that song, “I get knocked down, I get up again.” That’s it. You get knocked down and you gotta get back up again as fast as you can. Because the more resistance you’re getting, the closer you are to where you’re trying to get to. Just know that.

Know that whatever you desire right now, the closer and closer you get to that, the more resistance. So you have to increase your capacity to handle those attacks, otherwise you will crumble underneath it and you’ll never get to your goal. But also know that the harder those punches are, the more frustrating all those kind of things, it means you’re close. The closer you get, the harder it’s going to be and then all the sudden, boom. You’re going to be there.

But you gotta be willing to get knocked down and get back up again and take that next step. Take the leap of faith, take that step into the dark. Whatever that analogy is that you need, that’s what you gotta do. And when you do that, that’s where it’s at. I think most of us, I may be wrong, I think I’m right though. I think most of us, the times that we fail, if we fail and don’t get what we want, we’re probably one or two knockouts away from success. It’s just getting back up, putting the gloves back on and going back into the ring one more time. That’s it. Maybe get hit again, knocked down again and you’re like, “one more step, one more.”

It’s there, you gotta taste it, you gotta feel it. That’s enough now. That’s like 40 ananlogies. Hopefully one of those connected with you guys. I got sports analogies, I got everything in there. Alright, well I’m heading in. I’m going to drink my Keto’s, I’m going to go to bed. I got a big day tomorrow. I gotta film like 40 videos. They’re not as fun like this one. Alright, there you go guys. Appreciate you all, have a nice night and we’ll see you soon. Bye.

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Behind the scenes call with Myron Golden and Russell Brunson.

On this episode you will hear Myron Golden talk about the reason’s people make a lot of money versus a little money. He goes through the four levels of value for creating income and explains each level. Here are some of the insightful things in this episode:

What each level of value is and what resource is used.
Why each level of value is where it is, even though it may not seem fair.
And why there are actually two resources in the highest level of value.

So listen here to find out what the four levels of value are and how much money each level is worth.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a very special impromptu Marketing Secrets podcast. I just got off of an inner circle call and it was so awesome I wanted to share it with you.

So I’m on an inner circle call, and the inner circle are my 25k members and there’s 100 of them and we have a group closed at 100 people. Once a month I do consult calls with all of them and one of them today was with Myron Golden, who is one of the coolest people in the world. And in the middle of this thing he dropped, I don’t know 10-12 minutes of the coolest thing about how income and the different levels of income, it was so good I wanted to share.

After he ripped on it for like 15 minutes I was like, “Can I put that on the podcast?” and he was like, “Sure man.” So I’m doing this really quick before I jump on the next call. I’m going to plug this clip in here. This will help you understand the levels of income and if you’re stuck where you need to shift and what those changes are for you to get to where you want to be from an income and finance standpoint. It’s awesome. So listen right now and I hope you enjoy this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Myron: There’s a reason people who make a lot of money, make a lot of money. There’s a reason people who make a little money, make a little money and it’s because income is the result of value created and offered in the marketplace. So value is what creates income and there are four levels of value and if you’re operating on one of the lower levels, you can only make so much money. I will just tell what the four levels of value are so you can just kind of wrap around that.

There are four levels but there are five resources. The top level of value, you have two resources you can use. So every level has one resource, the top level has two resources. The lowest level of value is implementation. That’s the lowest level of value. That is the people who do the thing. So if you do the thing, you’re the person who does the thing, you make the least amount of money. I basically tell people in the presentation if you’re an implementer, I know how much money you make. You make somewhere between minimum wage and $80,000 a year. You make minimum wage if you’re working as housekeeping staff at a hotel, or McDonalds. You make $80,000 a year if you’re like a mechanic that works on Rolls Royce or Bentley’s or something. That’s your income window.

And then the next level of value, and by the way, the resource you use at that level is your muscles. You use your muscles to make money. By the way, I shouldn’t show that on camera, but it’s here to protect, not to harm you. Anyway, pardon my corny, I’m a corny dude. What can I say? So the resource you use, your muscle to make money. The whole premise of the concept is that money is spiritual in nature, it is not materialistic in nature. So if you’re using a physical resource, like your muscles to make money, then your income is going to be limited. If you want to make more money then you have to operate at a higher spiritual level. Does that make sense so far?

The next level of value, which is the second to the lowest…

Russell: The two resources there were muscle and what was the other resource?

Myron: There’s only one resource at that level, that’s your muscle. The top level has multiple resources, the bottom levels only have one. Does that make sense? So the lowest level is implementation. The second to the lowest level is called unification. That is you use, your resource is your management skills. You use your management skills to make money. You don’t do the thing, but you manage the people who do the thing. So you make more money than the people who do the thing, but you still have a limited income. You’re going to make somewhere on the low end, between $40,000 a year, on the high end a quarter of a million. $40,000 if you’re a manager at Taco Bell, high end, quarter of a million, you’re a middle manager, vice president or something at Lock Heed Martin.

That’s your income window. If you want to make more money than that, like working harder in the same level doesn’t make you more money. So the next level is called communication. It’s the second to the highest level of value. Communicators are some of the highest paid people in the world. I’m not talking about people who communicate a message from their head to somebody else’s head, but people who communicate a message from their heart to somebody else’s heart. They can make, they use their words to make people feel something. You know exactly what that looks like because you do it all the time.

So you’re communicating a message. When you use your mouth to make money, on the low end you’re going to make $100 grand, on the high end you might make 100 million. Low end, 100 grand you sell cars. You make $100,000 a year. High end, 100 million, You’re an actor. You’re an A-list actor, you might make a $100 million dollars a year. You’re Robert Downy Jr. You’re a Denzel Washington. You’re an A-list actor, you’re a singer. You’re an A-list singer, you produce albums. You’re a Jay-z, Usher, Beyonce. You are communicating. You’re either an author, a speaker, an actor, a songwriter, a playwrite, or a sales person.

You launch this business called Clickfunnels even though you don’t know how to program, but you do know how to communicate the message. #justsayin. So communication is the second highest level of value and people who get really good at communicating can make a lot of money. People who resist communicating, and if I quote a friend of mine who lives out in Boise, Idaho, they just hate money.

So communication is the second highest level of value and you use your mouth to make money. That’s the resource, you use your mouth. And it almost doesn’t even seem fair, because fair is not a real concept. It doesn’t seem fair that people who talk make more money than people who move things, who have a hammer and nails, or dig holes. But they do.

I have these guys come out here and look at my roof today and the guy told me he’s working for this roofing company for 40 something years and his skin was all leathery and he had sores on his hand. I was like, oh my goodness. It’s so painful. He uses his muscle to make money and he’d been doing it for 40 years. I just thought about that just now. Sometimes people will be physically diligent so they can maintain a state of mental laziness. They won’t work hard at learning a new thing, but they’ll work hard at doing what’s already not working. That’s the kind of progression I’m taking people through.

And the highest level of value, are you ready? Drum roll please. Highest level of value is imagination. You use your mind to make money. That’s one of the resources, you use your mind. The other resource with your imagination to make money, is money. So those are the two resources you use your mind to make money with. Are there people who make money trading stocks and options and commodities and all that stuff? Are there people who do that? Absolutely.

Are there people who lose money doing the same thing? What’s the difference? The difference is how they use their mind. So your mind is your greatest resource for creating wealth. But most people, we’ve been programmed our whole life not to think. Most people don’t think. They think they think. They just think they think, but what they really do is they’re really regurgitating pre-programmed responses that were programmed to them while they were plugged into the matrix and they think they’re having a thought.

So Mind Over Money Mastery is a program where I teach you how to use the three highest level resources and the two highest levels of value and teach you how to use your mouth, mouth mastery. I teach you mind mastery and I teach you money mastery. That’s why it’s called Mind Over Money Mastery. Thank you.

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It's amazing that marketers don't discuss this simple and lucrative funnel fix more often...

On this episode of Marketing Secrets, we have the last bit of knowledge Russell wants to share from the affiliate mastermind. This time it is a tip from Trevor Chapman. Here are some of the super informative things you will hear in today’s episode:

Why knowing that 68% of people leave a website before it’s finished loading is significant.
How you can increase conversion just by making your page load faster.
And how Clickfunnels can help you decrease your page loading times.

So listen here to find out how making your page load faster could significantly improve your conversion rates.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the last of the secrets I want to share with you from the affiliate mastermind. This one has to do with page load times.

Okay, so I hope you have enjoyed some of the recaps we’ve shared this week. There’s one more cool thing I wanted to share with you. I’m not going to actually show you the video clip of it. But I do want to explain the concept because I think it’s pretty valid and I think it’s interesting and it’s something I’m going to be testing and it’s worth it for all you guys as well.

So this actually came from Trevor Chapman, and Trevor is one of my inner circle members who was there. It’s interesting, he was talking about doing all sorts of stuff with his funnels trying to figure things out and he ended up starting to put Google analytics on stuff to look deeper at everything. And as he was looking at analytics he was trying to figure it out and he couldn’t find someone, so he’s like, “I gotta dig deep in this and try to figure some stuff out.”

And a couple of things he found that were interesting and I think it’s worth listening to. So number one, he said that basically 68% of visitors, I don’t know if it was his page or if it was an industry stat from Google analytics, but 68% of people leave the page before it finishes loading. So they see your ad, they click on it, come over to the page, the page starts loading and 68% of them leave before the page finishes loading, which is interesting.

So he started going back in and started saying, “My page is loading too slow. I need to increase my page load speed. If I’m losing 68% of people before the page even loads, that’s 2/3rds of my traffic or whatever the fraction is on that, never even see my ad.” So he started doing stuff to lower things. Lowering the image size, lowering page size, page structure, a bunch of stuff like that and increasing how fast the page loaded. And he got his, I can’t remember how much he decreased the load time, but from 25-30 seconds down to 10 seconds, down to 5 seconds. And as he did that he 2-3x’d his income. Not by changing the page or ad or anything, just by reducing, increasing the page load time, which was super fascinating.

In fact, he kind of mocked, he teased me because the clickfunnels.com homepage right now, I don’t think I ever optimized those images, but it takes almost 30 full seconds to load the entire page, and he’s like I bet you 68% of people never see that thing. I’m like, “That sucks.” So that was kind of interesting.

Then he made another observation that for me was super fascinating. He talked about how people like me say ugly pages convert better, or your page….a webinar registration page without a video on it increase conversation rates and all sorts of stuff. He’s like, “I always thought it was because ugly pages convert better. No, the problem is a lot of times pretty pages take way longer to load.” You’ve got beautiful background images and a video file and all that kind of stuff just takes longer to load. That’s why people are leaving.

Where with the ugly ones, it’s just html code, there’s text and some stuff, they load faster and therefore instead of 68% of people leaving, it maybe drops down to 23%. You’re getting twice as much traffic just by increasing the load speed time. I thought that was fascinating and interesting. So I’m going to be doing some more testing, but I wanted to share with you guys, with everyone as your doing it, because I don’t know 100%, I take everything with a grain of salt, but I do think he’s onto something. I do think the page load time is interesting.

I do know on the Clickfunnels side, this is something that should be comforting to you guys, Todd spends time every single month trying to decrease page load speed on our side, doing stuff to optimize the pages, get the code out faster, all those kind of things so that page load is happening faster. In fact, I’ve seen over the last probably year, I’ve seen him shave across network wide, tens of millions of pages that people view every single day on ours, shaving time off by multiple seconds.

So we’re always optimizing on our side. But you guys as you’re building pages in Clickfunnels, just know that. Know that, man if I have a background image, how big is that file? If it’s 3 megs and I got 3 of those things, that’s 9 megs just in background images. That’s not good, especially when you’re pulling it on your phone or mobile. It gets really, really bad. In fact, we just created a new tool inside Funnel University, for those of you who are Funnel U members, it should be there by the time you’re here. But it’s an image re-sizer. I had Dorel on my team build a little software app where basically you take a background image, throw it in this thing and what it’ll do is take an image that’s like 3 or 4 megs, you’ll click a button and it’ll pop the image back out, it looks exactly the same but it decreases the image size from 3 or 4 megs to like 300 megabytes or whatever, 1/10th the size.

So I’m going back to all my old images, my e-cover image, my picture image, any image I upload in Clickfunnels, I have on a page, I’m putting back through that thing and shrinking the size of it to increase page load time. Just know, those are things you should be looking at because, man, if you can increase your conversion by 10%, 20% 30% just by images loading faster, that’s a lot of money without having to write better copy or any of those kinds of things. Just page load time.

So Trevor Chapman, thanks for bringing that top of mind to me. And hopefully everyone who’s listening on the podcast, it’s something definitely worth doing. And it’s something you should all look at.

With that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of Marketing Secrets podcast. If you loved this episode, a couple of things. Number one, please go and share with those who you love. Tell them to go subscribe and listen. Number two, please read a comment. I do read the comments over at itunes.com, leave a comment and let me know. Number three, the best thing you can do to increase us, right now, last I checked we’re number 5 in the business category, if we want to be number one, it’s all about listen time. The more you listen the higher we get ranked.

So go and binge listen. Go back to episode number one, click play and let’s catch up on the last 5 years together. Basically since we started launching Clickfunnels is about the time I launched this podcast and you get to hear the ups and downs, behind the scenes. Everything we did to go from zero to over 100 million dollars in sales and it’s all free here on the podcast. You just gotta go binge listen at the very beginning. So come back to episode one, let’s have some fun and I hope you enjoy the podcast. I appreciate you guys being on here and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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Your supporters might be secretly mad at you if you're neglecting to do this simple thing.

On this episode Russell talks about validation and why it’s important to validate people when they have done a great job. You’ll also hear from Julie Stoian at the mastermind event talking about how validation motivated her into working harder. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in today’s episode:

How Julie helped Russell realize that he needs to be better about validating people when they do things well.
Why Russell and Dave validating Julie motivated her to keep going and to work harder in the affiliate contest.
And why validation is important in all aspects of life, not just business.

Listen here for that and more on this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. This one, we’re staying in the affiliate event. I’ve got so many more cool things to share with you guys. I want to talk about a concept that was brought to my attention again called validation.

Alright so at this affiliate mastermind group we had again, our top 20 affiliates were there. And one of the people who came was an unlikely person on our leader board, I say unlikely because I didn’t know much about her prior to this, but now that I know her, it’s very likely. There’s a reason why she’s successful and I hope she knows that if she’s listening to this. But it’s Julie and if you guys watched the affiliate contest you saw it, she did awesome throughout the contest and she came in and ended up being on the top ten leader board, ended up being number 4 I believe in this contest.

She has become the first Clickfunnels affiliate to win a car, Julie Stoian and a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. What’s interesting is she joined this contest, I didn’t know these things, it was in the middle of her moving, she was in the middle of her own product launch, a bunch of stuff and she started going and she started trying to be part of this launch and help support us. Throughout the launch, first off I guess and I didn’t know this, a bunch of people were doing Facebook Live’s with me and she wanted to do a Facebook Live and I guess she reached out to Dave and asked, and Dave was like, “We can’t, Russell’s got 30 a day and we just can’t do it.”

And rightfully so, she was kind of upset about that. A little while later, other things happened and she kind of blew up and it was funny, it was the first time she’d really been brought to my attention. I was watching her videos and I was just like, man, she’s killing herself trying to help support us and I was so grateful for that. And she was upset, which always adds a little layer of whatever. I saw her video and I was just like, at first I was kind of hurt, oh man. Then I started comments and the more I started reading I was like, she said something that she kind of dropped in a comment, “He won’t even let me do an interview with him.”

I was like, “She just wanted to do an interview?” So I just posted, “Do you just want to do an interview. We can do that.” And she wrote back, “Yes, I’d love to.” I’m like, “Okay, if that’s it, let’s just do an interview, that’d be fine.” And we ended up doing the interview and she sold a bunch of books and she kept doing it and she ended up being number 4.

And she came to this event and she was talking about the top 10 or 15 things she’d learned through this affiliate contest, which were really, really cool. I’m not going to share all of them, because obviously a lot of the stuff that was shared at the event is private for those who were there. But one of the things that was interesting is she talked about is just validation. How me and Dave Woodward on our team, how us validating her, is what got her to keep moving forward. And I’m going to show that clip really quick so you guys can kind of just hear her say in her own words why that was so important, because it’s interesting and I want you guys to hear that. And then when we come I wanted to kind of talk about that because it’s important to so many aspects of our lives. So let’s watch that clip right now.

Julie: At one point in the contest, I was angry. I was really angry because I had asked for an interview and I didn’t get one, and then I saw other people getting one that were further down the list than me and I was just, I was mad and I felt like I was missing out and my feelings were hurt, but I was angry. So I posted on Facebook that I was mad about the $20 bid, and I also didn’t understand the context of the whole Dream 100 because I’d never gotten any of the other packages because I wasn’t part of Russell’s Dream 100.

So I felt like I was in this ridiculous game where the rules were changing and I wanted their attention and I wasn’t getting it. Well Dave and Russell both validated me and from that moment on I went from “I don’t know if I want to do this. Maybe I’m going to quit.” To “I’m yours forever.” The validation that happened at that moment of being able to reach out and say, “I see you. I see what you’re doing, I’m appreciative. Do you want an interview?” I had all kinds of motivation I never had before.

So in my own business, when I see my customers or my clients floundering but they’re really trying, and I’m not talking about the trolls and the thugs and the people who are just the complainers, but the people who are really trying and they’re just drowning. That one seed of “hey, I hear you.” Can change everything and that’s what it did for me. Because I was ready to quit and then Russell and Dave reached out and I was like, I’m not quitting. It completely changed it for me when you guys reached out. I was done. So in business that matters to me, and I think that’s how I’ve created customers for life in my own business. And why I got as far as I did.

Russell: It’s interesting huh, how us validating her got her to go and do these things and to do stuff. I started thinking back about my life, in fact Brandon Fisher who’s one of our main video guys, he talked about this too as well. When I validate, or when someone validates his work or whatever it might be, how powerful that is. And a lot of time, and I forget this and I wish I was better at it. But a lot of times your employees or your spouse or your kids, a lot of times they’re doing stuff because they love you and appreciate you and want you to be happy and I think sometimes, especially in the business world we get caught up in, “What do they want? They want a raise.” And we think about that because it’s the monetary side.

But a lot of times it’s, a lot of people that’s important obviously, but what’s more important sometimes is validation, saying “Thank you.” Saying, “You did a great job.” And I’m not perfect at that. I struggle with that. I wish I was better at that. But it kind of brought it back to my attention and I feel like the team we’ve built at Clickfunnels is second to none. And I feel like one of my roles that I need to become better at is validating people and just thanking them for what they do and telling them they did a good job and things like that.

So I’m making more of a conscious effort of that, to do it more often. Because it’s been interesting, as I’ve built this company with my team, even when I said the word “I” right there, I said “I’ve been building..” I felt like that’s not true. Is that weird. I was like that wasn’t true. So let me step back, as we’ve been building Clickfunnels, because it has not been me. It’s been a team, an army of the most amazing people on earth who have built that together.

A lot of times people think it’s me because I’m the bouncing monkey, “Oh get Clickfunnels.” But I’m just one little piece of this machine that’s been growing. A lot of times I get validation from the market, which makes me feel good. People like my comments, or they comment or share or whatever and I get the pat on the back for a job well done but for the rest of the team, they don’t necessarily get that. It’s just coming from me or coming from somebody else. So I think sometimes I forget that because I get the ego boost. I mean that’s why.

Honestly though, why do I share so many videos? Why do I do podcasts? Why do I do so much stuff? I like the validation. I like when I put something cool out there and people are like, “Dude, that was awesome.” I get that validation and I think too often I don’t give it to the people who are the rest of the army behind what we’re doing. And a lot of times my family, my kids, my wife….It was a good reminder for me, it was humbling. I hope it’s a good reminder for you too.

With that said, thanks again for listening to this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. If you loved this episode, if you love anything you’ve learned so far, please share this. Let other people know about it. Last I checked we were number 5 in the business category. We’ve been beating out some of the legends and we’ve been there for a long time now. And the way we get to number one is you guys sharing, telling other people about it, binge listening. In fact, the best thing to increase the ratings of the podcast for all of us is for you guys to binge listen.

So if you like this one, go back to episode number one and go through these things together this weekend and let’s binge listen together, it’ll be kind of fun. Appreciate you guys. We’ll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.

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Do you say "yes" to too many opportunities? If so, this episode is for you.

On today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, we hear another excerpt from the affiliate mastermind. We hear Garrett Pearson go over the rules he must follow in order to see a project through. Here are some of the awesome things to look for in this episode:

Each of Garrett’s rules to follow to take on a new project, and why.
And how the rules may vary in different businesses, but why it is important to figure out your own rules.

So listen here to find out what rules a project must fall into for Garrett to take it on, and why you should be doing something similar with your own business.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. This episode I’m going to be talking about some of the rules you need to setup before you say yes to any project.

So for today’s podcast, again this is another cool thing that we got from the affiliate mastermind group. One of my friends, his name is Garrett Pearson, he runs a bunch of cool companies, and we’re actually launching a company soon together, which I’m really excited for. I won’t ruin the surprise yet, but it is amazing and you’re going to go crazy. Should I tell you more? After you see the webinar you will want to create a software program inside of your company. That’s all I’m giving you.

With that said, Garrett came and showed the business we’re building together, kind of presented it to all the affiliates, because again, I think that every affiliate, I think every business should have a software component to it. I think you’re kind of crazy if you don’t. Of all the businesses I’ve been in, I’ve been supplements, info products, ecommerce, everything, by far my favorite business ever is software, which is probably why I love software, as you can tell.

But one thing that Garrett talked about, they have a list of rules that they, before they see a project, he’s like, “I have a new idea for a new software product every hour. If we didn’t have a filter…” and at first when he started his business, he didn’t. He’d just create everything. He said, “We created this filter.” So I asked him if he’d share that filter with everyone during the mastermind event. So I’m going to have him share that filter, I’m going to show you guys that clip right now.

His filter may be different than your filter, but listen to this because you need to create your own filter. And I struggle with it as well. So many opportunities come by and I’m like, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I gotta say yes.” And it’s like, no you have to create a filter otherwise it will consume your whole business and life. It’s something that I’m working on and so it was a good reminder for me. So I want you guys to hear Garrett’s filter, the thing he runs things through before he jumps in and says yes to a project. So let me show you that clip right now.

Garrett: We had to come up with a way to stop us from doing too much. Because you have to focus, like Russell said, you have to focus. So here’s how we stay grounded. We don’t do a software if it doesn’t pass all of these things, okay.

So is it sexy, does your product fill a need or want in a desirable, attractive way? That’s pretty obvious right? You’ve got to find something that people want. More importantly in the software world, is it sticky? So in the software world, if you want recurring billing, you want recurring revenue, you need somebody that’s going to pay you over and over again, month after month, or year after year. So is it sticky? Is it going to be difficult or painful for a client to stop using our software.

So Clickfunnels is a good example. I don’t know what Russell’s churn rate is, and that’s people that stop using it, but with the amount of users he has, that’s just part of doing business in the software world. But it’s super sticky, because if you’ve got ten funnels you’re not going to leave.

Russell: Even if you hate me.

Garrett: Exactly! You’re not going to leave, right? So our shopper approved software, it’s a rating and review software for ecommerce companies. They start using us, they get even 50 reviews, they’re going to stay with us forever and keep paying us and paying us. So is it sticky? That’s really, really important. For example, with Allison’s, it’s definitely sexy, it’s definitely sticky because you’re going to keep using it over and over again, hopefully. So people are going to keep paying her month after month.

Can you charge recurring billing? We don’t do anything unless we can charge recurring billing. So it’s very, very important because the recurring billing is where software, as we’ve already talked about today, why it’s the 9th wonder of the world. Can you sell it via call center? Now this is for us, these can be different for you guys. We love to sell our products in a call center. So for us, if we can’t sell it in a call center…for example, where something wouldn’t work for us, if it’s $47 a month. Because we can’t sell that in a call center because our guys won’t make enough money, our sales team won’t make enough money. So if we can’t sell it in a call center, we generally don’t do it.

Can you promote it to your existing customers target market? Now this is for us, because we already have software in certain niches right. So we try to build stuff that we can sell to our existing customers, or that market. Now this software funnel is an exception, but sometimes you gotta make exceptions, right.

Is it programming excessive? If it takes us more than 6 to 8 months to develop with one or two programmers, generally we won’t do it. Is it customer service friendly? It’s gotta be customer service friendly or it’s going to be a nightmare to work with over time. So those are the things that we go through and if it doesn’t pass those, we don’t do it.

Russell: Alright to recap what Garrett said. Is it sexy? Is it sticky? Can you charge recurrent? Can you sell it through a call center? Can you promote it to existing customers? Is it programming excessive and support friendly? For them those are the filters they need to have. You don’t have to have the same filters for you. Sometimes you don’t want a call center. Maybe that’s the opposite filter, like it cannot be sold in a call center, it’s gotta be sold online. But you gotta pick your rules. These are the rules of what I’m willing to do and not willing to do.

Otherwise, as I’ve found in my life, and I still struggle with it like I said. If you’re not careful, you’ll commit to too much stuff. If you suffer from over commitment, that’s the problem. I would definitely say that I fall in this trap. In fact, it’s been interesting, in the last two weeks, two people have been placed in my life. One I haven’t seen in 16 or 17 years, a spiritual leader who I have so much respect for, but I haven’t heard from him in 16 or 17 years, and I hear from him and a couple of weeks later he’s in my office, sitting there talking to me, and then he’s gone.

And then, just today it happened again. Again, someone I respect a ton. And both of them basically said, almost word for word, said the same thing. “Russell, you gotta slow down. You need to be in this for the long haul.” I think God is telling me something consistently and I’m hearing it loud and clear and now I’m trying to figure out for myself, I’ve got to create my filters, I’ve got to create these rules for myself because as you guys can probably see, I’m running faster now. We’re doing a lot of stuff, which is good, it’s fun, I love it. But at the same time, if I’m not careful I’m going to burn out. I need to be in the for the long haul for myself to keep me happy in the long term in my life, for my customers, for my partners, for our employees, for everyone.

So just a good reminder for me and hopefully for you as well. Thanks again for listening to the Marketing Secrets podcast, I hope you appreciate it, if you do, if you learn anything please share this with your friends. Please come into iTunes, please comment, let us know. We’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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The harder you try to get it, the more success escapes you.

On today’s episode we hear another clip of John Lee Dumas talking about a quote from Albert Einstein that taught him not to chase success. Here are some of the cool things you will hear on this episode:

Why being a person of value is more important than being a person of success.
How being a person of value will lead to success.
And what JLD’s 3 special ingredients for success are.

Listen hear to hear John Lee Dumas explain how being a person of value led to being a person of success.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’ve got another really cool thing to share with you from our recent affiliate mastermind.

Alright everybody, this is one that I thought was really powerful. This was also a really cool strategy shared by JLD, John Lee Dumas of EO on Fire and he talked about when he was growing up he wanted to be successful. So he was doing things to make him successful. He was going to school, getting jobs, trying to become successful and somewhere in this journey he said that he heard a quote from Albert Einstein and the quote, I’m probably going to mess this up. Let’s do this, I’m going to cut to the clip so you can hear him actually say it and tell the story, because he’ll say it more articulate than I can. So let’s listen to that clip right now and we’ll come right back.

JLD: So at 32 Years old I kind of had this realization when I read this quote by Albert Einstein, which was, “Try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value.” And I was like, I’ve been trying to become a person of success my whole life and it hasn’t really worked. So what is this value thing?

So I started really doing some research on what it meant to be a person of value and that’s when I started looking around my world saying what people are adding value into my life? And those people, really in 2012, were podcasters. I was like, these people are adding free value to my life and they’re amazing. Maybe this is something I can look at. So this is something that led me down the path of launching my own podcast so that I could then create free, valuable, and consistent content. That’s my 3 special ingredients for success. Because I deliver free, valuable and consistent content, I was able to grow an audience.

Russell: So I thought that was such a key because I know that for most of us, for me, I want to be successful and if we’re running towards success, a lot of times we don’t realize that that’s not what makes you successful. It’s figuring out how to provide value, how to be a person of value. That is the key. And when you do that you’ll get the success that you want.

There’s so many things in life that we have that problem where there’s a direct path to success, but instead of going and getting it, we go and do things on these huge loops to try to get the success we want. One of the funny ones, when I first started working with Tony Robbins, started learning all his 6 human needs and things like that, it was interesting because prior to that my wife and I had a conversation. I was out there trying to build this business, trying to do all these cool things and trying to impress her so that we would have more love and connection between me and her. And I was going on this huge route trying to get more love and connection.

I remember one day I came home and I was all excited about this stuff and my wife you could tell that she missed me and she was like, “I just wish you’d come home.” And I was like, “What? I’m doing all these things for us.” As sometimes we say. And as I thought more about it I was like, I’m doing these things for myself. I’m trying to feel more significant, more of all these kind of things so that I can impress her so that we can have love and connection. I’m going on this huge route to get love and connection where I could have just come home and gotten the same love and connection.

It’s just interesting sometimes as humans we go on this route. And I think this is one of the things I got out of the affiliate mastermind. It was just like, if you want to be a person of success, don’t pursue success, pursue being a person of value and the person the provides the most value to the audience, to the people, to become successful. If you understand that, the game changes. Hope that helps, hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. Thanks again for listening to Marketing Secrets. Please, if you like this episode or any of the episodes, share it, comment on it, love to hear it. I appreciate you guys listening and I’ll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.

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In my 15 years of doing business, I've never heard this critical business concept explained so perfectly.

On this episode of Marketing Secrets Russell lets you listen to how John Lee Dumas describes his ideal and perfect customer. Here are some cool things you will hear:

Why you need to be able to describe your ideal customer in detail in order to appeal to them.
Why it’s a good idea to make decisions based on what your ideal customer would like.
And why creating a few calls to action based on your customers needs will be beneficial.

So listen here to find out what John Lee Dumas’s perfect customer is like, and how you can nail yours down as well.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I’ll take you behind the scenes of our recent affiliate mastermind talking about building out your customer avatar.

Alright everyone, so this last week we did an affiliate event for my top 20 affiliates for the Expert Secrets book, which was really cool. We had them all fly out here to Boise, we hung out, shared ideas, talked and it was really, really cool. In fact, the next few episodes of the podcast, I’m actually going to do right here in my home office. I’m here right now and I’ve got my notebook with a whole bunch of cool stuff and there are a whole bunch of really good takeaways that I think were valuable enough to share with you.

We also happened to film the event, so I’m going to get Brandon on my team to grab some of those clips and plug them into here so you can actually see some of the footage and some of the ideas and concepts, I think are really, really important. I know the last few podcasts I’ve done have been some long ones. Some an hour long, 90 minutes, so I’m going to get back to a shorter form to share some of the really cool things.

So first I want to talk about JLD, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur On Fire, who is I think the number one Clickfunnels affiliate right now. He’s going to be the first affiliate in Clickfunnels to make a million dollars himself, that’s his goal and he’s killing it. He’s also probably one of the lowest maintenance, if not the lowest maintenance affiliates I’ve ever had and partners. He’s just an awesome dude, and I love him and love working with him and it’s awesome.

So he was at the event and what was cool was that we had him do some Q&A with the group and somebody asked him, “I’m building a podcast,” and the first thing JLD asked was “Who’s it for?” and they’re like, “It’s for this kind of person, this kind of person, and this kind of person.” He’s like, “There’s your problem, you need to be able to identify exactly who your person is.” And then he went into this state where he shared exactly who his dream customer, his dream client was. I’ve never in the history of me doing this business, which is now 14 or 15 years heard someone more perfectly explain their customer avatar than JLD did in that moment. And I’m so glad we got it on film. I’m going to play that clip for you right now so you can see exactly what he said.

And as you’re listening to this I want you thinking through that because that is how clear you have to be on exactly who your customer is, and that way you create your product, your podcast, whatever it is you’re doing, you match it to your customer and that is the secret. So let me show you that clip right now.

JLD: So who’s you’re perfect listener?

Audience member: Our perfect listener would be a business owner, or an entrepreneur, or a real estate investor.

JLD: So that’s really vague. Perfect listener should just be that one individual that you see as that perfect, ideal client. Because once you’ve made that step and that decision as a podcast host, everything changes. So for me, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted Entrepreneur On Fire to be I was overwhelmed because it was hard for me to find what the path that I wanted to take my listeners on.

When I really sat down and said okay, my listener, or my avatar is Jimmy. He’s 37 years old, he has a wife and two kids ages three to five. He drives by himself to work every single day, it’s a 25 minute commute to work. He gets to a cubical at a job he hates for 9 hours. He gets done with his job, drives home, it’s a 35 minute commute home. He gets stuck in a little bit of traffic. He gets home and hangs out with his kids, has dinner with his family, puts his kids to bed, hangs out with his wife and then he has a little Jimmy pity party at the end of every single night because he’s sitting on the couch saying ‘Why do I spend 90% of my waking hours doing things that I don’t enjoy doing? Commuting to a job I don’t like, being at a job I don’t like, commuting home and only 10% of my waking hours doing things that I love. Like spending time with my kids and my family.’

Jimmy is my avatar, he’s the person that, as he’s driving to work, should be listening to Entrepreneur On Fire so that when my guest is sharing their worst entrepreneurial moments he can understand that it’s okay to fail. That you can learn lessons from failure. And that when he’s driving home and my guest talks about their aha moment, he can talk about how you take an aha moment and turn it into success. And then instead of having that pity party at night by himself on a couch, he can listen to the lightning round where my guest is sharing their best advice they’ve ever had, their favorite book, their favorite resource, so he can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

So for me, whenever I come up to any question I have above the direction of my podcast, I go to my avatar and I say, “WWJD, what would Jimmy do?” And I know from that one answer that that’s the way I gotta go. So if you sit down and really say hey, this really is the one perfect listener of my podcast, then you’re going to know that person inside and out. You’re going to know where that person hangs out, what Facebook groups they’re in, what LinkedIn groups they’re in. How to advertize to them, what lead or ad is going to be appealing to them on Facebook, that’s going to get them to download it and be promoted to your show.

And again, this is you ideal, perfect client. You can probably picture right now, this person that whenever he sits down in front of you, you’re just like, “Dude, you’re like my favorite client.” And he’s like, “I know I’m your favorite client.” That’s the person that you want to be drawing in. So if you sit down and really just figure out who your perfect one ideal listener is, everything changes from that point forward and all the decisions you make are based off of that. So every piece of content you make for your podcast is speaking to that avatar, that one person. Every call to action you give, every intro, and every call to action, and every outro is for a specific purpose.

So for instance, in my podcast, Entrepreneur On Fire, you’ll hear me, I have seven rotating calls to action on my intro’s and outro’s. One’s going to say, “Hey this John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur On Fire where I interview the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 7 days a week. By the way if you’re struggling with a goal right now, you should check out the Freedom Journal, because I teach you how to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days, so visit thefreedomjournal.com” And that will be one call to action that will bring people down one specific funnel that will result in them purchasing my journal, the Freedom Journal, for $39.

And then I have the call to action in my outro that says, “Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the chat with Russell today. He rocked the mic as always. Oh, by the way, if you’re thinking about creating your own course, your own podcast, I have a free course called Free Podcast course, it’ll teach you how to create, grow and monetize your own podcast in 15 days.

So then they’ll go to that URL, they’ll sign up for the free podcasting course, which lead them to my free master class, which I do every two weeks live. And then the master class will lead to me pitching them Podcaster’s Paradise, which is what we have for our premium podcasting community. So every single call to action I have is for Jimmy to take him into one of my 7 or 8 functioning funnels that I have to result in some kind of revenue being generated at the end.

So I think the steps you can and should take is really nail your avatar, understand who that person is as an individual, and then start creating one, two, three calls to action that you’re using in your intros and your outros that are getting them into a beginning part of a funnel, that’s going to result in your ideal action, which might be a phone call. Which might be, whatever, you know, investigating their first dollar with your company. Whatever that result is, that’s the funnel you’re taking them in. Does that make sense?

I hope you guys loved that. As he was talking I was trying to take notes. I’m like, oh good we got a video. It’s pretty powerful and I want to make sure you guys all know your customer avatar that clear as well. If not, it’s time to do your homework, stop the podcast and go think through that. Because as soon as it becomes that tangible, where you know who they, everything else becomes easier. With that said, thanks you guys so much for listening and we’ll see you on next week’s episode of the Marketing Secret’s podcast.

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If you’re not as successful yet as you’d like to be… I know why. This episode I went off on a 96 minute rant that’ll get you back on track.

On today’s special road trip edition of the podcast Russell talks about some exciting events coming up, some personal development rules he follows, and why it’s okay for people to outgrow Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to look forward to in this episode:

The viral video by the Harmon Brothers and the kind of party that is planned for it.
Why Russell thinks studying, learning and geeking out on the marketing of your product is the key to success.
Why it’s okay to be greedy in the initial stages of your business.
How building and growing a business is similar to making, being pregnant with, and birthing a baby.
What the 3 steps toward personal development that Russell follows are.
Why you need to be willing to take risks.
What some Clickfunnels clients are doing that they shouldn’t and why Russell is a little pissed off about it.
And much, much more.

So listen here to hear this extra long, extra informative and extra exciting episode of Marketing Secrets.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a special edition, a road trip version, edition, whatever you want to call it of Marketing Secrets podcast. I feel like we’re going old school, for our long time friends and followers, this is like a Marketing In Your Car. But I’ve got a long drive ahead and I want to welcome you guys to the podcast.

Alright, alright everybody. I just started a super long road trip heading to Burley, Idaho. It is my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday. So we’re heading down to the big birthday party. Isn’t that crazy, 100 years old! It’s really, really fun. My wife and kids actually left a day and a half ago. I had to get some stuff done, so now I’m heading down for the big party.

So basically I have a two hour road trip and was heading out the door, super excited and I’m totally unprepared. I forgot my camera to record podcasts, I forgot my little ear buds, I forgot my sunglasses. Oh well, what can you do? I forgot my battery charger for my phone, oh well I’m still excited.

So I’m heading down and I’ve got some time to talk to you guys. So I wanted to share some cool things. First off, one thing we’re working on is, as you’ve probably heard, we’re about to launch our viral video with the Harmon Brothers. They’re the guys that did Squatty Potty and Poopourri and all the other awesome things. What’s funny, everyone asks me, “Oh I want to hire them too, their stuff is awesome. How much does it cost?” and I think people think the quote is going to be like 10 or 15 grand or something, but it’s actually half a million dollars to hire them to do a 3 minute video for you. It’s not cheap.

So we paid a lot of money to get this video created and then I was like man, most people do a video and then they launch it and it kind of just, you hope it goes well and sometimes it does, but I’m like, if we’re going to launch it, I want as much oompf behind it as humanly possible. So I was like, we need to do a launch party. So that was kind of the first thought, but how do we do a launch party? I’ve never done one before but it’s gotta be just kind of like a regular party. Well maybe we should get some cool speakers, some cool influencers and affiliates out here, so who would be cool to have? Oh Gary Vaynerchuk would be cool. He’s not speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, but he’d be a really cool fit for this event.

So we called him up, he said yes. We had to pay him about 100 grand to get him to come to Boise to speak. But we’re like where in Boise is actually cool enough to host an event like this? There’s not a lot of cool hotels. So the Boise State football stadium, the big Skybox there, is kind of cool and hold 3 or 400 people.

So we’re like, cool we’ll do this. We rent the Skybox, but who are we going to invite. We need to make this really, really cool. I think it was Alex Charfen told me this, it might not have been him, but I think it was. Basically said that entrepreneurs like to create events out of everything to make it memorable for them and for everybody else. So I was like, we need to make a big event.

So anyway, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can invite our affiliates, that’ll be kind of fun, we’ll invite a bunch of them. But who else can we invite that can share this video? We can invite people that aren’t necessarily our affiliates, just other influencers that if they share the video it would dramatically boost it. So okay, let’s do that.

So we set up this event, I was going to speak, Harmon Brothers were going to speak, Gary was going to speak, then we start reaching out to influencers and they’re like, “We don’t really care about people speaking. We want a party.” And we’re like, it’s going to be kind of a fun party. We’re all fun people. They’re like, “No we need a real party.” So we’re like, how do we throw a real party?

So we started just kind of brainstorming and what came out of the brainstorm was what if we rented out the actual football stadium and tried to play bubble soccer, that’d be kind of fun. What if instead of playing bubble soccer, what if we tried to play the biggest game of bubble soccer ever? What if we had the Guinness Book of World Records come and….

Anyway, that was kind of the initial crazy thought and then Dave was like, “I’m going to figure out how to make this work.” So Dave spent the next two weeks on the phone getting the Guinness Book of World Records, and then getting Boise State to let us come, and all the licensing fees and it’s been this insane project. So we got all that done. We don’t have any influencers who have kind of, we’re in this thing with a lot of money. We have no influencers actually coming. So then I was like, okay, I have to go old school. Practice what I preach.

So the last two days I’ve sat in this car and recorded almost 200 videos, personalized videos for all these influencers, which was a lot of work. We made a page, 200 pages for 200 different influencers and now Monday, we’re in the process of contacting all of them and inviting them to this huge party. Anyway, it’s been crazy and none of them may come, but hopefully they will. But regardless it’ll be a fun party. We’re going to set a world record, we’re going to launch a viral video and that’s one of the many things we’re doing.

We also have 12 events in the next 43 days happening in Boise. One of them just got done so it’s actually down to 11. Monday we have a design-a-thon where we’ve got 30 designers coming out and we’re busting out a whole bunch of new templates for the Marketplace that’s launching during the new onboarding, everything’s going live in Clickfunnels when the viral videos hits and about a billion other things. It’s crazy. The next 45 days will probably be the most stressful, crazy days of my life. But if we can pull it off, it’s going to be nuts.

I keep saying that, I did the same thing with the book launch. I think there’s something about me, I think something’s wrong, the wiring in my head where I always think that after this life will get normal again. But then I just keep stacking things on. I think part of it is just momentum, it’s hard to get momentum for a lot of people. But when you have momentum you don’t want to slow down, you want to keep riding the wave. So I feel like I’m 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame and I’m enjoying the ride and I don’t want to slow down, so I’m like, we just keep rolling stuff out.

We’re launching a new book, the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, this month. It’s crazy. If you guys could see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, I don’t think you’d actually believe it. Funnel Hacker TV, we started filming that because we wanted to show people, but that’s still just a glimpse, it doesn’t come close to everything that’s actually happening. It’s nuts.

Alright, so for you guys I wanted to share, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this last night as I was working super late. I was like, why am I here? It’s been two nights that I’ve been here until like 2:30 in the morning and I’m loving it. Outside of hanging out with my kids, there’s nothing else I would rather do than that. And I’m like, how do I get people to where they’re this passionate about what they do and their business and what they’re selling?

I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the number one trait I found between entrepreneurs who are successful and those who aren’t and the biggest trait is that the ones who are super successful, they’re the ones who are extremely passionate, not just about their product but about the marketing of their product. They start geeking out on the marketing. That’s the key. Those who obsess with the marketing are the ones who have the most success, which is why for me it’s been a big deal, that’s why I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book and the Expert Secrets book, and why I do the events. All the stuff I do is because my goal is to get you guys, I want to make marketing and sales fun. If this is something that you guys, if I could make this the entertainment. To study and learn and geek out on the marketing, then that’s been my mission on this earth.

Because when I was learning this stuff, it was exciting for me but honestly it was kind of boring. The people teaching and talking about marketing, yawn, they were boring and I had to wade through a lot of boring crap and now I’m trying to make it exciting. I’m trying to bring my raw passion to you guys and I hope I’m doing my job. I’m doing my best. Because if you get pumped up and fired up about the marketing of your thing, then that’s how you get the ability to make money, free yourself, and give you the ability to not just make the money but impact more people and serve more people and that’s the goal.

So I’m thinking, outside of me just everyday trying to get you guys pumped and excited and fired up about how much fun the marketing of your thing can be, I was thinking about this last night, how do I just take that part of my brain out and shove it into your brain so you’re fired up. I started thinking about it and I think the key for someone to be truly passionate about the marketing and the selling of their thing, they first have to be truly passionate about their thing.

Because you think about that, I talked a little bit about this in the Expert Secrets book, initially you don’t wake up, well I did, but I think most people don’t, maybe that was my gift of whatever. But most people don’t wake up excited, “I’m going to learn how to do marketing!” It’s not the thing that pumps people up. But there’s something else that happens, there’s something that you got excited about in your life. It could a book you read, it could be audio, could be video, could be just a weird thing, I don’t know. Whatever it is that your thing is. Everyone has their thing, your thing is something.

So your thing that got you pumped up, whatever that was, I want you to think about that because that’s the key that unlocks everything. First you get excited about that thing because it’s exciting to you. You go through this time of growth. You start studying it and you learn and geek out and start growing and growing and growing and growing and at first it’s honestly kind of a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s the dude from Wallstreet say? Greed is good. Initially it is, I think. Not long term, but short term greed is good. Greed is what gets you to unbalance your life in a way initially, not long term but initially. Initially you have unbalance your life to focus on a thing to have greatness come.

When I met my beautiful wife and I wanted to fall in love with her, for me to be successful in that I had to be greedy. I had to shift all my time and all the other stuff I was doing and other people and other things. I had to unbalance my life to focus everything on that relationship so that we could fall in love and get married. The same thing happened with business. The same thing happened with wrestling. When I started wrestling, I had to be greedy about that thing. I had to get so unbalanced in every other thing in my life and just focus on that thing, because that’s what it takes to be great at anything, right. That raw passion.

So first, the greed of that thing, of you desiring that thing is what initially starts. Some of you guys it was weight loss, some of you guys it was Biohacking, some of you guys it was finance, some of you guys it was history. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you geek out about. So the greed of the excitement that you feel initially for that thing is what makes it so you can completely unbalance your life and absorb and go into that thing. That’s the first key because to be an expert, to be able to share your message, all those things we talk about and to actually care about the marketing about your thing, you’ve got to be ridiculously passionate about the thing first. Otherwise you’re not going to wade into this territory, you’re going to go through all the pain of being an entrepreneur and getting that thing out into the world.

Because I know a lot of us paint this beautiful picture of entrepreneurship and it is eventually, but initially it’s not. Initially it sucks. Initially you have to go through so much. It’s like giving birth. My wife has given birth to 5 kids, 4 times, one time was twins. Giving birth is not pleasurable. The initial thought of it, that creates the baby. That’s pleasurable just like your business, the thought of it is exciting. You’re romantic about the thing you’re going to create. Sorry, my jeep is super loud when I go into overdrive.

Anyway, that’s pleasurable, we all enjoy that. I enjoyed what it took to get my wife pregnant, that’s awesome I enjoyed what it took to create the seed of Clickfunnels and the business, right. That part’s fun, and then after the romantic side happens, for pregnancy there’s nine months of pain for the woman. My wife, I watched her go through this 4 times. She gained weight, she felt horrible, she felt sick, she was throwing up. Business is the same way, after you go through the romantic part, now it’s painful. You have to work hard and you can’t sleep and you have to deprive yourself of friends and family and life and all the pleasures in life to birth this thing that you have. And most people give up during the birthing process, because it sucks.

With a baby you got no option, the baby’s coming whether you want it to or not, but the birthing of a business and to be an entrepreneur, it’s so painful most people don’t make it through it. They always say that 1 out of 100 businesses succeed, but the reality, 1 out of a million businesses never even get to fruition because the idea is planted, but the birthing of the thing never happens because it’s so painful.

So if you’re not obsessively, insanely passionate about your thing, I’ve got to break it to you, it’s going to be hard to birth it. Those hard times come and it sucks. So I think that not only do you have to become passionate about the market, because I’m trying to make that part fun, so the birthing process is actually fun. Maybe I’m the equivalent of the hypno-birthing class. My wife and I did hypno-birthing for the last kid, which was actually really cool. We did classes and they tried to make it really, really fun. So maybe I’m the hypno-birthing coach. Trying to make the process of birth fun for you even though you know it’s still going to suck. But maybe you can have a good time along the way, you should, it is really fun.

But I was like, if you’re going to go through that birth process, you have to be so excited about the baby, that’s the key. My wife and I were so excited about the twins, we were so excited for the other kids and that’s why she was willing to endure that pain because we were so passionate and excited about the kids.

So for you, it starts with before you can be an entrepreneur, before you can birth this thing, you have to be insanely passionate about your thing. And there are people who will tell you otherwise. “No, it’s math…blah blah.” I don’t know, I think you can make money without passion, but you can’t leave a legacy, you can’t do what’s really important without it.

So my next phase of this, we got a long road trip, you guys. I hope you don’t mind. But the next phase of this is how you become passionate about this thing? You’re like, Russell I see you. You’re jumping around, excited, screaming every single day, but I wake up in the morning and I’m tired. I wake up in the morning and I don’t always feel that passion. And I get that. I want to share some stuff, this is maybe personal development, according to Russell. I don’t teach personal development, I probably never will, but I have my thoughts on it, I have my feelings. So I do a lot of it myself. So I’m going to give you, during our road trip together, some of my thoughts and the personal development stuff that I had to go through and we have to go through and hopefully some of these things will help.

So number one, the first thing is all of you guys, you’ve got to quit being so bleh. That’s the official term for it, bleh. My daughter, she puts on this little monster mask, it’s so cute and then she’ll go “bleh.” That’s what most of you guys are doing. If I ask you what you’re working on, you’re like, “Bleh.” You’ve got to be excited, if you’ve listened to the podcast, probably three hundred episodes ago I did one talking about being awesome. People always ask you, “How are you doing?” and everyone goes, “I’m alright. I’m doing okay.” First off, if you’re doing okay, it means your life sucks. You need to stop it. “I’m doing okay.” My kids, I told them, when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you never say I’m doing okay. I’m doing good. Good is the enemy to great. If you’re doing good, that’s not a good thing. If you’re going to change the world you can’t be like, “I’m doing good. It’s alright.”

Notice this, everyone will ask how you’re doing and you’ll always say doing good. First thing to change, you are no longer doing good. You are doing awesome, all the time. My kids, if you ask them, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” If you ask me, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” You need to reprogram your brain from “I’m doing alright.” To being awesome. When people ask you that from now on, this is rule number one, you have to say you’re doing awesome. It may seem like a dumb thing, but you will see how it changes people around you. “How you doing?” “I’m doing awesome.” They’re like, “Really. Huh, nobody ever says that.” If you say you’re doing good, bleh. You just did that, bleh. You pulled an Ellie, a monster Ellie. Ellie’s my daughter that does that, bleh. So no more bleh’s. You’re doing awesome. And if you don’t feel awesome, guess what the first step to feeling awesome is? Saying that you’re feeling awesome. Okay, that’s number one.

Number two, stay in control. If you ever go to a Tony Robbins event, which you should, if you don’t you’re insane. I’m not allowed to say yet, but he may be hanging out with us at our next Funnel Hacking Live event. But regardless, you should go to at least UPW. You get to walk on fire and hopefully have a chance to go to Date with Destiny as well. If you really want to have a shift in your life, Tony is the person that will take you and shift you. That’s why I don’t teach personal development because Tony is the best in the world and I couldn’t do better, even remotely close, so I’m not even going to try. If I felt like I could I probably would go and try to serve that market, but Tony’s the best, so I’m not going to.

So I leave it to Tony and also Brendon Burchard, Brendon’s the man. Tony and Brendon, those dudes will shift yourself, personal development wise, so go and study them. Tony especially, because walking on fire is insanely cool. But one of the main things you learn in Date with Destiny is a thing called state control. So state is the thing that you are in as you are doing something. Sometimes you’re in a happy state, and a bleh state. Most of us we live our lives in a bleh state. You have to learn how to change your state like this. The coolest thing I learned from Tony is that I actually control the state I’m in. I don’t think most people understand that. You control the state you’re in. You can change it, you can be depressed or be happy, you can change it that fast.

When I learned that and became aware of it, it was insanely cool. I would have a long horrible day at the office. I’d be beat up and tired, worn out, come home and as most people do, I could walk through the door and be like, bleh. Be a bleh dad. But I was like, no. I don’t want to be a bleh dad. So I walk in tired, beat up, angry sometimes, frustrated, all the crap you go through sometimes during the day, I get to the door and I say, I could either walk in and be a bleh dad, or I can change my state. What am I going to do? I’m going to freaking change my state.

So I do what Tony Robbins talks about, there’s three things he calls the triad. I make these three shifts in my life, my physiology, my focus, my meaning, I shift those things and boom, that fast I walk in and guess what? I’m not a bleh dad, I’m a freaking awesome dad. I have fun with my kids, I play with my kids, and they’re going to remember that.

When I walk in the office, some days I haven’t slept for more than an hour. I walk into the office and guess what I feel like? I feel like I want to die sometimes, I’m so tired. I walk in and could be like, bleh. But guess what happens if I walk in at state, guess what happens to all the people around me? They will match my state, because I’m the leader. If I walk in like bleh, they will all become bleh. This is the official term by the way, it’s bleh. So if I walk in bleh, they’re all going to be bleh. If I walk in at a freaking ten, they are all going to rise to my level, to my state. State control is huge. You can control your own state, but the other cool thing is that you can control the state of the people that are around you.

People always come to our office and they’re like, “Is it always like this?” the answer is yes. Why is it like this? It’s because I’m freaking setting the pace when I walk in during the day. I walk in knowing that the pace that I set, everyone’s going to match me at that pace. If I come in bleh, they’re going to be bleh. I work with other companies, and partners and friends and people and what’s interesting, we will work with employees of a business owner and whatever the state of the business owner is, and you know that by seeing their videos and all their stuff, the entire company matches that state. It’s insane.

So if I want to dominate the world, I gotta learn to change my state. So understanding state control is huge and so much more simple than you think. Tony Robbins talked about, go to UPW. There’s three things, he calls it a triad, there’s three things that are involved in state control. I’ll kind of go through these, I’ll probably just slaughter them, so go study Tony. Worst case, go to YouTube and type in “Tony Robbins State Control” or something, I’m sure you can get some videos of him teaching it as well.

But the triad, there’s three things you gotta change. The first thing is your physiology. You’re body, this amazing gift that God has given us functions and drives everything. Have you ever notice that depressed people look depressed? Bleh. Sad people what do they do? They look sad. They’re body matches and mirrors how they feel. So a lot of times you think, “I’m sad, that’s why my body’s like this. My shoulders are drooping because I’m bleh.” Sometimes, because your body’s drooping, that’s why you’re sad. Just changing your physiology, changing your state, how you hold your body, will actually change how you feel. It’s insane.

He talked about a group of people who were clinically depressed, not just I’m depressed, I’m sad, clinically depressed. They were in a clinic, they were in rehab because they had such bad depression. They took this group of like 50 clinically depressed people and took them off all their depression medication, which all medication really does is change your state. Changes our physiology, honestly we’ll talk about that in a minute, but it takes them off all their meds and makes them stand in front of a mirror for thirty minutes a day, with their shoulders back, smiling. Even if it’s a fake smile, or angry, makes them smile for thirty minutes. Guess what happened? Just by changing their physiology and forcing themselves to smile for 30 days, every one of the people who had clinical depression were healed. They were miraculously saved from their depression.

Now there are times when, I have friends and family members that deal with depression, so I’m not short changing that, but I promise you that by shifting your physiology you can shift everything. It’s huge. I’ve seen people who are depressed shift their state, shift their body and they get un-depressed. It’s crazy.

So if I want to be in a happy mood, if I want to be in a good state for my kids, my wife, my whatever. If I’m going to a meeting or whatever, the state, how I hold my body has a ton to do, 50% of how I enter a room has to do with the outcome of what’s going to happen. That’s not scientifically proven, that’s just what I’m guestimating based on what happens. That’s a big thing. So figure that out. How do you control your body?

Look at what depressed people look like and if you hold your body in a way that depressed people hold their body, you’re going to be depressed. If you hold your body the way sad people hold it, you’re going to be sad. If you hold it in a way of the happy people, you’re going to be happy. Look right here right now, do I look happy? The reason why I’m doing this, if you watch Funnel Hacker TV, “Why is Russell so excited?” Because when I’m in an excited mood, I feel better, I get more done. I get people around me to raise to my level of vibration and they get excited as well.

There’s this weird thing, and this is scriptural, for those that are the church going folk, and those who aren’t it doesn’t even matter. Light cleaveth to light and dark cleaveth to darkness. One of my coaches, Tara Williams talks about this all the time, vibes, vibrations. People like, “He’s got a good vibe, she’s got a good vibe.” Sense the vibration. And if you think of this like tuning forks. Let’s say you have a tuning fork here and you want to, if you hit two tuning forks next to each other, they will eventually match their vibrations. There’s a high pitched one, a low pitched one, they will meet in the middle because vibrations match. Light cleaveth to light, dark to dark.

The same thing happens with you. If you come in and you’re a tuning fork and your vibration’s high, people are going to suck you down to their level and you’ll be depressed. Or you’re going to come in and freaking just blow your mind with the level of energy and vibration and everybody will rise to you. You have to understand that. They’re either going to suck you down, or you’re going to rise up.

That’s one part of state control, is understanding that your body has so much to do with it. Now that you understand that, how else can you control your body? This is why us nerdy, entrepreneur, biohacking people talk about the importance of our body. Alex Charfen at the Pirates Cove mastermind said that “for any of you entrepreneurs that aren’t treating your body like a professional athlete, you’re insane. You’re doing things that professional athletes aren’t. You’re trying to accomplish things that they can’t even fathom. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’re insane.”

It’s true, what you put into your body effects your physiology. When I eat crap, guess how I feel? Crap. People always ask me why I take so many supplements. Because different supplements I take effect my physiology. I have rules with my supplements. Most of you all know, I’m a Mormon, therefore I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t do alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, any other crazy stuff, I don’t do a lot of these, but there’s some supplements that I do take because they affect my physiology.

I do take some caffeine, because caffeine affects you physiology. You take it, it increases your energy. Your physiology changes, it helps me get into state faster. There’s other supplements I take, I could go days on supplements, but there’s things I take because they affect my physiology. There’s things I don’t eat because they affect my physiology. If you look at how I eat, I usually don’t eat breakfast. The reason why is breakfast typically makes me feel sluggish and tired, my physiology goes down. I usually eat one huge meal a day. When I’m at the office Melanie makes me this huge salad, it’s got high fats, tons of vegetables, I eat it and there’s almost no carbs outside of the carbs inside of vegetables because carbs make me feel sluggish and tired. I don’t want to feel tired. So I just eat the vegetables meats and fats because that keeps my energy, my physiology good.

When I’m at home, if I’m going to eat junk, typically I eat it at the end of the night, when I’m about to go to bed, because at that point I don’t care about my physiology, I’m going to fall asleep. But I don’t eat at dinner, I usually won’t eat all the other nice stuff. I’ll go and pick the veggies, the meat off, whatever my wife makes and I’ll eat that because I know that if I eat the rice and the carbs, stuff like that, guess what happens? My physiology drains and I’m going to be a worse dad for my kids. I know how it works.

So if I want to stay in peak state for my kids, I have to stay in, I gotta keep my physiology going, so I’m very careful of what I eat. Sometimes, I’m not as good as a lot of my biohacking buddies, sometimes I just screw up, and if my physiology…this is probably the bad thing. This is the negative of personal development. But if I eat something and feel like crap, I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap. I’m going to feel like crap no matter what, I might as well make my taste buds feel good.” So then I go all out and if I have a bad day, I have a really bad day. Because I’m physiologically jacked anyway, let’s have some fun. Anyway, there you go. Alright, that’s number one.

Number two side of the pillar of Tony’s triad is shifting what you focus on. Have you noticed that depressed people focus on depressing things? Have you noticed that happy people focus on happy things? But Russell, there’s so much sad things happening in the world. I know there is, but guess what I don’t focus on? The sad things that are happening in the world. Guess what I don’t watch? The freaking news. Want to know why? Because the news focuses on depressing things. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t listen to depressing things. I try to focus on people and things that get me pumped up.

I listen to podcasts of people that inspire me, that get me excited. I read things that get me excited. I focus on stuff that gets me excited. In business, crappy stuff happens every single day and I tell you what, when you go from a million dollar company to a 10 to 100, the level of crappy crap that comes up everyday exponentially increases. They say, someone told me the other day that every three months an entrepreneur’s focus with decisions could either make or break them.

That’s true when you’re running a million dollar business. When you’re running a hundred million dollar a year business that happens a lot more often. I would say probably every three hours. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of crap that hits me in the face every single day and if I focus on the negative, I would be in a state of depression right now. I have to look at it and I’m like, “Oh, that sucks. Alright, this is the answer.” And I turn my back and run from it. I do not focus on it for more than 5 seconds, otherwise I will lose my state.

What are you focusing on? A lot of you guys get overwhelmed and get stressed. Do you not think I get overwhelmed? I have 12 events happening in the next 47 days. We’re doing the biggest launch in the history of the freaking internet. We’re re-doing the complete onboarding process, I just wrote a new book in the last 30 days. It’s not a tiny book, it’s a freaking cookbook, it’s a 500 page cookbook. We’re doing a design-a-thon in two days. If you knew how much stress I have on my plate. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure most people would crack under the pressure. I’m shocked that I haven’t yet, but the reason why is because I keep moving on.

Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in the history of wrestling. Well maybe not the greatest anymore, but he is the legend. He is the Michael Jordan of wrestling. So Dan Gable, someone asked him one time, because he went through all of college never losing a match. His very last match he lost, he got so pissed off that he went and started training for the Olympics and he actually became an Olympic champion and not a single person scored on him. And what’s crazy is while he was training for the Olympics, it’s so crazy. The Russians actually said, they came out publically and said, “We are going to train an athlete with the only goal to beat Dan Gable from the Americans.” And Dan Gable was like, “No, I’m the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived, no one’s going to beat me.”

So what did Dan do? He would work 7 hours a day, working out 7 hours a day preparing for the Olympics, then he’d go to bed at night. Then as he’d go to bed at night, he laid there in bed saying, “The dude in Russia who is trying to beat me is awake and training right now. And that pisses me off and freaks me out.” So what did Dan Gable do? He woke up at midnight and he’d go running. Because he knew that his opponent was competing, was training and it stressed him out knowing that his opponent was awake while he was sleeping. He did not like that so he got up and kept working out.

Is that obsessive? Heck yes. Did he crack under pressure? No, he went to the Olympics and won. Not a single person scored a point on him. That’s Dan Gable. Now someone asked Dan Gable, I heard this in an interview one time, they said, “Dan don’t…” and afterwards Dan went on to become the head wrestling coach of Iowa Hawkeyes and won more NCAA championships in a row than anyone in any sport, I believe. Anyway, insane. And someone asked Dan Gable, “Don’t you believe in pressure?” and Dan’s like, “Yeah, I believe in pressure, it’s everywhere. The difference is that most people sit underneath the pressure and they sit on it. I believe in it, I just don’t put myself underneath it. I step aside and I focus on what I need to get done.”

And most of us, it’s that same way. I don’t know about you guys, sometimes I have so much stress and so much pressure, I’m about to crack. Then half of that is just in our heads. So I’ll sit down with a pad of paper, especially at night when I can’t sleep, I sit with a pad of paper and write down what I’m stressing on. I write all those things down, when you write it down it’s like, oh that’s actually not as bad as I thought. And then you can fall asleep, get yourself out of the pressure.

Sometimes we’re focusing on all pressure and stress and all this stuff and that’s why we don’t succeed. Don’t do that. Write it all down, prioritize it and be like I can’t control what I can’t control. I’m going to move forward out of the pressure. Go. And sometimes I don’t get crap done. I’m sure that all the stuff I have to get done between now and our viral video launch, most of it is not going to get done. A lot of it will, most of it will. But sometimes you can’t affect it, so you do whatever you can and as you get closer and closer to deadlines all of the non essentials fall away and then you get the essentials and that’s how the game’s played.

Alright, this is fun, we’ve been going 32 minutes you guys. I hope you’ve been having fun. I don’t know where I left off. Physiology, shift your physiology. Number two, what you’re focusing on and then number three, what’s the meaning. I think number three is meaning. If not I’ve been teaching this wrong, or thinking about it wrong.

Number three is the meaning we’re attaching to things. A lot of times something bad happens to us and we attach these weird meanings to it. And we, it’s really cool, we have this unique ability as humans to attach meanings to things, right. And usually what happens is subconscious; we don’t know that we’re doing something right. If someone punches you in the face, subconsciously our body attaches a meaning to that. So this person is mad at me, we attach the meaning, I need to fight….sorry, let me step back.

Someone punches us, right. Our meaning maker attaches this meaning to the thing. That person is mad at us, we must fight them back. So I go and try to fight someone. Or someone punches us and maybe the meaning is this person is going to kill me, that’s the meaning we attach so then we run away. There’s all sorts of things. Every single day, something is happening and we’re attaching these meanings to it and these meanings direct where we’re going with our thoughts and actions and everything else. But as soon as you’re aware of this, you can actually change the meanings that are coming to you.

I actually don’t know if this is part of the triad, it may not be. I can’t remember now. Go YouTube Tony Robbins. Regardless, I want to talk about meaning, because meaning is a big thing. When you’re aware of this it’s kind of cool because now it gives you the ability to kind of shift meanings. So when somebody, we’ve had some morons, and they are morons, this week that have been attacking Clickfunnels and at first I got so mad I want to kill them and fly to their house and beat them, because that’s the wrestler in me. My body attaches a meaning to what they’re doing.

But then what’s cool is Tony taught me this technique where you stop and say, okay, what if that’s not the meaning they’re attaching, what if it’s actually this meaning? You shift the meaning that maybe they’re attaching and if you shift the meaning associated with an experience, it’ll change your perspective, which changes everything. So we gotta become good at consciously picking the meaning we’re attaching to things. If someone screws us over we can attach a meaning saying “That person is a horrible person trying to screw me over.” But if you attach that meaning, be careful.

Because as soon as you attach that meaning to something, guess what happens? Now the situation you enter, the state you enter is going to be based on that meaning and it can get really bloody and get really bad and things can turn really bad, which is going to increase all these other pressure, noise and other bad stuff. But if you come in and say, “Look, that person is a total douche bag,” I don’t know if I can say that on TV. I apologize if I can’t. Anyway, that person is a horrible person, but maybe their having a bad day today. Maybe they’re struggling, maybe financially, whatever. You attach a different meaning to the situation, then you come and you’re like, man that person screwed me over, but this is probably why he did it. Or why she did.

If you attach that meaning it gives you a different set of tools to deal with the situation. So what happens now in my life, if something happens and instantly a meaning is attached by my brain and what I’ve found is that most of the times that the instant meaning that’s attached, is going to leave me in a really negative path. It’s weird how it works. So too often I run down that negative meaning and bad things happen. So I try to consciously stop and try to take the exact opposite.

I remember Tony at Date with Destiny he does this thing, he says, “Find an experience in your life that pissed you off.” For me it was something with my wife, and my wife was at the event then, sitting separate, so she was sitting four rows ahead of me and there was an experience and they said to write down the experience, so I wrote it down. They said, “Write down all the meanings you attached to that experience.” I was like, “My wife is mad at me, she doesn’t love me.” I wrote down all these different meanings that I had attached to that situation.

And then Tony said, “Write a big line down the side of the paper and next to each of the meanings you attached to that situation, I want you to write the exact opposite of that thing.” So I was like, “My wife is mean to me, but on the other side, she actually loves me. My wife is super selfish, no she is actually so giving that she struggles.” So I wrote the exact opposite of each of the meanings that I had attached to the situation.

But what’s crazy is after handwriting out probably three or four of the things, I started crying. I started crying because I realized, I love my wife and I know her, and I realized the true meaning of what happened in that situation, was actually the exact opposite of the meaning I had attached to it. I instantly realized that I was in the wrong and she wasn’t. I broke down crying because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Where else in my life is this happening? Where I’m attaching these meanings subconsciously to a thing and I’m actually wrong?”

I realized that day that I have to take control of my meaning maker, the meaning I’m attaching to every single situation. So something happens now and instantly I get the negative meaning, it just happens that’s in our brains wiring for some stupid reason. I stop and I’m like, what’s the opposite of that, what’s something that if I could attach a different meaning would make me look at this person through a different angle, a different lens, a different light? I shift the meaning and it shifts everything. It shifts how I feel about the person. It shifts how I approach them, it shifts the response. It changes everything.

I wish I could say I am perfect with this, I am not. If you’ve ever been on the back end of a backlash from me for stuff, I apologize. Because I’m, I can be a prick sometimes. I didn’t realize this until the other day. We have a contractor, he was killing himself for us, and I imagine it’s got to be a pain in the butt working with me sometimes. Because I’m vocal, I’m on TV, I’m on Instagram, I’m ranty and ravy and talking about everything. And without thinking I kind of shared publicly my thoughts and part of it’s because I’m a media personality. If I came out like bleh all the time nobody would listen. So I’m usually on the extremes, I’m extremely happy or extremely upset because that’s what’s interesting.

So I feel bad because I published stuff that was negative towards that person. And the other day it was kind of brought to my attention, “Wow, Russell this person is really working his butt off for you and you’re saying these things.” And I had this moment again where I kind of broke down and I was like I’m a bad person sometimes. And the meaning I was attaching to all these situations was like, they’re lazy, they don’t care, they’re not working hard enough, or whatever. I’m attaching all these meanings and I had this fun little moment where I had this exercise where I was like, okay, if I switch the meaning, what’s actually happening? And I was like, oh man, I’m a jerk.

I realized it again, so I reached out personally and apologized and I don’t know if it’ll make it better or not, but I was wrong. I’ve had other situations this week where again there’s this person who’s honestly, it’s always the people you help the most. It’s someone I helped a lot, to have a lot of success, I bent over backwards for them and now they’re publically attacking me and us. It’s just….it’s funny, the meaning, even now, the meaning I want to attach to it wants to come in there. I’m like, no stop. Get out of my brain. Because I know, I know the reason why this person is being a douche bag. I’m going to use that word, I apologize. I know the true meaning. It’s not the one that makes me feel better about myself, which sucks because that one makes me feel so much better about myself. But it’s the truth.

So I’ve tried to attach that meaning to it, even though every time I think about the situation, my blood’s boiling just thinking about it again. But I gotta go back to the meaning that I attached on purpose. So the more you guys are aware of this the more you can affect. That’s a big part. There’s number two in personal development.

So where have we gone this far? So far we’ve talked about not being bleh. We talked about shifting your state in the circumstance. We talked about shifting the meaning you’re attaching to things. Alright so here’s a couple of things. Yes, we’ve been going for 40 minutes, but I still got another hour and a half drive, so we’re going to keep on talking. It’s like on Wedding Singer, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, do you remember when he’s all depressed after his girlfriend gets married on him and he’s hosting the wedding party and he’s telling all these jokes? And the one guy’s like, “Hey wedding singer, you’re the worst wedding singer I’ve ever heard.” And he looks at him and he’s like, “Well I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.” One of my favorite lines ever. That’s how I feel right now. I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.

I guess you can turn me off, hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you can hear me. This is car is so loud when we’re driving. I hope this is coming through because I think there’s some good stuff in here for people.

Alright, next thing. We talked about being not bleh, we talked about getting in state, we talked about meaning, these are pieces to help you function better as a human being. I always tell people how much of an impact Tony Robbins had on me. It’s because he made me aware of these things and there’s so many more. I wish we could go to UPW. Go walk on fire. I think you can get a ticket for $500 to a thousand bucks. If you are broke and don’t have the money, go get a credit card and finance it. If you’re broke, you’re going to become more broke. Who freaking cares? At this point, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re going to go bankrupt? Dude, you’re broke, it doesn’t matter. It always blows my mind when people are like, “I don’t have any money, I can’t invest.” Then you have nothing to lose. Go take out a loan. Go take out five loans, who cares? Worst case scenario is you lose it all. If you have nothing, then you have nothing.

I taught the cub scouts, the 12 year olds, I did an entrepreneurship merit badge and one of the guys asked, “how old do you think these kids should start?” I was like, “They should start now. I got a dozen friends who are teenagers who are making insane amounts of money.” The guy who asked said, “Just so all you kids know, you have nothing. If you lose it all you didn’t lose anything, so who cares?” Anyway, it always makes me laugh because people are like, “you can risk a lot because you have money to risk.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s way easier to risk when you’re broke.” Worst case scenario you lose everything, but everything is like rent on an apartment, but that’s not that big of a deal, you guys.

When you’ve got 150 employees whose lives depend on you, I promise you it is a lot scarier to risk at that point. Nevertheless, I digress. Where was I going? I don’t even remember. Hopefully there was something in there of value.

Okay, what I want to talk about here is you gotta risk. You’re creating this thing, you’re giving birth, you’re going into this thing…..Oh I remember what I was talking about. I was talking about investing in UPW and talking about being broke. Yeah, go to UPW, go to Date with Destiny. Invest in these events because it’ll transform you, it’ll help you to become super aware of yourself and other people. That’s what Tony gave me that was so important to me. Most of us live life on autopilot and we’re just going through the day bumping into things and things are happening and you’re just not aware of how we work. When you’re aware of how you work, it’s like now you can affect things, change things, tweak things. I can change my approach, I can change other people’s approach. For me it’s been huge to understand me and people better. So yeah, go to those things it’s worth it. There you go.

I have a friend down in Australia, his name’s Mal Every, I don’t know why this just popped in my head but he says, “I don’t have a problem with you if you’re broke, but I do have a problem if you stay broke. There’s too many opportunities in this world. If you stay broke, it’s because you’re not trying.” You’re literally not trying. Anyway, I don’t know why I said that, but it popped in my head therefore it must have been important.

Alright, the next thing I want to talk about. If you want to be successful in life the next piece outside of not being bleh, and figuring out state control and attaching meaning to the right things, the next thing is you have to stop dabbling. Stop freaking dabbling. School has screwed up all of us. School has taught us how to dabble. You sign up for college, you take 20 credits, 20 cool things that you want to learn about. What they do is they spoon feed you and force you to dabble over a semester. So they give you a little bit of information in math, you spend 50 minutes. Then you go to the next class, here’s a little bit of science, a little bit of history. So you dabble in a whole bunch of little crap and you try to remain and retain all this stuff and then you go back the next day and you dabble a whole bunch and you dabble and you dabble and you dabble for like 15 years of our life.

Let there be no mistake. You will never be hyper successful if you are dabbling. Dabbling is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to be successful. If you want to be successful in something, you have to go deep, you have to immerse, you have to be obsessed with that thing. I guarantee you the people I’m competing against right now in our business, the reason why we are kicking the crap out of all of them is because they are dabblers. I promise you, there’s not one of my competitors that spent as much time in the last 48 hours, in the last week, in the last 5 weeks studying marketing and business and growth and personal development as much as I have. And for most of them, we’re already way past them, so why in the world, why are they not…..? I don’t know.

But they’re dabbling and that’s why I’m able to pass them. When you start immersing and you go deep, a couple of really cool things happen. First off, you will start seeing connections that you cannot see when you dabble. I sucked in school because I could never see the connections. I spent an hour in history, an hour in math, then an hour in debate, then an hour in logic, I’m trying to figure out how to make the connections. Unless you go deep in something, you can’t do it.

The reason why I’ve written two books is not, yes I like writing books, yes I like sharing it. When I write a book, I have to go in such deep immersion that I start seeing these connections that you don’t, you can’t see when you dabble. When I started writing the Expert Secrets book, I was doing a whole bunch of things. Some things consciously, some things subconsciously and as I started focusing on this book and trying to make a really, really good book, it forced me to read and study and geek out and immerse myself in a whole bunch of different things and through that process, I was not dabbling, I was immersing. I don’t know if it’s God, if it’s your brain, but when you immerse yourself, I feel like the reward for that, all these connections that you don’t normally see, all the sudden start being open to you.

Howard Berg told me, he’s the world’s fastest reader. He said when he goes to do a topic, most people read a book and they form their opinion based one book they read. He’ll read 30-40 books to get a really clear view of the reality of the situation. This is what 30 authors have said and you get a very clear view of it. And that’s how I feel about immersion. When you immerse yourself and you go and listen, study, read, you really geek out and become obsessed in your thing. I don’t know if it’s your brain, God or the universe, whatever you want to attribute it to, I know who I want to attribute it to. But he opens up pathways, he opens up connections for you and lets you see a whole picture and that’s your reward for immersion.

So that’s the next step in this you guys, you have to stop dabbling. So first off, the first phase in this comes back to you being greedy. The first phase is figure out this thing you want to be obsessed with. Maybe it’s not the marketing yet, and that’s okay. Because phase one is about being greedy and mastering it for yourself and becoming who you need to be to serve the world that you’re trying to serve. So go and now is the time to become unbalanced.

In the bible, well if you listen to this song, I think it was…who was it? A time for every season, there’s a time under heaven for everything. A time and a season for everything, right. This is your season to immerse in your craft and become the best in the freaking world in your craft. Again, there’s a time and a season, this is the time and season right now for you to do that, for you to immerse yourself. So that’s phase number one and that’s going to give you the ability to become who you need to be. And you’re going to become completely unbalanced. Your work life, your social life, your family life is going to become unbalanced during that period of time, but you’re going to be able to immerse yourself, you’re not going to dabble. You’re going to unbalance and become awesome at your thing.

And then there will be a transition phase where you’re going through and becoming so passionate about it, where there will be this weird time where all the sudden, I don’t know what it is, you can’t get filled up anymore. For me, I was doing all this marketing for all of our businesses and companies. We were doing the Neuropathy product, the weight loss, the dating, all these different businesses and we’re doing it and there came a point where I stopped getting fulfilled by just doing the business and I didn’t know what it was. I started going through this slump. I didn’t feel the momentum, didn’t feel the progress.

I was like, ugh. I didn’t feel it and that transition is because eventually you can’t keep growing in that immersion. Because eventually you’ll see the connections, you’ll see everything, you’ll be going through this immersion and then you will…. I don’t know how to say it, not that you’ll become perfect ever, but you’ll become more perfected in that thing. Where it’s hard to squeeze a lot more oranges to get any juice out of it, to really fill you up.

And that’s what I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, that’s where you transition from this growth, to the only way you can keep growing is transition into contribution. And this is where entrepreneurship is born. This is where you realize the only way for me to actually keep sharing this and to keep having that juice is to start contributing and giving back and sharing with other people. And what you find is insane. As soon as you take this path and this gift, this thing you’ve been geeking out on and immersing yourself on and become obsessed with, you start sharing it, that juice starts flowing again. It’s like the next wave and it’s so fulfilling. That’s why I’m doing an hour long podcast instead of focusing on the road and listening.

That’s why for me right now, I started listening to, when I start doing personal development and growth and start learning and studying, as I do that I start shaking because this is good. I’m getting juice, but if I could share this with other people I’d be getting ten times what I’m getting now. That’s why I publish so much, that’s why I share so much. It’s because that contribution will fill you up more than the growth will eventually.

But first you gotta fill up. Again, you gotta become unbalanced so you can become who you need to be. But after you’ve hit that point, and you’ll know it because you can’t get the same thing out of it, until you start contributing. And that’s logically where you start shifting to contribution. That’s when you start becoming obsessed with the marketing. That’s when you start geeking out there. That’s the key you guys, that’s what it’s like. At that point, you don’t care about the money. This is what I talked about a few podcasts ago.

The people who struggle are the people trying to make money. When you’ve been geeking out on a thing and have filled yourself up and now you’re shifting to contribution, you do not care about money. I could not care less about money at this point in my life. It’s fun, it keeps track, it’s how we know that we’re doing well. It’s such not a driving force, you can ask…..I do not have logins to my bank accounts. I have no idea what’s in there. My accountant, I’m always like “Hey can I buy this?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. I have no idea.”

My wife, I don’t have access to my bank accounts, personal, business, anything. I do not know what’s in there. I don’t want to know. It means zero to me at this point in my life. The only thing that means anything to me now is contribution. That’s what fires me up. That’s the state you gotta enter business and entrepreneurship in. Those are the people who are successful. The come in like, “This thing that I have, this gift, this thing. I’m so passionate about it, I have to figure out how to share it with other people.” Then guess what’s going to happen? Then it’s going to be easy to become obsessed with the marketing because the marketing is the means for you to get your message out, for you to get your product and your service out.

All the sudden it becomes exciting. I think that’s why I struggled in school so much. I would learn and read a book and it didn’t matter to me. If you’re going into marketing and you’re struggling, this marketing, I’m learning this stuff. I learned about squeeze pages, traffic and conversion but you don’t care. It’s because it’s like school. I study a thing and I write a paper but I don’t care about this paper, there’s no point to it. If you’re struggling studying the marketing it’s because there’s no point to it. But as soon as you find your thing and you obsess with it and you’ve grown and filled yourself up and shift to contribution, now when you start studying it, the marketing becomes alive. It lights up and becomes alive again.

I remember, I always thought I was dumb. I hated reading, I hated studying, I hated school, I hated all those things and honestly, I thought I was a dumb kid. I started my business and started selling these little things, it was crazy because I was selling some stuff and I was not doing that well. I remember it was pre-podcasts, but everyone used to do tele-seminars back when I got started. I would download all these tele-seminars and I would listen to them. Guys like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian, those are the guys I listened to. Marlon Sanders, these are the guys I listened to initially. And I would listen to them on my headphones. I would burn these tele-seminars onto cd’s and put the cd’s in and listen to them while I was on my wrestling trips and I would learn stuff.

They would say stuff and I’m like, “That’s so cool. I’m going to go try that.” And I’d try it and the craziest thing would happen, I would try something. I was making a little bit of money and then I’d try something and make more money. I was like, are you kidding me, that freaking worked. I gotta try something else. I listened to another tele-seminar and I would try it and are you kidding me, that freaking worked! And then another one and I was like, that guy wrote a book. I’d read his book and I’m like, I’m going to try it. And then guess what happened? I’d make more money. My thing would go out to more people and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And all the sudden reading became alive for me, studying became alive for me, marketing became alive for me.

I remember copywriting I was like, one of my first websites I set up and I didn’t have a sales letter and someone’s telling me about this copywriting thing and I was like, are you kidding me? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not going to write words, I don’t want to learn that. I remember just being angry because I didn’t want to learn copy. It sounded so boring and stupid.

Anyway, I tried to hire a copywriter, and the copywriter, it was actually Michael Thornton was the first copywriter I tried to hire and his quote for me at the time was 8 or 10 grand or something and I was like, “Whoa! I haven’t made that much money in my entire life combined at this point.” So then I tried to read a book on copy and again, it was horrible. I read it and I was like this sucks. I had to write my very first little sales letter. So I wrote it and then it was crazy because it made money.

So then I started listening to some copywriters and the guys like, I remember it was Michael Thornton actually, I was listening to this presentation he gave at this big seminar and he was like, “We tested this thing and it turns out that a red headline out converted a blue one.” So I changed my headline to red and sure enough it out converted. I was like, what the crap? Okay, what else does this guy got? I remember he tested a brown background, it did better in this thing. So I’m going to do a brown background. So I did a brown background and sure enough it out converted. I’m like are you kidding me?

Then he said to try a new headline, his headline swipe file had all his headlines. So I tried four or five headlines and one of them dramatically beat the other one. I was like, what? I changed the headline and I doubled my income. Normal humans, if they want to double their income, guess what they gotta do? A doctor would have to go back to like 16 more years in medical school to specialize and double their income, work another 15 years and then maybe they would. I changed 13 words on a headline and all the sudden guess what? Copywriting became alive for me. It got exciting and all the sudden I want to read every freaking copywriting book I can find, because I’d read through and most of it was garbage or rehashing stuff but I’d read one sentence that was like, “Oh, you should end each line with a dot, dot, dot. Because it keeps the readers mind open and doesn’t close out the thought and they’re more likely to keep reading.” I was like, what?

So now to every single email and every single thing I’ve ever written, I add a dot, dot, dot, you’ve probably noticed that before. Guess what happened? Everything increased. And I started going to marketing seminars. I’d go to a five day seminar and listen for five days and every single speaker who is talking, I knew everything. I’ve done that, knew that, heard that, rehash, rehash and then one speaker on day 6 would say one thing where he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one time I added an exit pop where I gave a discount and 20% of the people took the exit pop.” I was like, wait, what? So I go back to my thing and add an exit pop and my income would increase by like $100,000 a month. From that one little thing.

I remember I was like, I sat through 5 days of crap and got that one thing and it was so huge for me that it made the whole thing worth while. Or I would be at an event, got nothing and I’d go out to eat with everybody and I’m the Mormon dude, everyone goes to the bar and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the bar, I don’t want people to think I’m drinking. So I’d go to the bar, and I’m not joking, I’d order milk because I didn’t want people to think…..if I ordered a sprite people might think I’m drinking and I’m like I don’t want people to think I’m drinking, so I ordered a milk.

So I’m holding a milk and I’m at the bar and everyone’s drinking and they’re like, “Why do you got a milk?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Mormon, Mormon’s don’t drink so I’m drinking milk.” They’re like, “that’s weird.” And then they’re kind of drunk and the coolest thing about drunk people, drunk people don’t have any filters. They lose the inhibition to filter stuff or whatever. So I’m drinking milk, totally sober, they’re completely drunk and I’m like, “Hey so, what’s the biggest thing you’ve figured out?” and they’re like, “Oh man, okay so we did this thing on our squeeze page where we did blah blah blah.” I’m like, what? He just told me that. I would spend four or five hours in the bar drinking milk, asking people questions and getting nugget, after nugget, after nugget. I’d go back and add it and sure enough I’d add this little thing and it’s like Russell, you gave yourself a three thousand dollar a day raise by doing this one little thing. That’s a million dollar a year raise.

How do average humans get a million dollar a year raise? They don’t, they can’t. It’s physically impossible to do that. How did I do it? Some dude at a bar who is drunk off his butt told me this little thing and then I did it. Where do you guys think I got the Perfect Webinar from? I am not a genius, but guess what? I went to all of these events and saw speaker, after speaker, after speaker pitching and maybe what they said sucked, but I heard how they did a close, I heard how they did a trial. That guy said that thing. All of the differences…it’s funny because Stephen’s always like, he always talks about the Russellisms, the things Russell says that are so cool in my presentations. I didn’t make most of those things up, most things I heard another speaker say it and I’m like, that’s amazing, wrote it down and it was worth everything.

It would make me laugh, I’d go to an event and I would get one or two little nuggets like that and I’d come back and it would give me a two to three, maybe four thousand dollar a year raise and I hear someone online complain, “It was a pitch fest. All they do is sales stuff.” I’m like, “You went to that event to try to learn how to sell things. Why do you hate money so bad? I saw the same thing you did. I gave myself a four thousand dollar a day raise.” I don’t know what else to do.

It’s because they haven’t figured it out yet. It’s like they’re going to school and they’re pissed because the professor bored them to death. It’s like, when you go with this different lens, when you’ve got something you are so insanely passionate about, that all you care about, you don’t care about making money, spending money. All you care about is figuring out how you can get this to more people and when you get one little nugget after five days of information and that one thing does this huge thing, that’s worth it.

I hear people complain, they go to forums, “That event sucked, it was a pitch fest. I heard that stuff before, they didn’t teach me anything new.” It’s because they’re not real entrepreneurs. They haven’t fall in love with the marketing of the thing. If you’ve fallen in love, this is how you know you’ve fallen in love with the marketing of your thing, it’s when you literally stop watching TV for the shows and you watch for the commercials. That’s how you know. It’s when you’re listening to the radio and you’re waiting for the songs to end so you can hopefully hear a really good direct response radio ad. It’s when you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed looking for ads. It’s when you’re like weird crap that you know you don’t care about, but you’re praying that they will start re-targeting you with their ads.

It’s when you log into your wife’s Facebook account, not because you give a crap about what she’s doing, or care what she’s talking about, but you know that she is seeing different ads than you are and you want to see what those ads look like. That’s when you know that you’re passionate about marketing. That’s when you know that you’re so obsessed with getting your message out that it’s become, that’s the level you gotta be at.

But I think I’ve come to grips now, I think it used to piss me off when people weren’t obsessed about marketing, but now I think I get it. It’s like, I don’t think you can be obsessed about marketing at first, until you have first gone through the growth phase for yourself. You’ve got to become ridiculously obsessed initially with your thing, because that’s the first phase. You’ve got to immerse yourself there and after you’ve done that, then when you start shifting the entrepreneurship side, the growth, to the contribution and sharing it. That’s when you will become obsessed with the marketing. That’s when copywriting became alive for me. That’s when split testing became alive. That’s when all the geeky crap that I shouldn’t care about, none of us should care about, that’s when I started caring about it, that’s when it became alive.

Does that make sense you guys? That’s when I can sit there for five days and watch sales pitch after sales pitch after sales pitch and hear a single word about what they said, but just watch their hands, their hand motions, how they’re anchoring the stage, what they’re pointing to, why, when and how and be excited.

One of my buddies, Darin Stevens, he literally went to a Tony Robbins event, he went to the entire thing. I can’t remember if he told me if he watched the recordings of it or if he did when he was there, but he watched an entire week long Tony Robbins event with no audio on. No audio. Why would somebody do that? Because Darin wants to be the best person in the world at controlling the stage. Understanding how your physiology and stage presence and how you’re anchoring the stage, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, why it works. What did he do? He took the best person in the world, Tony Robbins, and he watched him and took out all of the audio because the audio distracts you from he’s actually doing.

I can’t tell you guys this enough. Funnel hacking is not just about looking at the outside, it’s about really understanding what people are doing and why they’re doing it. Yes, I’m selling products and services to you guys, but at the same time watch how I’m doing it. So Darin went and watched Tony Robbins because he wanted to see Tony’s hand motions, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, how he’s doing it, and he wrote this huge write-up for me, he sent me, it’s insane. It’s about all the stuff that Tony is doing, the reason why Tony’s pounding his chest at times, why he’s going like this, why he’s doing the ‘whoa, yes!’, why he’s pointing to different directions while he’s anchoring and seating and all those things are not accidental. They’re real and they’re purposely done.

When I’m on stage and talking about stuff, when I’m walking on different parts of the stage, sometimes its accidental. But for the most part, I’m doing things on purpose. I’m anchoring the stage, I’m taking you on timelines, I’m trying to bring you back to different places so you get emotionally impacted based on things that are happening. Same things happening in a webinar, tele-seminar, not podcasts because I’m just driving and talking, but maybe I am, who knows.

But I want you guys to understand, all of these things are there for you. I spent 14 hours yesterday, 14 hours going through every email I have ever sent with swipe files, squeeze pages, templates. I found every template I ever had paid for, designed because every template I designed I went and had all these people, the examples, a decade of funnel hacking. I went through yesterday and archived all of it into trello boards based on page type, based on funnel type, based on all sorts of stuff. And I’ll probably never use those pages again, but I wanted to be able see them and categorize and be like, the reason why that page was awesome was because of this.

There’s actually this one little block, there’s a dude that figured it out, on these squeeze pages, I’m not going to ruin the surprise for you, but if you type in squeeze page warning, those who are in the know will know that there’s this dude who had a squeeze page and at the very top he had this warning block that says, “Warning: Blah, blah, blah” That increased conversions on squeeze pages by insane amounts and most people never knew about it. Then he mentioned it, I think he’s in the dating market, he mentioned it at a mastermind and then dozens and dozens of people have done it, but most people have never seen it before. If you were to do it on your pages right now, it’s insane.

I totally forgot about it until I’m looking at my swipe files right now and I’m like, oh yeah. There’s so many things. I think so many people get bogged down in this other stuff that they forget about that. Become obsessed with the marketing. Go through all this stuff and legitimately do and it’s going to make it so much fun, it’s going to make it alive for you guys and I want to give you that gift. But that’s the transition.

So anyway you guys, this has been a long one. I hope you got a lot out of it. I just want you guys, I know that you have something inside of you. I know that you have the ability to change people’s lives. I believe that, probably more so than you do at this period in your life. If I didn’t believe that I would not be doing this stuff. I make plenty of money running a software company. I don’t have to do all this stuff. I don’t have to talk or write books, but I’m in a spot in my life now where my contribution is to get you off your butt so you contribute as well.

I am trying my best to touch as many people’s lives as possible through the things that I do, but I just know that the clearest path for me to have impact on the world is to touch you as an entrepreneur because you have the ability to affect more people. You may not, some of you guys know this. Some of you guys know that we have people that literally have hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people a year that they are touching and affecting. If I could magnify what you’re doing just a little bit, it amplifies that. If I can show you something that gets you to convert more people and gives you more money so you can actually serve people at a higher level, that’s huge.

And some of you guys are at the beginning of this journey now and you’re like, “I don’t have anything Russell. I’m not that passionate yet. Or I don’t have a voice, I’m nervous, I’m awkward.” Whatever, I promise you, I wish I would have been podcasting and blogging 12, 13, 14 years when I got started. The Russell you see today was the most awkward, nervous, weird person on planet earth 14 years ago. I couldn’t carry on a conversation with a human being, let alone with a camera for an hour and 8 minutes now. That comes with a lot of practice.

It’s kind of what we talked about at the beginning. Unbalancing your life and becoming obsessed with something. I don’t care what that is for you. But you need to do it, find something that fires you up. Right now if you’re not that passionate about anything, that’s okay. Find something that gives you a little spark, because initially it’s a spark. I wasn’t that passionate about marketing at first, but there was a spark. Once you have a spark it’s like, okay now let’s throw some kindling on the fire. There’s a spark of something, go find other people who are obsessed. You have a lower vibration right now, they have a higher vibration, we talked about this earlier. Go find people who are obsessed and get around them. Listen to their podcast, read their book, if they have an event, finance your house if you have to, finance that event and plug into their vibrations so they will bring you to the excitement level that they are at.

I am trying to do that every day with my marketing, if you have not noticed. Most of you guys, when you came into this world, you did not know about marketing, you didn’t care about marketing. You didn’t care about funnels, that was not, you didn’t get into this world saying, I’m going to build funnels. You either had a spark saying I want to make money, or you had a spark saying I want to share something. You had a spark and for some reason you bumped into me because I’m so loud and obnoxious and annoying and everywhere.

You probably saw a YouTube video and you’re like, “Stop targeting me on YouTube, Russell.” But I’m trying to take your spark and ignite it. I’m trying to give you as much waves of excitement and passion and vibration as I can muster up, so that your vibration will rise to my level.

So for you, where do you have a spark? Find that spark and then find the people around you in that market who are on fire and plug into them. Give them any amount of money that they need. I’m serious about this. If you’re broke it does not matter, you’re going to be more broke. I don’t know how to get that, I was at Grant Cardone’s event, I think there were like 2500 people in this long room and you were seated based on how much money you spent. People in the front spent 15 grand to be there and in the back they spent like 500 bucks. The further back you got, the less money you spent.

What’s crazy to me, is when I pitched my product, the people in the front ran to the side of the room and bought. And the further back you went, the less and less people ran to the back. You may say, “Russell, it’s because the people in the back didn’t have as much money, therefore they did not run to the side.” I would argue with you that you are wrong. The people in the front have money because they have invested money. They’re used to spending money in investing and then they have more success. The people in the back are broke because they’ve never invested in themselves. That’s it. That’s honestly it.

They’re already broke. Grant Cardone said this to me backstage, he’s like, “Don’t the people in the back understand, if you’re already broke it doesn’t hurt you to be more broke.” It doesn’t. I don’t know if that’s financially irresponsible. But I did a whole podcast on this called entrepreneurial scars, our founding fathers who I believe were inspired from God, who created the constitution of the United States, they gave us this thing. Because in this country we needed to give the entrepreneurs the ability to risk everything and be okay with that.

If entrepreneurs didn’t have that ability, this country would have stagnated and died. I am a huge believer in that. Capitalism 101. If entrepreneurs don’t have the ability to risk everything, everything stops growing. But if entrepreneurs have an out, then guess what? They can risk everything.

So it’s scary at first, but I promise you it’s a lot less scary to risk everything now, then it is when you have a whole bunch of stuff. So now is the time for you guys to risk everything because you don’t have that much. I don’t want to be a jerk, but it’s true. Now is the time to risk things. It gets harder and scarier when you have people and money and all these kind of things.

I always tell people, for you, you have to figure out what is the worst case scenario if you fail? It gets people to look at that thing straight in the eyes and say, I’m okay with that. That is the key to be able to risk stuff. Because a lot of times there’s this fear of, the worst case scenario, something bad is going to happen and they can’t be successful. You gotta stop and write down for you right now, if you were to fail, if you were to go and get a bunch of credit cards and blow it on mastering your craft and getting around the best people in the world and raising your vibration, everything, what’s the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario, you go bankrupt.

You go bankrupt, what happens? You can’t get a credit card for like a day or two maybe. You can’t get a home loan. Okay, well you’re going to have to rent. Can you rent? I don’t know, hopefully. There’s programs, the country….I know I’ve rented to people who, there are things. Anyway, maybe it’s financially responsible. I’m not a financial planner, don’t listen to me. I’m just saying that if I was in that same situation and I was starting all over again, I wouldn’t worry about that. I would not worry about that.

I have built and lost everything twice now, and guess what? It was alright. It’s okay, but the biggest thing is if you don’t build something, you don’t try something, if you don’t go deep on something, then you’ll never know, you’ll never know. Anyway, make sure you clear it with your spouse first to get their buy in, I’m just saying. Those people in the back of the room at Grant Cardone, if they had run to the back and invested I think it was $2,000, that’s not that much. If they would have invested $2,000 they would have gotten the exact same thing that Brandon and Kaelin got.

Those of you who listen to the podcast, you’ve heard me talk about them. Brandon and Kaelin were down to their last money. The network marketing company they were in ended up kind of falling apart, they stepped away from it. They had zero dollars left in their account. They had a credit card and a couple of other things and they saw my pitch for funnel hacks, it was $1,000. They watched it and they were like, “We have to buy it, we have to buy it. We don’t have a thousand bucks.” They were freaking out and finally decided, “We’re going to buy it.” I wish they were on here right now to tell this story because it’s awesome.

So they said they were going to buy it and then Brandon was going to buy it, and going to buy it and then he wussed out. He’s like, “I’m not going to do it.” So he didn’t buy it. Instead he went to Clickfunnels.com and paid $100 for Clickfunnels. He went back to Kaelin and said, “I didn’t do it. I just bought the $100 thing.” And she’s like, “We said we were going to buy it.” And he’s like, “I know. We don’t have any money.” And she’s like, “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have any money anyway. Who cares if we buy something with it. We don’t have any money.” Zero and negative $1000 is pretty much the same thing. It’s not changing the quality of your life.

So they went back and ended up buying the $1000 thing and she was pissed because now they were $1100 in debt as opposed to $100 and then guess what they did? They had something they were really passionate about. She had lost, I don’t know, 60 pounds. She was in weight, she was already passionate about something, she’d already gone through the growth. She had already filled that. Now she was transitioning, they were transitioning to need to share this with other people.

So what did they do? They did similar to what I did. For them, they did it a little different, this is what I recommend for you guys though. They bought the Funnel Hacks training and then they watched video number one. They started watching it and as soon as they got into it, they paused it and they did that thing. They pushed play again, they started doing, they did that thing. They implemented what I said. Paused it. Did that thing. Pushed play, pause, play, pause. And for two or three months or weeks, I can’t remember how long it was. That’s all they did.

They put it all in place and when it was done, they launched their business. They’re initial launch, I think it was Thanksgiving or Christmas, they were driving to their families and they told me that they had enough gas money to get there, but no gas money to get back. So they filled the gas in their car, started driving, they got down to their families house, they were staying in a room and they started going through it and they launched this thing and luckily for them they rolled it out and made $20,000, that paid for gas money to get back.

And then they started geeking out, started plugging in, they started doing what I did. Again, I didn’t want to learn copywriting, but when I found out you change a headline you change 13 words and you give yourself a thousand dollar a day raise, it suddenly becomes really interesting. So they plugged in the podcast and I watched these guys over the next year, over the next two years and it was crazy.

I would do something, I remember I did a podcast where I was on a webinar with Jason Flatlien, who is one of the best webinar performers on this planet, at the end of the webinar Jason did this weird thing for 90 minutes. I was so pissed at him because I thought he was going to kill webinar sales. Turns out he doubled our webinar sales, on the drive home I was doing the podcast and I’m like, “Holy crap! Flatlien pulled this thing out of his butt. He did this thing, I never even heard of it, doubled, literally 2x’d our sales.” The podcast went live the next day.

Brandon and Kaelin listened to the podcast, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson.” Which is the same thing I used to say when I’d be like, “Freaking Dan Kennedy. Freaking Michael Thornton. Freaking John Carl.” All the guys I studied. They’d some little nugget and I’d try it.

So they said that, they went back and added the same thing to the end of their webinar and they messaged me back, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson. We did it to our webinar. Doubled sales.” I was like are you kidding me? And every single thing, they listened to my podcast and they’d tell me every time I’d say something, they’d take it and try it and Brandon said, “We’re like a week behind you on your implementation. You do it, we implement it a week later and we’re doing it, and doing it.”

And I want you guys to understand, that’s when this game becomes fun. It’s when you realize that man, listening to Russell rant about this stupid thing, if I add this one little piece, all the sudden I go from helping 100 people a day to 120 people a day, that’s pretty cool. My bank account goes from $1200 a day to $1300 a day. You gave yourself a $100 raise today, are you kidding me? People don’t do that.

We used to have a big mantra in our old office, we’d always say, we’d come in and be like, “How can we give ourselves a raise today? How can we give ourselves a raise today?” And it was like looking for that gold nugget. Looking for that little thing. Looking for that headline, split test, that tweak that I did, that little nugget. What could we do that’d different? That’s how the 108 split tests book was born.

I was able to do a lot more split testing before Todd Dickerson, my partner in crime in CLickfunnels, we used to build the best sales funnel we could, we’d get it out there live, pre-clickfunnels, it was a pain in the butt. We’d build the whole thing out, and get it live. Todd would login, he’d use visual website optimizer, it was our split test tool at the time, he’d split up like a thousand different tests and try to beat my control. And he always did, pretty much every time.

And that was the goal, I made the best version we can, Todd let’s see if you can beat it? And he would test, test, test, test and he beat it, beat it, beat it again, beat it again. And it was like every day, how do we give ourselves a raise today? That was the game we played and that’s how the 108 split tests book was born. That’s how half of what I know about funnels was born at that time. We were just testing every funnel variation idea, planning pages, template, idea, everything we could we dream of for a 2 ½ 3 year period of time, it’s how I became who I am today. It’s how I became the dude who probably knows more about funnels than any human being on earth because I hacked more funnels, tested more funnels, we did more than anybody.

And during that time of growth, that was the growth time for us, we were doing it on 12 companies we owned. We were doing it for a whole bunch of other people, which by the way, that’s a story for another podcast, don’t do 12 companies at once. But that’s what we were doing, that’s how we mastered this craft. That’s how I know more about funnel psychology, I believe, than anyone on earth. Because I did it. I did more of it. We tested so many thing. I was like, holy crap. I thought for sure this would have won. But this won, and this didn’t win. This helped on page one, but it made page three conversion go down. I got my gift because of the insane amounts of work that Todd and I did during that time.

Todd and I and my entire team, by the way. We didn’t have it nice like you guys have now days. I went on a little rant to someone on my team the other day, we get people now to come to Clickfunnels who first off, they don’t use Clickfunnels the way it’s made. So those of you guys who are having bugs, I want you to hear this. Because if you have bugs, it’s because you’re trying to do crap that Clickfunnels is not made to do. You’re hacking things and you’re doing stuff. If you use Clickfunnels the way it works, there’s not bugs. I don’t have bugs in my funnels. I don’t know why everyone’s got these bugs.

It’s because you’re trying to do things that you think are going to be better and they’re not. It’s because you’ve been listening to the Confusion Soft guru’s explaining why you need 55,000 different variations of funnels. If you just learn how to sell, all that crap would go away. Every time people say, “There’s all these bugs in Clickfunnels.” I’m like, “I’m not seeing them man, because I build funnels on it every single freaking day and I’m not seeing the bugs.”

There are little things here and there and we fix them as they pop up. But for the most part, you are creating bugs by trying to do stuff that does not matter. So that’s number one. Number two, you’re paying between $100-300 a month for the software. We had a really, really bad competitor come out, which we’ve had I’d say probably at least 30-40 Clickfunnels killers who have come out in the last 3 years since we launched Clickfunnels. They all come and go and they all try to undercut us in pricing.

I always get all these people like, “So and so cut you out.” And maybe someday we’ll have a big competitor, I mean who knows. I’m excited for that day, I actually enjoy competition. Some of you may probably have noticed. I got no problems with that. When I was wrestling, all I tried to do was fly around the country to find the best in the world so I could learn to beat them so I’m game. Anyone wants to step up legitimately, please do. But please don’t come in here disguised like, “We’re going to beat them by undercutting their price” Everyone’s coming out like, “You’re losing all your customers because they’re undercutting your price.”

I’m like, “Are you kidding me? The people who complain about spending $100 a month to run their entire company, I don’t want them as customers.” In fact, we’re honestly thinking about doubling or tripling our prices just to show, to give the virtual finger to everyone who’s trying to undercut us. We don’t want those customers. You can go there. If you can’t spend $100 to run your company, you should not be running a business at this point and time. Honestly, that’s how I feel.

I want to walk you through a walk down memory lane at how we used to build funnels because this is the reality of how it used to work. We would have an idea, I would then have to go funnel hack dozens of people to see what would be the best thing, so I’d probably spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars funnel hacking a bunch of people’s things. Because I didn’t have a way to mock up templates. So I’d funnel hack and take tons of screen shots of all these templates of all these different pages and then I’d have to go to one of my designers, I had a bunch through the years. I’d show them, “This is the process I think would be best. I think I want a landing page here, and this, this, this. I want this from this guys funnel. I like this over from this one. I want this from here.”

So I’d map out the funnel process I wanted to test. But I want this guys design but this over here…..it was a nightmare. So our designers would go and try to create a page but I’d be like, “No, but this and that…” and it would literally be 6-8 weeks of us going back and forth just getting the design and the funnel structure right. They’d have to hand code everything. So we’d get all this done. Then we’d have to go and after we got all the pages done, so it looked good, we’d go back to our developers and say, “okay, here are all the pages, here’s the order forms, here’s everything. Now you gotta actually make this work.” So they’d have to go and custom and go into PHP and coding and sequel database to build up so the order form would actually work. We actually went to a database, they’d have to set up the security certificates, they’d have to set up all the API’s to go to the 20 or 30 different things that we would need.

And it would take the developers on average, probably another 30 days to hook up all of those things. So my cost just in salaries at that point and time were probably at $15, maybe $20 grand in salaries just to get all these things done to that point. Then we still had to write the copy, which eventually I started liking copy, so I did a lot more of that myself. But prior, I started having a lot of copywriters. I would spend on average between 10-15 grand for every sales letter we would write. Whether it was somebody else, or it would be my own time, which would take me probably 6 weeks or so to write all the copy for a funnel.

We would then plug all those things in, and we’d be 3 months, conservatively 3 months and usually a little more than that, and conservatively about $30 grand per funnel in. Before we could test it. Before we could test it.

So for you guys to be like, “That’s $100 and I could only build 30 funnels. I still have to get an SMTP mailer to send my emails out.” I have no empathy for that. None, zero. I want you to leave us and go to the competitors. Please, for the love. Leave us, go for the $37 option. I want you to be their nightmare clients, I do not want you to be using Clickfunnels. I don’t have any empathy. Zero. Not one iota of empathy for you if you cannot pay $100 or even $300…..if you cannot pay $300 to run your company, you are not an entrepreneur, you should leave this business. Honestly, you should just stay as an artist and go to the beach and do your thing and have a hat out there to get tips. That is your level of being an entrepreneur. I don’t know what else to tell you. Please leave. You can go, you have my permission. I don’t not want or need your money.

But if you were trying to freaking change the world and sell stuff and make a business, that’s what we’ve given you. If you wanted super insane, complex stuff, you may have outgrown Clickfunnels. That’s fine, if you’ve outgrown Clickfunnels, go hire people to custom code stuff, I’m okay with that. You’re going to be like, “Oh your software’s buggy.” It’s like you’re trying to customize crap that your should be spending 20 or 30 grand on, like we used to. You can do that. Go for it. You have my permission to leave. I do not need your $297 that bad. I promise you that.

The headaches that go to some people who are trying to, who are complaining to me about the bug they find when they try to add the 47th upsell on the 13th email sequence if somebody clicks yes versus no, twice instead of once. That’s not what we’re made to do. And the reason why, after freaking testing a million things when you go back and do it the way I had to do it, those three months and that $30 grand was for the initial test. Then Todd would have to go split test a whole bunch of things and then guess what we found out? Half the time we’d get the pages to convert but the funnel wasn’t profitable.

So then we’d have to come back and say okay, this entire funnel didn’t work so we have to rebuild the upsell, downsell sequence. I had to go back to the drawing board and it’s not me spending 15 minutes in Clickfunnels, cloning the page and doing a split test. No. It was me hiring another copywriter to write a new version of the video sales letter. It was me figuring out new layouts and designs and functionality and trying to re-custom freaking code all that crap from the ground up, then we’d have to go re-build the entire funnel, then re-launch it, drive new traffic. If the funnel didn’t work we’re into another $10-15 grand in for the second test. “Oh my. $300 costs so much. I can only do 400 split tests at once.” I’ve got no mercy for you okay.

Sorry for the rant, but this freaking important. Alright, so the reason why my funnels are simple, and I want you guys to understand this, is because your funnels need to be simple. I learned this from having to custom code stuff. If I made these complex freaking funnels that everyone thinks are so cool now days, because of Confusion Soft and others, they draw these little diagrams and they try to impress their clients by how complex their funnels can be, that’s not going to serve you at all.

I want you to understand this, that will not serve you. It will screw you up and you’ll be finding bugs in Clickfunnels because it’s not build to do what you’re trying to do. With the design hack-a-thon happening next week, we are building out 30 types of funnels. These are the funnel structures you should use. You should work to plug the crap you are selling into these funnel structures, not the other way around. You should not try to say, “oh I got this good idea, I’m going to do 14 upsells and then I’m going to have a mini survey on upsell number two and then I’ll sell them this.” No, just plug the crap you have into the existing stuff.

The tiny potential maybe incremental sales you could get by tweaking this thing, is not worth….I promise you that if you put the same effort and same time and money and energy into hiring a better copywriter or mastering….there’s a dude who I pay $100 to write each headline for me. When we have an offer I’ll give him a thousand bucks and say, “Write me ten headlines.” That’s a better investment of your time than trying to have 16 different upsells. Because having a different headline can change your conversion. That will do more for you than the complexity that you’re trying to do.

My rant is over. I think it’s over. Should it be over? I just want you guys to understand that. Clickfunnels is built for customers like me, who want to get a message out quickly. They want to take the best proven practices, and they want to focus on the stuff they can control. If you want a cheaper option because you feel like $100 is too much to invest in the entire background and infrastructure of your business, you have my permission to go. I hope you enjoy it. And when your business makes enough money that you can switch, we will gladly welcome you back. Or you can do what the wise man did and built his foundation on a rock.

I don’t know if you guys remember that song from Sunday school but the wise man built his house upon the rock, and the foolish man built his house upon the sand. And when the rains came tumbling down, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up and the man on the sand washed. And the man on the rocks stood still. This is primary songs 101, guys.

So if you want to build your house upon the sand, go the cheap option you should. You definitely should. And if and when you want to get super complex, if there’s reasons and cases, Clickfunnels wasn’t built for, don’t feel bad you guys. I’m okay with that. You can outgrow us. Clickfunnels is a company that’s built for businesses in this certain range and I understand that and I respect that. That’s who we want to serve. If we try to serve everybody, we will not succeed either.

So a lot of times if you guys come to us and you’re like, “Oh, this is a bug, this is a bug.” A lot of times we’ll hear that and say, “It’s not a bug. It’s the limitation that we have put on our software because that’s not something that we want our users doing.” Because if we open that to everybody then it adds a whole other level of complexity. Clickfunnels is already complex, I don’t want to add more complexity. I want to make more simplicity.

I honestly, if I wouldn’t have uproarings and riots in the streets right now, I would take away some of our features. I would pull things out, I would simplify a lot of stuff. And you will notice over the next year or so, we have a bunch of new UI people and new teams coming in and our goal is simplification. Trying to make things more simple and easier, not more complex. Like, “Russell, what’s the newest feature coming to Clickfunnels?” There are some cool new things coming out, but at the same time a lot of its simplification.

At Funnel Hacking Live we opened up Actionetics and someone messaged me the other day, “you had this cool feature in Actionetics, it was the best thing you have and then you guys pulled it away two weeks later. Why did you guys do that?” I’m like, “Two reasons, number one: What people were doing was making smart lists that have literally 800 different things in there. I understand you guys want to be segmented, but I promise you that level of segmentation, it hurts you more than it will ever help you. And number two: It destroys our database. It’s not good. If you want that kind of complexity, please go and build that on your own. But this is for, Clickfunnels is built for entrepreneurs to move quickly.” The opportunity, you being able to launch two funnels instead of one is the difference. That’s the goal of it.

I’ve been going for a long time you guys. I don’t even know where I’m at. I hope I haven’t passed where I’m going. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast, it’s been a lot of fun. I hope you guys actually listened to the whole thing. There were a lot of really, really cool stuff that I really wanted to share with you guys in here. I hope you got a lot of value out of it.

To recap, don’t be a bleh, build your empire, become unbalanced and focus on becoming who you need to be, and then after you’ve done that and you’re ready to transition to contribution then shift your balance and be obsessed with the marketing of it, have fun with it. This game is fun you guys. Every day I wake up and I’m like, I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I had a two hour drive today and I can’t believe I get to hang out with you guys and share and talk and based on my stats, between YouTube and our podcasts, we’ll have between 15 and 20,000 people who will listen to this whole entire thing. It’s crazy.

20,000 people and if each of you got one little nugget out of that thing and I gave 20,000 of you guys the ability to affect an extra 10 people, that’s 200,000 people that we affected. And if you’re able to get an extra 100 people, that’s 2 million people I was able to affect. If you get an extra thousand that’s 20 million people. It’s insane the ripple effect. I hope that I didn’t waste any of your time and you guys got something, one or two or three little nuggets.

But look at these things that way. Go into this, go into everything, go into your study time, go into your podcast, I’m putting out a lot of content and I’m hopefully making it entertaining and fun for you guys, but you’re always looking for that one little thing, “oh, that’s how Russell….” I had probably a dozen people message me when they saw how I do my….One of the Funnel Hacker TV episodes I had my Expert Secrets board and I finished the Expert Secrets book and I closed the board and they saw that. That’s how you manage your projects. Now I see how you get so much stuff done. Everything’s compartmentalized. You have your teams, different projects, and trello’s the way you do it. That little thing was huge for people. One little nugget, and you never know where they’re going to be picked up. You never know when gold’s going to be dropped and you can grab it.

So plug in, immerse yourself in this stuff you guys. My goal is to get your vibration up to mine so you can be as passionate as I am, because if you are, that’s how you’re going to change the world. That’s how I’m going to change the world. I can’t do it without you. So I need you guys there. So step in, plug in, have fun, enjoy the process, simplify your funnels, and build your company upon a rock. With that said you guys, I appreciate you all and I will see you guys soon. Bye everybody.

View Details

Behind the scenes of how we were able to profitably grow our company without taking on any capital.

On this special episode with Brent Coppieters from Russell’s team, they talk about some behind the scenes things that need to be figured out while you are growing and scaling your company. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

How Brent has figured out how to structure teams with leads to make everything as efficient and smooth as possible.
Why they hire Clickfunnels users to work on support teams in Clickfunnels.
And why Russell wants everyone near him to max out their tax brackets.

So listen here to find out some important behind the scenes things you have to think about when you’re in the process of growing your business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I’m here today with Brent Coppieters on the Marketing Secrets podcast.

So everyone, I got a really special podcast for you today, I’m so excited for. Right now, where are we at?

Brent: Kauai

Russell: Kauai, Hawaii. This has been our backyard for the last week, and we’re heading home tomorrow, which is kind of sad. But I wanted to get Brent in here to help you guys out. Because obviously in the Marketing Secrets podcast I talk a lot about the marketing stuff, and Brent has been with me now for over a decade. How long is it actually?

Brent: Eleven years at the end of July.

Russell: Eleven years, dang that’s crazy. So that’s when you started? Was anyone else here when you first got started officially?

Brent: Anyone who’s here now?

Russell: Brittany? Was she here?

Brent: Brittany came in after. I don’t think anybody else who was here before I started is still here.

Russell: So Brent’s been the longest, long term person, except Doral maybe. Doral in Romania. We got a Romanian. Our backlight is kind of lit, it’s hard to see us. Brent’s been around for forever and done tons of different roles. Right now he runs the entire operations of Clickfunnels so I wanted to have him kind of talk about the stuff because it’s a big part of growing and scaling a company that we don’t talk about a lot.

But first do you want to talk about your back story, as far as getting into this whole thing. It’s kind of a funny story.

Brent: How much back story do you want?

Russell: We should move over here to the couch so you can see a little better. So I met Brent at church initially. Do you want a pillow?

Brent: Yeah.

Russell: That’s how planned these things are. What was one of the first impressions, about this whole business, when you got introduced to it? Because I know a lot of people got through that, especially spouses or friends or potential employees or partners that don’t know this world at all, it’s kind of weird at first.

Brent: Yeah, I had no idea. I was at, met Russell through a church function and didn’t really know what he did. When I kind of thought he made money on the internet, I initially thought eBay, he sold stuff on eBay or you know, I had no idea. I really couldn’t understand. So he had some of the business partners and friends that he kind of worked with at the time and I kind of pulled those guys apart and was kind of asking those guys, “What does he really do?” and one of our mutual friends, he knew that I didn’t understand so I talked to my wife who said, “I don’t know what this Russell Brunson guy’s doing, but it is freaking crazy.” Our friend was sharing the numbers that Russell was doing.

He was going to University, I was going to school as well. He was making more money than my parents combined income was, more money than they had ever made. So I was like, I gotta find out what this guy’s doing. So, like any friend, we invited him and wife over for dinner on a Sunday afternoon. So I just started asking him really carefully, “What are you doing? What exactly is this?” And he just kind of started sharing what he was up to, what he was doing. Obviously he doesn’t brag about what he’s doing, the success he was having and he was having tremendous success.

After they left, we had a good dinner and visited and then they left. I couldn’t sleep for three days. My head was spinning.

Russell: I ruined him.

Brent: You did, I was screwed at that point. After that happened I couldn’t fathom the success. But what was more important there was the value he was providing the world.

Russell: Was that before or after all our kids, we had twins and they had their first son the week before. I can’t remember if it was before or after.

Brent: We had met you before, we’d been friends for a little while. I think that we had our kids and you guys moved right after that.

Russell: All I remember is we had our twins we were in the NSU for two weeks basically. So we rented a hotel room in the hospital and just hung out there and goofed off, and I remember he was coming. “Don’t you have to go to work, or what are you doing?” He thought I was going to go…

Brent: Yeah, I told my wife, “We gotta take dinners over there or something, we gotta help them because they’re in the hospital with these twins because they can’t leave and he can’t work because he’s in the hospital.”

Russell: Little did they know the internet was working.

Brent: I had no clue.

Russell: So that was fun, so then a little while later, Brent started working for us. Initially it was affiliate management for how many years? You did that for a long time.

Brent: Yeah, like 8,9 years, roughly. The hats were always being moved but…

Russell: It’s a small company, you do a lot of everything.

Brent: Yeah, so probably 8 years to really focus on business development, affiliate management and partners and stuff like that.

Russell: And, just so everyone knows, I recently on the podcast had the presentation I gave from Funnel Hacking Live, the One Funnel Away, about the stories, and I talked about Brent in that and it made me cry in the middle of my presentation, it was kind of embarrassing. But you were here for the good and bad. When we went from 5 employees up to 100 and back down to 5 and all the stress up and down. I’m curious, honestly why you didn’t leave when everything collapsed and crashed.

Brent: That’s a good question.

Russell: I don’t know the answer either.

Brent: You’re going to get me vulnerable. Working with an entrepreneur, especially Russell, you know where their heart is and there came a point where he was trying to help too many people. He was employing a lot of friends and family and people that he wanted to provide opportunities for and that was great to a certain point. But there was a point there where the business changed a little bit, evolved and we were needing to make some changes with it. And those changes wouldn’t allow him to support everyone he was supporting.

That was very difficult for him. My wife and I, we cared and loved Russell and Collette and their family. We came to a point where I didn’t want to be a burden, I knew he was stressed and worried about taking care of people. I had a conversation with my wife, where I said I would rather keep our friendship, than have him feel stressed about supporting, having an opportunity for me to keep working there.

So one day I kind of came into your office, and had a real chat. I probably said some things that, I wanted him to understand how important what he was doing was, and also I wanted him to understand that I was okay to leave. I didn’t want him to feel like he needed to provide for me. I would be fine to figure things out. I just wanted to make sure he was okay. Because it was at the point where you were helping so many people, really one hiccup you could have lost everything. All your savings was going back into the company and at some point you just can’t keep doing that.

Russell: Yeah, I got really scared, but somehow we pulled it around.

Brent: Pulled it around and obviously you had to make some tough phone calls and decisions that changed the company at that point.

Russell: Basically we had to, we had 100 and some odd employees, we had all these wrestlers working for me, we had let go the whole wrestling team. We had to downsize. We shrunk from a 20,000 square foot building to 2000. It was rocky and scary but it gave us the ability to refocus and figure things out. Remember we went on a couple trips where we were trying to figure out who were the people still having success in our market. We jumped in a plane traveling to different people’s offices. We spent time with Ryan Dyson and Perry Belcher, trying to figure out what they were doing. With Alex Chafren, what they were doing. People who were our friends, just kind of used this time to figure out what’s actually working today and how do we shift our business model and change everything.

It’s funny how much pain there was during that time. We flew to London. How important it was for the transition for what became Clickfunnels and everything else.

Anyway, so many fun stories we could talk about forever. But we don’t have time for all those things. What I want to talk about a little today is, probably a year into the business when we first started growing, it’s funny I got a message today from Alex Chafren, he’s like, “You sound so calm.” Probably because we’re here in Hawaii but he was like, “I don’t know any other person running a hundred million dollar company that’s as relaxed and able to respond to people.”

Anyway, when we first started, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was just kind of like, we know how to sell stuff. Started selling Clickfunnels, it started growing and all the sudden all sorts of new headaches came up with that. From a software standpoint with Todd and we brought in Ryan and they had to deal with infrastructure, ups and downs. I think based on ranking we’re the 700th most visited website in the world. But that’s not counting anyone’s custom domains. If you take away custom domains, we’re probably in the top 500 websites in the world.

There’s not many humans on earth that have ever dealt with that kind of scaling and infrastructure. Todd had never done it, Ryan had never done it. They’re figuring this stuff along the way and we’re hiring consultants. On the marketing side we’re trying to grow and then all these things and as everything was growing one thing we didn’t have in place was any of the internal company business stuff. We were good sales people, good coders but we had to do that.

It was funny because, you’d never had experience with that either though.

Brent: Not really, no.

Russell: We had this time where internally there were, everything was shaking and we said basically “Brent, we’re going to take you from affiliate management and you’re going to run this role.” And didn’t know what to expect, if it was going to work or not going to work. He was able to step into this thing and turned it really simplified. I’ve had zero stress about that part of the business since you took it over. From that time we went from 20 employees to I don’t even know where we’re at now.

Brent: 135 or something. Employees and contractors, we got a few different folks.

Russell: Lots of people. So I’d love to talk, first you step in that role and it was probably disorganized and stuff. What were your thoughts? What did you have to go and figure out? What’d you have to learn to be able to turn it into what it is now?

Brent: I think the big thing is Russell’s vision for the company. We’d worked together long enough that I knew where he wanted to go. Even inherently just kind of knew. The big thing about Russell is his ability to surround himself with good people. That was the first part, evaluating who we have currently. Are they on the right seat on the bus, is a big part of that too. So we tested different things, and some things worked and some things didn’t work very well.

We brought people and we started the phone stuff a little bit with the clickstart program and some of those guys were better than others and we’ve evolved that program. But the big thing about it is obviously support. We had, when you guys initially started hiring support team members, those guys were rock stars, and a lot of those guys are still with us today. They have evolved in their positions in the company because of their commitment and their love of Clickfunnels. I love when I get to interview and talk to people and when those individuals say, “I love Clickfunnels.” That is the coolest compliment that we can get. When get people that raise their hand, they want to work with us because they love Clickfunnels, they love the mission, they love the ability to help people.

I think the biggest challenge was how do we grow with it? Because the marketing side, was growing so fast, it’s important that we’re providing and helping our users and helping them have the best experience possible. Also, Clickfunnels isn’t just some easy push button software. It is easy to use once you understand it, but there’s a lot of different parts of it and understanding marketing is a big part of it.

So we needed to bring on people who could understand Clickfunnels, who understood marketing and also understood Russell’s style, the way you were taking everything.

Russell: It’s crazy because I think when you took over the role of that, it wasn’t just support but that was a big piece of it, obviously. There’s probably what, a dozen support people at the time?

Brent: Yeah, there was probably about 6 to 10. Well, probably 10.

Russell: 10 at the time. You found a way to take that….it’s funny because one of the criticism sometimes of Clickfunnels is “Support’s not live all the time. Awebber’s live.” Awebber’s been growing for 20 years. They probably get 4 new signups a day. Clickfunnels right now, it’s been a while since I looked at the stats, but it’s anywhere from 500 to a thousand sign ups a day, every single day. Coming to Clickfunnels and trying to learn this huge platform that runs your entire company. How do we stay in front of that.

Our goal eventually is to get to the point where it’s real time support or as close to that as possible. But there’s no one else in our space that’s ever had to deal with that. That have grown companies that fast. Most big companies like Strive don’t have any support at all because they’re like, we can’t therefore we don’t. We still need to have that support and education and stuff like that in place.

I think what you did initially, I know that Ryan was a part of this. Ryan Montgomery helped set this up initially too. But just for those that don’t have support teams or maybe have three or four people and are starting to scale something, you kind of broke people into teams. Do you want to talk about some of that initial stuff that you guys did there to make the scaling side of support easier?

Brent: Yeah, so we moved over to Intercom, that allowed us to do like live support. It wasn’t right live, but people could submit conversations and we’d respond to them and that’s what we used to start. We’ve grown, our response time, that’s how we kind of gauge our success, our response time. There’s a lot of software companies that offer live support, from 8-5. Ours is essentially turned on 24 hours, we’ve got team members all around the world. When we initially started we actually had an international team and we had more domestic teams, but as we realized, and continued to scale and grow, we had more and more people international. We’ve got international folks on every team. We’ve got domestic folks on every team. So they can kind of work that schedule out as needed.

But as we came in we saw the amount of conversations we had, these guys are answering 8-9 thousand conversations a week, our support team. It is crazy. Our billing support is unreal. We’ve got a team of billing support team members and most of them are in our office. We’ve got a few individuals who aren’t. But the big part of it is having leadership being in those positions. So every support team we have has a team lead who is the person we reach out to and help with training and they now can pass the messages and training on to the other team members.

Russell: So how many teams do we have right now?

Brent: So technical support teams, we have 8 technical support teams. We have one billing support team. We’ve got one team that focuses on some other different partners we have and worked with in the past. We’ve got a team that helps with our Quickstart program, that’s a program people can signup with and it allows them to get some help on the initial setup and we’ve got a team lead that helps run that team.

Russell: The thing that’s cool about this, for any of you guys who are scaling, in fact this is what happened at first when we were scaling. There was one person in charge and had 10 people underneath them and we were trying to grow and everything was growing and that person couldn’t handle any more growth. Because it’s hard to have more than 8 to 10 people you report to. You get bigger than that, it gets stressful and it’s really, really hard. So what Brent did, he came in and said, “Okay, the people we have that are rock stars, make each of those a team lead. And let’s put employees underneath each of those and the team lead can train the employees and make sure they’re doing good. And he’s only got to deal with the 8 or 10 team leads, deal with them and then they are dealing with the individual people. It gives us a communication channel to get through and now he’s not having 90 direct reports back to him. He just has the 8.

Another cool thing we did recently, because the other big thing we have and some of you guys will have something similar with your businesses is, there was a competitor that has software that has pages that generate leads. Their software does one thing, there’s one button you can click and that’s it. It’s very, very simple. Clickfunnels is like, we’re building a landing page, your funnel, your shopping cart, your affiliate platform, your auto-responders, there’s 8 thousand things. For us, we can’t just hire someone in Boise, Idaho and be like, “Hey, now you’re a support person for Clickfunnels.” There’s such a learning curve they have to understand to be able to do that.

So a couple of things, number one is that most of our hires come from people that are members of our software, which is a big thing for you guys to think through. In inner circle this comes up all the time. Where do I find rock stars? I guarantee the rock star you’re dreaming for is already a customer of your product right now. Look at your internal customer base for your rock stars, because they’re going to know your product, be passionate, they’re going to care more than someone you pull off the street. That’s number one.

Number two is we needed, how do we train these people? I think initially each team lead just trained their people, and they were getting bogged down in the training and not being able to support and manage and stuff like that. So we talked about a new team that’s the training team, right?

Brent: Well a big part of this that helped, Mark came up and helping work, he does a lot more direct work with the team leads.

Russell: You guys know Mark Bangerter, he’s killing it, he’s awesome.

Brent: You know he still kind of balances customer education and he helps with support management. So Mark came in and we had the idea, we brought new people on and initially they would slow down the rest of the team. So we pulled another team lead out, we pulled out Andrew Newman, and now his focus is just training. So as we bring new team members on, he’s focusing on those guys. As we look at, he doesn’t have anybody currently to teach, he’s reaching out to people who have been on the team and maybe lack knowledge about Backpack or Actionetics, and then he’s pulling those guys out and he’s doing training with those guys so that we can get everybody up to the same level.

Russell: That’s cool. We did something like that back when we had our big call center before the big crash of what year was that? Crash or 08, crash of 09. Because we had 60 sales guys and the problem is the same thing. We’d hire sales guys off the street and someone’s gotta train them, so we had a training team. So every sales guy would come in and go through a two week training with Robbie Summers was the one that managed that and then the ones that were good we’d then put them on the floor under another team. And the ones that sucked, we’d just get rid of them.

And that’s kind of the same thought here. Let’s bring people in and have someone who’s dedicated to training them and when they’re ready, then put them on a team so they can start running with it. Everybody’s opposed to pulling people back.

It’s just crazy all these, these are all the things we’re learning as we’re growing and scaling. Someday we’re going to write a book about this whole journey and this whole experience, because I think a lot of times companies are built like, there’s a dude with an idea, they hire venture capitalists and bring in a management team, all this stuff and build a company. Whereas with us it was like raw passion and that’s what’s grown this whole thing and kept it afloat. It’s been a fun ride so far.

Brent: It’s been an unbelievable ride.

Russell: So I appreciate all your work and help and everything you do. Hopefully this gives some of you guys ideas as your growing your support teams or development team or management or whatever those things are. If you look at also, I had someone, it was Andrew Warner from Mixer the other day, he interviewed me, he’s like, “How are you able to write books and run a software company and do coaching and all these different things?” And the same thing is kind of what Brent mentioned earlier, I’ve gotten really good at surrounding myself with amazing people. Where I feel like it’s almost like there’s parts of the company that people are running. You’re running all the operational stuff, I don’t have to worry about that, the hiring and firing, the finding other people. Brent does that. So I just talk to Brent and then all the people stuff is taken care of.

Todd and Ryan run the development team, Todd’s running it. I talk to Todd all the time, but it’s just happening and I don’t have to stress about that. I’m kind of running the marketing team. Dave’s running, there’s john, there’s probably 5 or 6 people that I deal with directly inside the company and I’m able to do the parts that I love the most, that I’m the best at. And I think a lot of us entrepreneurs and most of the people in those positions all get profit share and equity in the company and I think one of the big mistakes I made when I first got started was I was so protective, this is my, I wanted so much control over everything that I stifled everything. Whereas when I was able to give up control and bring in rock stars and people that have skill sets that I don’t and now, because they have a stake in the game, I don’t have to worry about everything, every decision, every single thing.

I trust Brent. He makes a thousand decisions a day that I never even questioned or think about because I trust him. Same thing with Todd, they know they do that because they’re willing and able to do that. So I think a lot of you guys, if you’re struggling with growth, you don’t have the ideas, you’re not going to bring on venture capitalists and destroy your soul and you want to grow something. The opposite of that is bring on really smart people and give them a stake in the game.

It’s kind of like Chet Holmes used to tell me, he said that in his company, everyone was based on a percentage of sales, there was no salary based people. He said what’s cool about that is that big months everyone gets big checks, small months everyone gets small checks but everyone’s in it together. I think that building teams that way is better than bringing in a bunch of money and hiring the right people, or hiring the best people. It’s hiring the right people and giving them incentive to where they can grow and do whatever they want.

In fact, I’m going to share one thing. This is cool. Am I allowed to share this, I probably can. This was, we had these accountants, most marketers don’t like accountants, but we had these accountants and every year I’d have to go the accounting meeting and then they would always talk about all the stuff to do to try to lower your, anyway, it was super annoying. It was the worst meeting of my year, I would lose all motivation and momentum for an entire week because I was so stressed out. I remember driving home from one of those so pissed off at the accountants for trying to ruin my happiness in life. And I remember in this podcast, I have to go find it, but I was like, “My goal is I want, not only am I going to max out my tax bracket but I’m going to have everyone I know around me, all my partners, all the people that are pushing this, I want to max out their tax bracket as well.”

We were talking about this earlier on this trip here in Hawaii, there’s probably half a dozen people or so on our team now, that have maxed out their tax bracket because of this whole concept that we’re talking about. That is the coolest feeling in the entire world.

Brent: It’s pretty awesome.

Russell: It’s pretty amazing. So there you go, Uncle Sam, there you go. Anyway, that’s all I got. You have anything else you want to add?

Brent: No, I just think, you said unbelievable, it truly is every day. How cool is it to be able to come and work with friends and good people that, it’s just a positive place. Our company culture is a big deal and you drive that and it’s been really fun to see people come into our office or just come into our business, our space and feel that, and even those who just work remote, we’ve got a lot of team members that work remote, most of them are. And it can be kind of a lonely road out there, but we do things to try to help them feel the love. Russell will send swag to people and just unexpected things that make people feel the love and help them know we appreciate them and that’s a big deal.

Russell: So here’s a question, for those who may want to join Clickfunnels team, how do they?

Brent: We have a link on Clickfunnels, at the bottom of Clickfunnels under Careers, but we’re always looking. If someone out there is passionate, you want to be able to find a place with us, hit me up. You can hit me up on Facebook, email, brent@clickfunnels.com, send me an email. I can direct you where to go, we have application up.

Russell: That’s awesome. Thanks man. So that’s a little behind the scenes of how the HR, the growth, the internal stuff, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Again, we’re just learning all this stuff along the way. Someday we’re going to write a book about it when it’s all done. Because the lessons we’ve learned along the way have been cool. So hopefully this gave you guys a couple of ideas and things as you’re growing and scaling your teams, and that’s all I got. Thanks everybody. Thanks Brent.

Brent: Absolutely. Thanks guys.

Russell: Bye.

View Details

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:

How Russell is able to still learn while on an anniversary trip with his wife, and make plans for business once he’s home.
How Russell plans to use the 50,000 letters a week rule in his own business.
And how he plans to add urgency and scarcity to his core products.

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.

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These two things are probably keeping you from charging what you want and selling what you want.

On this episode Russell talks about people pushing their own purchasing decisions on you, and why you shouldn’t do that. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

Why you shouldn’t push your own buying decisions on your customers, because people spend money differently.
And why you need to be willing to spend the amount you are asking others to pay for your product. Hint, it all has to do with karma.

So listen here to why you gotta spend money to make money and why you should never force others to spend money the same way you do.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to a special Hawaii edition of Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, my wife and I are in Hawaii right now, Kauai, actually, on our 15 year wedding anniversary. Well next week is technically our anniversary, but it’s been 15 years so we’re here with some of our friends who it’s also their 15 year. It’s been really great. We didn’t do a hotel this time, we actually AirBNB’d it, so I don’t know if you can see back here. I’ll show the AirBNB for those who are watching on Marketingsecrets.com you can see the video. If you’re on the podcast you can’t see this, but it’s crazy. This is the AirBNB we rented. It’s 5 or 6 thousand square feet on this private beach.

We have our own beach and we’re here right now hanging out. My wife just got soaked by a wave, we just got done getting massages. I’ve been kind of MIA for a little bit. I’ve got some content going out while I’m gone. Last week I had scout camp so I was gone for scout camp all week and little access to anything. And then this week I’ve been in Hawaii. I should have done, I was going to do some more stuff but you know, trips, it’s really difficult for me to unplug, and now that I’m unplugged it’s really difficult for me to plug back in, to be completely honest.

Anyway, it’s definitely interesting, but having a good time here. There’s dudes out kite boarding, I don’t know if you guys ever kite boarded before, but I’ve always wanted to kite board, so I may try that. It would be kind of fun actually.

I hope it’s not too windy for you guys to hear me. I was trying to figure out what I should share with you guys here to kind of give some inspiration or some thought or an idea for how you can better market your business with the things you’re doing. So I was thinking about that, what’s something that would be the biggest value for you guys and I think one of the biggest problems we have, and I’ve seen this ten times since we’ve been here in Hawaii, is that they place their own ability, the way they make their purchasing decisions on other people.

For example one of the things, I had a GoPro here, and I brought the GoPro and I had the little handle, but I forgot the little screw thing that screws the GoPro to the handle, so we go to the store. I was like, “Hey, I need to buy one of those screws.” And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t sell the screws.” I was like, “You have those handles right? Give me a handle then.” And he’s like, “But you just need a screw?” I’m like, “Yeah, but just give me the handle, I’ll just do that.” And he’s like, “Dude, it’s $47 for the handle, if you go down the road, two or three streets down there’s a place and they might sell screws there.” and I’m like, “No dude, just give me the handle.” And he’s like, “But it’s $47.” I was like, “I don’t care, I don’t want to drive two or three streets down the road to find a place that might sell a screw.” For me, the $47 is so much cheaper than the opportunity cost for me to go do that thing.

It was kind of funny and so many things happened like that. We tried to buy something, or do something and people are putting their purchasing decisions on, they would never do that, they’d never spend an extra $47 just to get a screw, because for them they’d do all these other things. I think a lot of times we get caught up that way with our customers. In fact, I’ve had people before be like, “They’ll never buy that.” I teach them in Expert Secrets and they’re creating the course and they’re like, “No one would ever pay $997 for that. No one would ever pay $400 for that or $500 for that.” Don’t put your purchasing decisions, the way you’d logically do things on somebody else. It has nothing to do with it.

You have to look at what your customer wants. If you create something they really, really want where what you’re creating is worth more than what it is you’re getting in return, the money, then they’ll buy it. If you create something that sucks, it’s not going to happen. It’s got to be something that’s amazing.

So many I think that people don’t sell stuff, or they don’t sell stuff for what it’s worth because in their mind they’re like, “I don’t think I would want to pay for that.” Which is another problem, it’s a mental thing you gotta get over as well. You’ve got to be willing to buy stuff too. But it’s just interesting how that’s such a barrier.

I remember when Justin and Tara, in our inner circle and Two Comma Club winners, when they came to inner circle, they had their real estate program, they were selling for $2000 and they paid $25 grand to join my inner circle and the first meeting all I basically told them is they should sell a $25,000 thing and they’re like, “My people won’t pay that.” And I’m like, “you paid it.” And they’re like, “Huh, we did pay you $25,000.” They valued that, they didn’t value the real estate education much because they already know it, they already do it. But the education they wanted they were willing to pay for that. And because they were willing to pay for it, they were able to ask for it. So they sent an email off to their list and sold 18 people at $25k the next week, it was crazy.

But it was just a little mindset shift. It’s interesting, I have a lot of people I know who will try to sell a thousand or a ten thousand, or a twenty five thousand dollar thing, but then they’re not willing to buy that from somebody else, and I think there’s a lot of incongruency. It’s really difficult to sell a $25,000 thing unless you’ve bought one before.

A big reason why I joined Dean Graziosi’s and Joe Polish’s group is because I know in the future I’m going to have a 100k group and I wanted to make sure I’d be willing to invest in myself that much before I ever asked somebody else to. It’s the same for you. It’s this weird karma thing, if you’re not willing to invest in yourself and your business, it makes it a lot harder for people to invest in your business. I think the reason why it’s easy for me to sell books is because I buy a lot of books. I love buying books, so it’s easy selling books. People who struggle with that, they’re like, “I never bought that in the past.” Well if you’re not going to buy it, then you’re not going to love it.

I buy, I probably shouldn’t say this on camera, but I spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month on supplements, depending on the month and if I’m refilling and stuff. So for me it’s easy to sell supplements because I buy a lot of supplements. There’s congruency and a lot of things that people don’t have.

So make sure that you’re buying stuff. Make sure that you’re not putting your buying beliefs on other people. These are all such important things. Check out this little swing from our tree here. But, these are just things that I think are important. There were probably 5 times while I’m here in Hawaii, where I just wanted to strangle people who are trying to place their buying decisions on me and I’m like, “Let me give you money. I just want this thing. Quit trying to talk me out of it.” It’s crazy.

So that’s what’s happening here in Kauai, Hawaii on our anniversary. We’ll be heading home next week, so by the time you watch this I’ll probably be home and back at it, which is exciting. We’ve got a lot of things coming up. The viral video we created with the Harmon Brothers is launching on September 15th. We are throwing an epic party which we are streaming everywhere, so you guys will be able to go see it. But we’re really going to try to set the Guinness world record at the launch party, with a whole bunch of influencers and other stuff. It’s going to be so crazy.

It was funny, we were planning this and Dave Woodward had all these crazy ideas that we’re really logical or possible, and that’s where greatness usually starts from, an idea that’s not logical or possible. And then he went and figured out a way to get it done and now we’re going to be doing it. So it’s crazy. I’ll share more details as it gets closer. But that’s kind of what I got for you guys today. So beware of putting your purchasing decisions on other people. Number two is beware of asking people to purchase things that you aren’t willing to purchase.

And again, if you’re a real estate coach you’re probably not going to buy real estate coaching, you might if you’re like me, I buy every marketing coaching program on earth. I’m obsessed with it. But I also invest in other things with those types of dollar amounts, it’s not incongruent for me to ask people for those things as well. Because not investing yourself is really painful and hard and annoying to try to get people to invest in your stuff. The money universe doesn’t work that way very well for whatever reason. So anyway, that’s what I got you guys. I hope you’re enjoying your day as much as I am, and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

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I got a whole bunch of questions this weekend about this topic and I want to give you my two cents.

On this episode Russell talks about listening to John Reese’s new podcast and people thinking he was talking trash about Expert Secrets. Here are some things you will hear in this episode:

Why despite a difference in opinion, Russell thinks that he and John Reese are both right about having (or not having) a personality on the front end of your business.
How having a personality in your business can 10x your sales.
And why an Amazon business is a good choice for someone that doesn’t want to be the personality at the front of a business.

So listen here to find out why Russell doesn’t believe that John was talking trash, and how can both be right.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast, this is a short one you’re going to get in the jeep while I’m going to grab my kids from the last day of scout camp.

Alright everyone, I wanted to shoot you guys a quick message because I have been up in the mountains for the last almost week now. I got a sweet beard. So those that can see my beard line, this is why I can’t invest in a beard oil company, or grow a beard for that matter. I don’t know why, I’ve never been able to. My brother’s got a beard that’s thicker than the hair on my head, so this is the best beard you are getting from Russell.

I wonder if I were to buy Rogaine and rub it on my beard parts. Sorry, I’m going back and forth in this little cab in the road with cars everywhere. Anyway, if it would actually grow in thick, I should try it someday, but I won’t because I don’t really want a beard to be completely honest.

So my message for you today, I’ve wanted to throw this in. So I was just in my buddy’s cabin and I tapped in the internet for a few minutes and got all these messages flying in and seeing what I missed in the last week. It’s funny, I got a bunch of people who messaged me about my man, John Reese’s podcast. So hopefully you guys are listening to it, if not go to iTunes and search the Wacky Minded John Reese. He is the dude who is the first guy to make a million dollars in our market. He is the one that inspired the Two Comma Club Award, and he has inspired so much of what I do and is someone who I appreciate. He has become a friend and he’s been a mentor and he’s just pretty much the man, so it’s worth it. Go search the Wacky Minded John Reese and plug in. He’s posted two podcasts as of today. I listened to both of them yesterday and they’re awesome, I love it.

But I got a bunch of people messaging me saying, “Did you listen to John’s podcast, at the very end he was totally talking trash about Expert Secrets.” I was laughing because I listened to the whole thing and at the end I was listening how he was talking about how he doesn’t believe people should need to be a personality and things like that to be successful in their business.

It’s funny because at that same moment, I Facebooked John and said how much I appreciate him and his podcast is amazing and stuff. Obviously, I look at things from a different angle than John does, it doesn’t mean anyone is right or wrong. That is what is so cool aobut this business. Marketing is, I always tell people this, it’s an art and a science. The science is the structure, like pages and all that kind of stuff that we talk about and geek out in our funnel world. And then the art is the stuff on top and people do it different ways and different business models require more or less of those types of things. So it kind of depends on what you’re trying to do and what you’re creating and things like that.

So the reason why I wrote Expert Secrets and why I’m so obsessed with the Market is because I believe in it so much. I believe that personality and connection with the audience are what people are craving. I think you can add an expert front end to any business and dramatically scale it, and we’ve proven it over and over and over again. And it’s awesome.

John was basically saying you don’t have to have that, and I think his message is right because a lot of people struggle because they’re not that person, they don’t want to be the personality, they don’t want to blog and Facebook and podcast and do the dog and pony show that I do every day. And I totally understand that and respect that. But what I am saying and proposing from an Expert Secrets standpoint is that if you do, you will take what you have and blow it up and catch it on fire.

I believe that I can go into any company that is a product based company focusing on traditional stuff and add an expert front end and at least 10x those companies. In fact, that’s a challenge, I want somebody to take me up on that. So I would say first off, John is right. Second off, I’m also right. So it’s just different ways to look at it.

John’s background is not, he talked about the podcast, he didn’t like being in the front and being all those kind of things, which I totally respect that. But when he did, he made a million dollars in a day, just saying. So there’s something to that, there’s power, the connection you can get with somebody blows things up, right. The connection is what gets people to share videos and gets people to talk about it, gets things to grow and all those things. Without that connection it’s harder to get, not impossible. In fact, I told someone, a peer wanted to start a business and asked me what I would recommend for them and just because of their personality, I told them they should start an Amazon business, that makes more sense for them in this spot in their life and personality. In an Amazon business you don’t have to have all those personality things, right. Just get a good product, a good price, a good description, images and doing the stuff to get it ranked.

If you want to take that and blow it up then I would find someone, if you’re not that person partner with somebody who could become the personality and use that person’s personality to blow it up. Because I could take any Amazon product off the shelf, tie it to a personality and 10x it overnight. That’s the power, so we’re both right.

I just wanted you guys to know that I still love John, even though he probably wasn’t talking about me specifically but people as a whole. So with that said, these guys all think I’m weird because I’m the one guy out here podcasting while they’re all scouting it up. Anyway, take that for what it’s worth. Alright, so I love John, love his advice and those of you guys who are nervous about the expert stuff, you can start a business that way, just know that this is how you amplify and scale and build a mass movement of people who buy over and over and over again. People connect more with people than brands.

I hope that helps and that’s all I got for today guys. See you all later, bye everybody.

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You’re just one funnel away…

On this special two part episode you will hear the second part of Russell’s “One Funnel Away” presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. In this episode you’ll hear:

How Russell nearly lost everything when his merchant accounts closed.
Why Russell didn’t know he hadn’t paid Payroll taxes in a year and could have gone to jail.
And how Russell turned it all around and along with Todd created Clickfunnels.

So listen here to find out how Russell went from nearly bankrupt to amazing success with Clickfunnels within just a few years.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell again. Welcome to the next episode of Marketing Secrets. This is part two of the One Funnel Away presentation.

I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s episode. If you did like it I hope you have shared it and told people to go listen to it. Today is going to be the exciting conclusion of Russell’s bankruptcy and failure stories. I hope you enjoy it, it should be a lot of fun. Listen to it online at marketingsecrets.com, you can watch it, there’s a video there, you can share and see the actual presentation there as well. I hope this helps you, hope it gives you faith and hope in what you’re doing, what you’re creating and where you are trying to go with your business and people’s lives you are going to serve. With that said, enjoy my failures, I hope you guys have a good time with it, see you guys soon. Bye.

Now the pros and the cons of this. The pros, this is really, really awesome. As a beginning entrepreneur I was like, we nailed, lets scale this thing. I probably shouldn’t have done some of this stuff, but we got excited. If this worked here, we should hire more people. We started this and we went from this little thing with 5 or 6 of us to 2 years later we had about a 100 people operation, where this is the model we were doing. Cd’s calling them on the phone, selling coaching, having continuity and it grew really big.

During that time there were some really positive things that came from it, some negative things, some ups and downs, and I’ll share a lot of those things. One cool thing is that while this was happening and it was going really well, my name got out there, so I got a chance to go speak a lot, which is cool. I’d seen a lot of other people speak from stage, and this is where I’ve told you guys this story, anyone who’s gone from Perfect Webinar, I spent about 2 1/2 , 3 years on the road going to seminars, standing in front of a bunch of people like this, talking and trying to sell something and nothing happening, it’s a really horrible feeling. Has anyone done that before?

My first presentation was on a stage like this, probably had 300 people in the room. I did the presentation and tried to do what speakers do and close, hope everyone runs to the back. Nobody budged and then the guy forgot to turn the music on and it was crickets and I was just awkwardly walking off the stage, and then running. I was so embarrassed, when you have those events that are multi-speaker events and all the speakers are selling and everyone is bragging about their numbers, I knew that I didn’t want them to ask me my numbers, because not one person signed up, so I hid in my hotel room. I remember ordering coconut shrimp and Haagen Dazs Ice cream for every meal for the next two days, while I hid in the room eating it and watching movies because I didn’t want to go back downstairs. It was really bad and awesome at the same time, because coconut shrimp and Haagen Dazs is awesome.

But I did that and learned how not to sell and then I started learning from some amazing speakers and people, learning the process and how it works. All the stuff we talk about in the Perfect webinar, all the stuff we talked about day one, about creating belief and breaking belief patterns. All those things I learned on the road in front of people on stage. It was scary, but it was such a good time for me to learn it and understand that part of the process.

As we started to grow, I wanna make sure I cover all the cool things, we had a bunch of different offers we came out with. One of the ones that was more successful for us was a front end offer like this, called Micro Continuity. How many of you guys remember Micro Continuity? This is awesome. So this is the one, it’s probably 8 years ago now. We put it on an MP3 player from Hong Kong, it had 6 hours of this training and that was the funnel we put through.

We kept creating front end funnels to get people into this program and it worked awesome. We grew the company from nothing to 3 or 4 million dollars a year and it was doing awesome. At the time I started looking at other people in my industry. Hopefully one of you guys will get a good idea from this one. I had this funnel, we talk about the value ladder, I had this really cool value ladder here and I was ascending people up and I realized that I was the only person in the market that had a real value ladder. Everyone else was kind of doing stuff down here and that was it. I was the only person selling really expensive stuff.

So I started calling my friends. I called Mike Filsame, “Hey man, all of our customers, we call them and sell them these $5000 things, and lots of people buy that. You should do that.” And he’s like, “I don’t want a call center.” And I was like, “Do you want us to call your customers and sell it?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” So we hooked up with Mike and became his backend. I called up Frank Kern and same thing, we became his backend for a little while. We started calling up a whole bunch of people and then we started becoming the backend. So all these people had frontend funnels and we became the backend for a lot of them. That’s how we took the company from 3 or 4 million dollars to 10 million dollars and it became really big.

I was going to say big and fun, but I don’t think it became that at all. It became really big. We had 100 employees, we had 60 people on phones in a big, huge call center. We had 20 people doing coaching for all the things we were selling and then had about 20 people driving leads and customers and stuff like that. It got really big, and I don’t know if you guys notice this, but I’m really good and selling and stuff, but really bad at the management of stuff. I was not good at managing all these people and it kind of started getting too big.

This is about the time, I was telling you guys, if you read the Dotcom Secrets book, I started waking up and was like, “I do not like what I created.” I got so excited that I started building this thing and then one day I woke up and was like, huh, do I really want to do this?

I think half the conversations I have with inner circle members when they first come in is this, “Do you really want to build this business? Yes, that would work, but sometimes it’s horrible when you get there. Think it through. What do I actually want to do? Who do I want to become? Who do I want to be when I grow up?”

Luckily during that time, it was probably one of the most painful times in my life, but looking back now, it was probably one of the most important times in my life. We had this huge operation and everything was working and then one day in January, literally 11:30 in the morning, one of my sales guys came in and said, “I’m trying to run a credit card and it’s not working. I’m not sure what’s wrong.” I’m like, “That’s weird. Try one of the other merchant accounts, maybe there’s something there.” then someone else came in, “Hey all the continuity orders are failing, I’m not sure why.” Three or four people came in and I’m like, “What’s happening?” I logged into the backend system and not….at 11:37 or something like that, every sale stopped. No sales.

I was like, what is happening. I was freaking out so I called our merchant account company and there’s a busy signal. I call again, busy. Call again, busy. I can’t get a hold of anybody and all the sudden I start hearing from friends. “Dude, everything got shut down. Are you still able to process?” I’m like, “No, what’s happening.” “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

And soon I found out that it wasn’t me, I eventually found out that it was 3 or 400 people at the same time. Anyone who was doing any kind of continuity stuff, the merchant accounts basically came in and said, “Look, we think what you guys are doing might be illegal and we’re shutting all of you guys down and you’re guilty until proven innocent.” I was like, “What? I’ve got 100 people that I’m feeding. 100 people and their families, it turns into 100’s of people. You can’t just stop processing.” Finally after an hour I get through to somebody and the lady on the phone says, “Yep, we shut you down. Good luck ever getting another merchant account ever again. I gotta go.” Boom and hung up on me.

I was like, “What?” at the time I thought I had diversity. We had 9 merchant accounts, all through one company, different merchant accounts but all through one bank. I found out that is the equivalent of having one. Which is why I’m a big believer now in having multiple merchant accounts in multiple different banks, which is a lesson hopefully for everybody. If you don’t know Alex Rowe yet, I don’t know if Alex is in here. But meet Alex, he’s the man who can get you hooked up with lots of merchant accounts. He’s done that for us, he’s amazing.

But it was bad, finally we got a hold of these guys and I’m trying to figure some things out. Basically they said, “You’ve got to prove that you are a good guy.” So we went through, it took us two weeks for them to go through all our stuff, look at our documentation, look at all of our stuff. Two weeks, and they came back and said, “You’re right. You’re doing everything clean, everything is above board. We’ll turn your merchant accounts back on and you’re good to go.” I’m like, “Sweet.” And during that time, when there’s that kind of instability, sales guys are freaking out, they can’t handle any kind of instability, they’re leaving like crazy. People are walking out the door.

I was freaking out, we had all this payroll and no money coming in, so I’m paying it out of my own pocket, everything to just keep things afloat. Going through this process it’s getting scarier and scarier and finally the merchant accounts are back on, you’re a good guy. So you guys, we gotta do a launch really quick to make a bunch of money. So we put together this huge launch and push it out to our customer list and in a weekend we made $250,000, and I was like, “Thank you.” That’s so great. Monday we should get the money, we can pay payroll, I’m telling everyone, “Tell your wives and kids we’ll have money soon. It’s coming I promise. It’s in the bank, going to be here any day now.” And the money didn’t come. Monday it didn’t come, Tuesday it didn’t come, Wednesday it didn’t come. By Thursday I’m calling, “Where’s our money? We need this money.”

The guy looks at the account, “It’s definitely in there.” I’m like, “When’s it coming to our bank?” He’s like, “Well it’s not going to come to your bank.” And I’m like, “Why not?” and he’s like, “You’re on 100% reserve so we keep 100% of your money.” I was like, “What? That’s not good for me or for anybody. How am I supposed to be in business? I got people to pay.” He’s like, “That’s just how it works. The good news is that it looks like you are a legitimate company. No one’s charging back or refunding this money that we’ve collected so far, so what we’ll do is drop you down to 10% reserve.” I’m like, “Ah, thank heavens.” He’s like, “But the $250,000 you collected in the last week, we’re keeping that for the next 6 months as collateral to make sure nothing bad happens.”

I’m like, are you kidding me. We gotta create another funnel. So we make another thing, push it out there, make some money. We start paying payroll for whatever we can but everything’s collapsing around me. That started in January and that started happening at the same time we’re trying to find other merchant accounts at other banks. And all these other banks are like, “Oh yeah, we’re cool. Come in, we’ll give you a merchant account. This is how it works, you gotta make $100,000 a month.” I’m like, “Cool, we’re going to do that in like 2 days. I’m going to need 4 merchant accounts. We can make money. We just need you to give it to us after we make it.”

They’re like, “We’re cool, we’re good at that, don’t worry.” So okay, cool. We get a merchant account, get it all setup, drove a bunch of traffic, and twice we made over the $100,000 a month we were allowed within a day, day and a half, and they froze our accounts and said, “You made too much money too fast. We’re freezing your accounts. We’ll give this money back to you in 6 months.” I’m like, “6 months? Please stop doing this to me.” We ended up with 4 or 500,000 dollars locked up in merchant accounts and it kept getting worse and worse throughout this whole year. It was the hardest year of my life. It kept going down.

Every single day I’m laying off friends and family members and people who I loved and cared about and I’m coming in, “I don’t know what to do man. I’m so sorry. I gotta let you go.” It was such a dark time in my life with thing after thing after thing. I wish I could say from there it got better. That was an entire year, the next January started and one of our friends was doing an event in Vegas, I’m like, “I’m going to go out there and see what everyone…. I gotta re figure out my whole business. Everything’s completely collapsed.”

At the time, by the way, we were in this big, huge office we had rented, that we were leasing. I think it was 20,000 square feet because we all the call center and stuff. I went to the landlord and I’m like, “Hey man, I can’t afford to pay you anymore.” And he’s like, “Okay, well we’ve got a 3 year contract. If you don’t pay me, I’m going to sue you and you’re probably going to end up in jail.” Are you kidding me dude, I’m trying. He would not work with me at all, I had all this fear behind that.

So I’m in Vegas a year later, trying to ask friends what’s happening, what they’re doing in their business, and they’re trying to tell me their stories. I’m like, this is, I don’t even know what to do. That night I got an email on my phone from my dad, I opened the email and it was a shot in a gut. Probably the worst second in my life, that I read that. The email said, “Hey Russell. I’m so sorry.” My dad was doing my books at the time, but we had a bookkeeper in the office, and the bookkeeper was trying her best, but she didn’t know. She knew we were struggling and she didn’t want to stress me out, so she didn’t tell me how much we were struggling. It turns out what she had been doing is she had been paying the bills she could, and the one’s she couldn’t she was trying to not pay them and delay them. And to hide it from my dad and everyone else she was saying in Quickbooks that she paid bills, but then not actually paying them. So it looked like it was clear.

But he had gone through and audited it and found out that she hadn’t paid payroll taxes in almost a year. In the email my dad said, “Just so you know payroll taxes aren’t something where they fine you. If you don’t pay payroll taxes you’re going to go to jail. It’s over $150,000 you owe in payroll taxes.” I was like, that’s the end. It had been an entire year. Every penny I had ever earned was gone. All my people in my teams, it had all fallen apart. I’m sitting there like, “I don’t know what to do.”

The next morning I got on a flight from Vegas back to Boise. I get there and walk in and the call center is empty, all the guys are gone. There’s two people that are left and they said, “Just so you know, the call center across the road just recruited us and we all left. We’re out, see ya.” They walked out. I was like, “I owe the government $150,000, I have no one to help me sell. I don’t know what to do.” I want to quit, so bad I want to quit. But if I quit I go to jail. I also sold coaching to a lot of people I cared about, if I quit all these people that bought coaching from me, I can’t help them. That’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do. I don’t know what to do.

So I went to a bankruptcy lawyer, “How does this work man? I don’t know what to do. I gotta figure this out.” I kind of explained the whole process, told him about my lease. “The landlord says he’ll come after me, the government’s going to come after me. I don’t know what to do.” And he’s like, “The best thing to do is, I should come with you to your landlord and explain that you’re going into bankruptcy and maybe they’ll be nice to you.” So I’m like, “Alright.” He’s like, “Do you have any money?” I’m like, “No.” and he’s like, “What do you got in your pocket?” I was like, “100 bucks.” And he’s like, “Cool, give me $100 and I’ll come and I’ll tell the landlord you’re going bankrupt.” I’m like, “Alright man, here you go.”

So he comes with me, which is actually the best $100 I ever spent. He comes with me to the landlord and he’s like, “Russell’s screwed man, he’s going through bankruptcy. He just hired me. He can’t pay you. You can come after him, but he’s done.” It was this old man, he’s like, “He’s done. The Government’s coming after him. You’re screwed, don’t even try.” And basically convinced our landlord that it was a useless cause. So the landlord was like, “Alright, be out by Friday.”

And we had a big space with office cubicles and phones and craziness. So I’m like, “Okay, we’ll be out by Friday.” But 90% of my team was gone at this point. From 100 employees down to about 7 or 8. The few people that stuck by me, people like Brent Coppieters, love that guy to death. Brent and John and some of the people back then, Brent had taken a pay cut, a 50% pay cut and never…..amazing people.

So the few of us that were left, we were packing up stuff, we put up ads on Craiglist, we got tons of computer and crap, things we’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for, we were selling for hundreds of dollars just to get out of it. We made I don’t know, maybe 5 or 6 grand on all of our crap, getting rid of it. We had a huge dumpster, just throwing away everything we had ever created because we had to downsize. Trying to figure out how to get into a smaller building and how do we keep the people we have to have to be able to fulfill on coaching. We have to cut everything else that we have.

So we were downsizing everything, going out and the night we were moving, that Friday we were supposed to be out at midnight or whatever it was, I was sitting in the office, the desks were gone, everything was gone, all I had left was my laptop. I was sitting there, I had my socks on, I had some levi’s and I had no money. I was like, “We have to make some money or else we can’t even move into…I don’t know how to do anything.”

So I sent out an email to my list I had at the time, got a bunch of people to register for a webinar. I was sitting there in a chair with my laptop on my lap, doing a webinar, praying that something would happen. And that webinar saved us. That webinar made $150,000 in sales over the next 3 or 4 days, which gave me the money I needed to pay everyone to not leave, get a new office, get us moved in and get us stability so we could actually breath for a few minutes and figure out the next step, what do we want to be when we grow up.

So we downsized from 20,000 square feet to 2,000 square feet. And we had this really cool moment where we’re like, “What do we want to do when we grow up? What do we want to be?” And as painful as that process was, it was one of the coolest things ever because we didn’t have to keep going on this path. We could pick anything. That’s when I started thinking about, who’s our dream customer? Who do we really want to serve? What fires us up? What gets us excited?

And we started thinking through that and during this process, we started creating again and having fun. What should we do? I had a friend at the time who he had this website that was making him 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month and he got in some trouble, and I had a couple things making a little money at the time and he’s like, “I need to get rid of this site. Can you pay me some money?” So I paid him $20,000, he gave me this little website. This little machine that you zap and it gets rid of cold sores, and on autopilot it was making 2 or 4 thousand dollars a month and I was like, “Oh this is so cool.” So we had this little thing and I was like, “That little business just kind of runs. What if we had another one.”

So we started creating other ones. We had one in the couponing market, we set it up and had a guru in there, it started running and making money. Then we’re like, “What’s another one?” we did one with weight loss, and another. And in a year’s time we launched 12 different companies, each making different amounts of money. During that time is when we launched Neurocel, our supplement company, all these things were happening and it was starting to get exciting again. We were creating we were doing, doing the business instead of teaching the business, which was so much fun for us to do, to learn and see why this stuff works in this market, but not this market.

One of the things that would drive me crazy about teachers in my industry is that they come in and act like the marketing techniques that work in one space work everywhere. And I learned during that two or three period of time that that’s not true. Everything’s different. There’s intricacies in couponing versus business versus weight loss versus diet versus supplements. There’s differences and I came to respect that because we had a chance to do it in so many different businesses and different things.

We spent the next two or three years creating stuff and during that process, one of the really cool things is I go to Flipa.com all the time and try to find cool websites we could buy and turn to businesses. And there’s a website called championsound.com that was for sale. And it was this cool little email, text message auto responder for bands. I was like, “I’m going to buy that and we’re going to take it and niche it for every market. We’ll make email auto responders and text message auto responders for dentists, or chiropractors.” I was so excited.

It was 20 grand, we didn’t have that much money but I was like this is the future of our company. We have to do it. So we ended up buying this website from these guys off Flipa. We get the website and we’re trying to transfer it to our servers after we paid them the 20 thousand dollars. And as they’re trying to transfer it, they’re like, “You can’t have the Linux server, you need the Ruby server.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” They’re like, “It means that this is not coded in PHP, it’s coded in Ruby on Rails. You have to have a different kind of server.”I’m like, “What does that mean?” “It means you have to go over here and pay $800 a month for a new server.”

Are you kidding me, I don’t have $800 a month for a server. But we bought this thing, so we did and they installed it. Then it didn’t really work. I didn’t know what to do. None of my tech guys had ever used Ruby on Rails so I went to Odesk to hire some guys and they couldn’t fix it. I tried 5 or 6 guys and finally I was like, I wasted 20 grand. I was so upset and frustrated because I didn’t have that money.

On the way out of the office one day I was like, “I wonder if anyone on my list knows Ruby on Rails?” shot in the dark, I have no idea. So I send the email out to my little list at the time. Subject line was like, “Ruby on Rails, looking for a partner. If you know Ruby on Rails, I’m looking for a partner.” I said basically the story I just told you guys, “bought this thing, can’t make it work, if you know Ruby on Rails, become my partner, we’ll make a bunch of money with this thing together.” Sent the email out.

About an hour later I get an email from this guy in Georgia named Todd Dickerson, and Todd’s like, “Hey man, I know Ruby.” I’m like, “You do?” I looked at his picture and I was like, “You don’t look like a nerd. I don’t think you do.” And then I went to Facebook and I Facebook friended him, it was actually six years ago last week. I Facebook Friended him and he’s got a beautiful wife, he’s got a daughter. I’m like I don’t think he’s a coder. I don’t know if I believe that. He’s like, “Yeah man, shoot me the login, I’ll fix it.” I was like, “Whatever I have had 8 guys try to fix it for the last 4 or 5 months and nobody can do it. Whatever, here’s the login.” So he logs in and an hour later he’s like, “Okay, done. It’s fixed.” I was like, “What?” and he’s like, “Yeah, I got it fixed. I just did blah blah blah. And it worked.”

I’m like, “Dude, how did you do that?” and he’s like, “I just love Ruby on Rails. I’m amazing.” He didn’t say that, he’s super humble. But I was like, this guy’s amazing. I’m like, “I have all these other things. Want to help me with these other things?” So Todd came and we started working on this other project. We had an idea for an auto webinar, Todd built out the software behind the scenes, which was Clickfunnels verson 0.0, pre-everything. He built this auto webinar software because Mike Filsame had been talking about auto webinars. Rick Shephard had put in a webinar report. A couple of guys had started talking about auto webinars but nobody had done one. No one was really doing them.

So Todd custom built this whole platform so we could do them, we launched an auto webinar through that and in that auto webinar we made a million dollars in 90 days. The first thing I did from that million dollars is took the money and paid off the IRS and I was like, I’m free. I’m not going to jail. The IRS is paid off, the fines are paid off. That auto webinar literally saved me, literally gave me freedom. Up to that point every night when I went to bed at night I was like they could come knock on my door. I have not paid payroll tax in that long. And that webinar freed us.

We kept doing thing after thing, and what’s funny with Todd and Dylan used to design half of these things, just the contract, he’d design these pages and Todd would take them and code them up and make these funnels. He did funnel after funnel after funnel. We probably had 15 different companies, within those company 2 or 3 funnels. We probably had 40 funnels we built over, thing after thing after thing. And the last funnel we actually built the old school way was the Neurocel funnel. That’s one of the ones that blew up big and made tons of sales, we were having a bunch of fun with it and about that time is when Todd was like, “We should really create something so I don’t have to keep creating websites for you every single day.”

And that was where the idea came for Clickfunnels. So we started that project in front of a whiteboard, like we talked about yesterday. We mapped this whole thing, and Todd went to work to build Clickfunnels and we partnered with Dylan to build the editor and the UI. And then fast forward 7 or 8 months later, we came and we were like this thing is going to change the world. I was so excited. I was like, “We’re going to do a free trial.” And I think the very first month our goal was to get 10,000 members the first month. I’m like, this is going to be the greatest thing in the world.

So we put it out there we created the first funnel, had all the stuff in there, there was a free trial, we had a bunch of people lined up to promote it, we launched it, there were crickets. People came and then left. I was like, “Dude, do you not understand what I’m giving you? I made that page you’re looking at, it’s really good.” Nobody got it, why don’t they get it? There’s something wrong with my messaging. So we changed the funnel again, launched it again, a few of you guys signed up and that was it. They hit it and then they left. We tried again and again. We rebuilt that funnel not once or twice or three times or four times or five times. It was six times it took us before the Clickfunnels funnel worked.

The sixth time was because one of my friends, Mike Filsame invited me out to his event and he’s like, “Hey Russell, I want you to come and sell Clickfunnels, I think it’s awesome.” I was like, “Dude, Mike, nobody’s buying Clickfunnels. We gotta figure out our next deal or figure out something because it’s not working.” He’s like, “No, my people need it, you need to come speak on it. You gotta sell it for $1000.” I’m like, “It’s a free trial and nobody even wants it.”

So Mike’s event was happening that weekend, I was literally sitting in my office watching the event streaming and as I was sitting there I started writing my webinar and I had my slides open, I was following the Perfect Webinar script that I had been working on for ten years. I started filling in the blanks, started making this webinar, true to the Perfect Webinar Script. I literally was watching it, adding the things in while watching Mike’s event happen. That day I finished the slides, next morning I jumped in a plane and flew there. Got to California, put the slides up on the thing, okay here we go.

I started it and the title slide was “My weirdness funnel is currently make $17,947 per day”, talking about the Neurocel funnel and how you can knock it off in less than ten minutes. Showed the first slide, started going through and when we got to the end, got to the stack and the close, we did it and 30% of the room jumped up and ran to the back, jumping over the tables, fighting to get back there. I was like, we did it. That was the message, that was the key. Now I know how to sell Clickfunnels.

We took that message, went back and as a lot of you guys know, especially inner circle members, we started doing webinars every single day, sometimes two a day. One time I did three in a day, which was really hard. Over and over again, I did that webinar live over 70 times over the next year and a half and we went from being a startup with no members to after the end of last year we had over 10,000 members, after this year we have over 30,000 members and it’s continued to grow and grow and grow. And it was that one funnel that changed everything for me.

So this process, for all of us you guys, is an up and a down. It’s always happening and all of you guys are somewhere in this wave right now. Some of you guys are at the top riding it, some of you guys are at the bottom going to crash. Some of you guys are somewhere in between. Always going up and down, but if nothing else at this event, I want you guys to all understand that no matter where you are, there’s hope. It might not be this funnel. I can’t tell you how many funnels flopped. I guarantee I have failed at more funnels than anyone else in this room because we tried over and over and over again. Because of that we found out what worked. The only way to do that is to do it over and over and over again.

It’s a lot easier now, I promise you it’s a lot easier than what we used to do. Poor Todd and Dylan had to custom code every single thing, every single time. Now you can test things really fast. The first time I met Trey, first call he said, “Russell, I’m going to launch a funnel a week, every single week.” And I watched as he launched a funnel, and another funnel and another funnel, he had some marginal success, a little success, more success, more success. I saw him launch a funnel last year, one funnel and within 90 days became the biggest selling funnel in the history of the world.

I was talking to some of the guys at affiliate summit. They said there’s never been a funnel that’s made more money in a shorter period of time than one of Trey’s funnels. I’m not privy to share all his numbers and stats, but it was insane. And it came from doing a funnel a week until he hits the one that just explodes. You don’t know what that’s going to be. It’s important, that’s why this tool is so important. Because you can do that, you can test and try over and over and over again.

View Details

You’re just one funnel away…

On this special two part episode you will hear the first part of Russell’s “One Funnel Away” presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. In this episode you’ll hear:

What the first product was that ever made Russell any money and how he only had to pay $20 for someone to write the software.
How Russell first hired employees and what he learned about having to actually pay them.
How Russell and his first team were able to make $55K in a two week period just in time to save Christmas.

So listen to this first portion of Russell’s story, and don’t forget to come back for the second half.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson, welcome to a special Marketing Secrets episode where I’m going to let you guys see behind the scenes at one of our presentations at last year’s Funnel Hacking Live.

So this presentation is one that I was really nervous at giving, it was called “One Funnel Away” which is the whole theme of the last Funnel Hacking Live event. It’s something that I wanted to share my failures, my bankruptcy stories, the ups and the downs. Everyone here talks about the highlight reel; I wanted to share the other side of it. I don’t typically release sessions from Funnel Hacking anywhere but this one had such a big impact on our audience and let people know that everyone, including me, especially me, has big ups and big downs, yet we’re just one funnel away from success each time. So as we’re preparing for the next Funnel Hacking Live, which will be coming live soon at Funnelhackinglive.com, I was re-watching some of the presentations and saw this one and wanted more people to have this.

So I’m going to break this up into two episodes. This is episode number one, go check it out. Leave me a comment if you like it, subscribe, tell other people about it and hopefully it will give you some hope and faith that the path you are on is right and this process is going to get you what you want and desire and let you serve other people. So that’s the game plan, check out this episode and I will see you on part two tomorrow.

Okay, so what I want to do is go on a journey with you guys, my journey, which started way back over here on my timeline, in my back story. So those who know me or have heard about me or know anything about this, initially I started learning about business when I was a 12 or 13 year old kid, sitting there with my dad watching the news and I was like, “I can’t believe he hasn’t told me to go to bed yet. This is the coolest thing in world.” And the news was on and when it ended Mash came on and I was like, “He must think I’m asleep or something. He hasn’t told me to go to bed.” I’m sitting there trying not to move, I didn’t want to let him know. I’m sitting there watching Mash with my dad, I thought it was the coolest thing in the whole world.

Then when Mash got done, he still didn’t say anything, I was like, “He’s gotta be convinced I’m asleep, this is whole cool.” Then the next thing came one and it was an infomercial, a late night infomercial with Don Lepre. How many of you guys remember Don Lepre? Yes, just an amazing person, he had an infomercial and I was so grateful for his passion and excitement, talking about what he was doing. The infomercial was about how to place tiny little classified ads and you can make a fortune. And it was it was the coolest thing. I remember sitting there listening to him and I was like, “This makes so much sense.” I’m looking at my dad like, are you paying attention to what’s happening? The whole thing made so much sense to me.

He said, “I took a classified ad, put it in the newspaper and I made 30 dollars and told my friends and family, ‘I made $30. I started a business this weekend,’ and they all laughed at me. So then I took that same ad and ran it in a thousand newspapers the next month and made 30 thousand dollars.” And I was like, mind blown. I’ve been ruined from that day on when it comes to the world. I can’t not do something like this. I was so excited, saved a bunch of money mowing lawns and everything and eventually I bought Don Lepre’s kit on the infomercial and I read it all and learned it and wasn’t able to actually do anything though because I didn’t have the money to direct mail and things like that.

But that’s how I first heard about the direct response market. I remember after I got Don Lepre’s kit I was so excited I was at the grocery store with my mom and after we were walking out, on the checkout stand there was a magazine called “Small Business Opportunity Magazine” that a whole bunch of cartoon people on the front of it. How many of you guys have seen that magazine before? That’s it? This is the greatest swipe file of direct response ads ever.

So I didn’t know it at the time, but there were thirty things, how to get rich quick. I’m like, sweet, I want to get rich quick. That’d be awesome. So I had my mom buy this magazine and I went home. If you look at it, it’s 140 pages of ads and four pages of articles, it’s pretty awesome. I was looking at every single ad, “Oh my gosh. I can sell gold chains at the mall and make money.” So I called this number for a free info kit. Free info kit gets sent to my house. And the next page it’s like something else. Page after page, all 140 pages I called every single 800 number to request the free info kit.

And about a week later, I started getting these gifts in the mail. At first it was 2 or 3 letters, then it was 10 or 15, then it was 60 or 70 letters. And I think those companies started selling my name to other mailing lists, because soon it was hundreds of letters. And the mailman could not physically shove the junk mail in the mailbox anymore because there was so much coming in. So I get home from junior high. I’d come home and walk in the house and see it on the bar. I’d see two or three letters for my parents and Russell’s stack of junk mail. They’re like, “There’s your junk mail.” And I’d take it my room and open it and read these things like, this is so cool. And all these money making ideas.

So that happened at a young age. Unfortunately I couldn’t do anything, well I tried once. This one person convinced me that direct mail was the key and all you do is get a list of buyers who bought similar products and write a sales letter and you mail it to those people and a percentage will buy. I’m like, “Awesome.” The only problem is I can’t afford a mailing list, I don’t have any stamps or envelopes or anything. So I’d done something, I made a little money doing some chores. So I asked my mom to take that money and instead buy stamps and bring me home stamps. So she brought me home 38 stamps. That’s how much money I’d made.

I had 38 stamps and I’m like, “This is so awesome.” I used to tell my brothers and sister and parents, my parents didn’t tease me, but my brothers and sisters did. I was like, “I’m going to be a millionaire any minute now. This is going to work.” And they’d be like, “Oh, are you a millionaire yet?” and totally make fun of me. So I had these 38 stamps and I’m like, “If I can get 10% of these people to buy, that’s 3 people. If I sell a $50 product that’s $150. I’ll be rich.” I didn’t know what to do, they talked about sales letters so I was like, “I’ll write a sales letter.” So I printed it out on blue paper because blue paper they’d be more likely to read. So I put it on my parents computer, wrote a sales letter, printed out 38 copies of it. I couldn’t afford an envelope so I just folded it and stapled it.

I didn’t actually have a mailing list, so I opened up the white pages and flipped through and randomly picked 38 names, I’m like, “This is going to be huge.” So I wrote it, put my stamp on it, and all my savings and put it in the mailbox and I was like, “I’m going to be rich. This is going to be amazing.” I sent it out, told everybody, “When this gets out, it’ll be over. I’ll be able to move out, get my own house. It’s going to be amazing.” Unfortunately nobody responded. That was the only time I was able to invest. I didn’t have the money to buy a classified ad in the newspaper so I just kind of kept reading all this junk mail and learning from all these people.

A couple of years later I got into wrestling and forgot about making money. But there was this seed that had been planted. I wrestled through high school, had a lot of fun, got a college scholarship, wrestled through college. When I was going to college I met my insanely beautiful wife, that most of you guys….if not she’s here hiding. I met her and fell in love really quick and spent the next 3 or 4 months trying to convince her, in fact that was probably the hardest sale I ever had, to convince her I was the right one. Did you see that picture? I was kind of a geek, not going to lie. Anyway, I convinced her to marry me and it was amazing. About the time we got engaged, I realized my dad said, “When you get married, I’m not going to keep supporting you. That’s when you become a real man.”

I’m like, “What? But dad I’m wrestling.” And he’d always send me money to pay for food and stuff but he’s like, “No, if you get married, you’re on your own.” I was like, “Crap, I want to get married but I don’t want to grow up yet.” And my wife, fiancé at the time, she was working and making money and got a second job to support us and I was wrestling and didn’t have any money. I’m like, “I gotta do something.” And luckily the greatest thing in the world happened, that happens to a lot of us. I was up late at night stressing out about this and then this little thing popped up on TV, it was an infomercial.

It was this guy talking about how people are making money with these little websites and that they were doing an event at Holiday Inn the next day and you come and get tickets. I’m like, “Oh! This is it.” So I called the number and get my tickets to Holiday Inn and show up and it’s a little, tiny room with 50 really desperate people sitting there. I get there and there’s a dude onstage all in a suit and tie and I’m like, “Whoa, that guy looks rich.” And then he started doing this thing and within 5 minutes he closed me on this $50 thing. I ran in the back and had my one credit card with a $300 credit limit, that’s all I had earned so far. So I bought my $50 dollar thing and I’m like, “I’m going to make so much money with this.”

And then he pitched on a website and it was $3 grand and everybody’s running back buying websites and I’m like, “I can’t afford a website. Dangit.” And then he pitched website hosting at $80 a month and all these things. They’re teaching, “If you call your bank you can get your credit extended.” I’m like, “Oh, sweet. I didn’t know that.” So I’m calling the bank like, “Hey can you make my credit line a thousand dollars.” I’m learning all these things, getting my credit card bigger, which was kind of cool. The I bought everything he told me. I needed the whole thing, so I buy it all. He convinced me, he’s like, “Paypal is evil. You have to have a merchant account. And it’s $6000 for a merchant account.” I’m like, “I don’t have $6000 yet.” And he’s like, “Well you can’t make money online without a merchant account. $6 grand.”

But I couldn’t afford that, but I had everything else. I went home and I was like, “cool, I have a domain name, I got hosting, a thousand dollars worth of internet web stuff.” I jumped online and I’m like, “I’m going to have a website.” I was getting excited. I started Googling things and eventually within 15 minutes I realized website hosting is not $80 a month, I realized a domain name is not $1000. I was like, crap I got taken. I was freaked out.

So I ended up calling the next day, I was like, “My son is a minor and he was at your event last night and he charged all his credit cards and he needs to be out of this contract.” And they got me out of the contract and gave me my money back. That’s one trick, if you ever need to get out of a contract, it’s worked almost every time. So those are the real Dotcom Secrets.

So at that point I was in, I was like, “Oh my gosh. I need to sell stuff on the internet. That started this thing about the time my wife and I were getting married and I was trying to sell stuff. I was selling all sorts of things. I remember initially thought it was eBay. Maybe people make money on eBay. I remember driving to the thrift store buying everything I could find that I thought was worth value. On my bike, with grocery sacks full of crap, riding my bike back home. I bought a Michael Jackson record. I was like, “Records are so old, this has got to be worth hundreds of dollars.” I ended up selling it for 13 cents on eBay. I was so depressed. I was boxing and shipping things out and when all was said and done I made $40 or $50 but my costs were $150-200. I was going and trying to find boxes for all of these weird things I had bought. It was just horrible.

I was sitting at the post office with 18 different boxes of weird things, records and all these things. And there’s this dude standing there with a big box full of cd’s. hundreds and hundreds of cd’s, and I’m here with a wheel barrel full of odd boxes and I’m like, “Dude, what are you selling?” and he’s like, “Oh I sell information products.” I was like, “What does that mean?” and he’s like, “All these cd’s have info burned on them and people pay me and I ship them a cd.” I’m like, “Is it the same cd?” and he’s like, “Yeah, I have a cd burner. I just burn them. Then I put them in these things and send them out.”

I was like, “Are you kidding me?” They’re all the same size. I could just buy one box, it would be so much easier. So that’s when we started talking about information products. I was like, “I didn’t know that was even a thing.” I got all excited about information products and started Googling stuff and started learning about information products.

I ended up buying this cd and it was a cd that 8000 coloring book pages for kids and the guy was selling it, I emailed him and said, “This cd is cool. Can I buy the rights to this cd, I want to sell it?” and he was like, “I’ve never done that before, but sure for $200 I’ll sell you the rights and you can sell it too.” I’m like, “Sweet.” So I gave him $200 that I didn’t have and he gave me the rights and I had the cd and basically all I had to do was burn it on a cd burner and I could mail it out as many times as I wanted. And he had a big long sales letter he let me use, so I put his sales letter up and started trying things.

What was cool, I started making sales. Not a lot, every other week it would make a sale for $20. I would burn the cd and ship it out and I was like, “This is so cool.” Information products became the thing and I was trying to figure out how that whole thing worked and I started bumping into people like Yanik Silver and all these different internet marketing guru’s and watching what they were doing, selling information products and I was just hooked at that point.

About that time I started watching what they were doing and I started learning and creating different things. In fact, one of my very first products ever, does anybody in this room remember the product Zip Brander? Three people. I had all these info products and I was buying resell rights to other people’s products and I’m selling these things. And I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way if when I sent this digital file to somebody, when they first opened it, instead of just getting the file they see an ad for my product and then they see the file? That was my first light bulb. It’s like zipping a file, but when you zip it would be branded and when they open it, they see your ad first. I was like this is it. I thought this was it. That was my idea, I thought it was going to change the world as we know it.

So I bought zipbrander.com and I remember Arman Morin at the time was one of the guys I was studying. I was like Arman is so cool. Every one of his sites were so similar and I’m looking and Arman always had a big header graphic with his picture with his arms folded with a suit coat on. I was like, that’s what I need. So I got a picture of me folding my arms in a suit coat. And he had a header, so I had a header that looked just like his. His were always Ecover Generator so I was like Zipbrander, looked identical. This is where my funnel hacking started. He had this big long sales letter. I was like, this looks weird, but Arman’s doing it so I’m going to do it.

So I looked at his sales letter and wrote my own based on that. Then I was like how do I create this, I didn’t know that. My first thought is I should just become a computer engineer. That would be the coolest thing. I want to make software. So I switched my major to Computer Information Systems so I could learn how to code. It was about the time the semester was changing. So I get to class the first day and the teacher gets up there and starts talking about code and databases and all these things and structures and I was sitting there like, “oh crap. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not even a little bit.” Within about 15 seconds I realized I am not a coder and never will be a coder. I couldn’t even understand. I thought it was a Spanish class or something. I was like I don’t even know what he’s saying.

But I didn’t know how to change my major again, so I just kind of stayed in it. I kind of got depressed, that was my one idea. I guess I can’t do it. And then I remember I was listening to a tele-seminar. I was at a wrestling tournament and we were driving to California, it was a 16 hour drive. I downloaded on my, it was pre-iPod’s, it was this tape player thing, a whole bunch of tele-seminar’s that Arman had done. I’m listening to these things in the back of the car where all these other wrestlers are partying and having fun and listening to music and I’m listening to these seminars. They were totally making fun of me the whole time, if you meet any of my wrestling buddies, they relentlessly made fun of me the entire trip. “You’re such a nerd. You’re never going to be able make money.” I’m like, “I swear I will.”

So I’m listening to these the whole way and on one of these things like 22 hours into this thing Arman says, “I don’t code software. I go to Scriptlance and I pay guys in Romania and India hardly anything to build stuff.” And I was like, Arman’s not a programmer? I thought he was a programmer. There are people in India who can do this? So literally that night I jumped on Scriptlance and actually prior to that I had tried to hire a company to do it and they had quoted me $5 thousand. I was like, “Okay, I don’t have that.”

So I took the same description I had given these guys and posted it on Scriptlance and instantly I got, all these people started bidding on it. One guy was like, “I’ll do it for $5000.” “I’ll do it for $2000.” “For $1000.” “For $500” and it came all the way down to this guy in India who was like, “I’ll do it for $20” I was like, “I got $20” So I picked him.

He was like, “So this is how I’m going to do it.” I was like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just do it.” He spent 2 or 3 days and sent it back, “Here it is.” I tried it. Zipped a file and opened it and my ad showed up and I was like, “you did it. Oh my gosh.” And he’s like, “yeah, thanks for the $20.” And I was like, “No, this is going to be huge. I’m going to make millions of dollars and I feel guilty giving you $20, can I give you an extra hundred?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” So I gave him $100 and I felt good about it.

That was my very first software product that I ever did and it didn’t make me millions. I probably made 10-20 grand with that product. But it was the first one that I had a sales letter, started driving traffic, doing Google ads, I was finding JV, all these things and I started selling it and that was the first thing that made me any money. Isn’t that exciting? How many of you guys want Zipbrander? The first 30 people in the back….just kidding. It doesn’t work anymore. The coding stopped working 10 internets ago. So it’s done.

But that was my first software product, it was so cool. About that time was when I started learning more about info products. That when the Potato gun came out, the potato gun DVD. All these things, doing all these little businesses and none of them were huge smashing, million dollar successes. I didn’t pull a Dan Henrie and read a book and 5 months later made a million bucks. I was like, “Hey I made 5 grand here. Oh I made 200 dollars here.”

These little things kept happening, it was so cool. And every project did a little better. It was like slow momentum, every one did a little better than the last one because I got more customers coming in and more people. I kept making things in different markets, potato guns and all these sorts of different things and every one of them got a little better and it was fun. I remember back then I started doing tele-seminars and I’d get 30 people online and I’d talk about something and sell it at the end and some people would buy it and it was so exciting. That was the start of this whole thing for me.

Then one of my friends, BJ, he’s sitting over here. He was a wrestler in Nebraska, I wrestled at Boise State, it was my senior year, I’d made pretty good money. Probably $150-200,000, somewhere in there my senior year. He’d heard about and Boise State was wrestling Nebraska and we’re sitting there wrestling and we’re glaring at each other because we’re opposite teams and afterwards he’s like, “Hey man, someone told me you’re making money. Is that true?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “How are you doing it?” So we talked about it a little bit.

We flew back to our places to finish out college and we kind of talked back and forth for a little while. Then after college got done he’s like, “Hey man, I want to do what you’re doing. Can I get a job?” I was like, “You want a job?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “What would you do all day?” and he’s like, “I don’t know. I’ll do what you’re doing.” I’m like, “okay, can we talk about marketing stuff.” He’s like, “I love talking about that.” I’m like, “This will be so cool. I have no one to talk about this stuff.” I thought it was just me.

I’m like, “So you’re actually into this stuff.” He’s like, “Yeah man.” I’m like, “Okay, yeah I’ll give you a job. Come on out.” So he jumps on a plane, flies to Boise and literally moves into our office. Slept in our office for 6 months. He’s like, “so how does this work?” I’d never had an employee before. “I don’t really know either. I’ll pay you, we can talk about marketing and sell stuff and it’ll be awesome.” Me as an entrepreneur, I was in this mode of eat what you kill. I’d sell something, make a bunch of money and I was like, sweet. Then we wouldn’t do anything for 4 or 5 months, then create something, sell it, make a bunch of money and that’s the model I was on for a long time.

Then BJ came and wanted to be an employee and I was so excited. I’m like, “sure.” He’s an employee and the weirdest thing happened. Every two weeks he wanted to get paid whether we made money or not. I had never heard that. I was like, “Okay, here’s some more money.” And then two weeks later, more money. I was like, oh crap we haven’t sold anything for a long time. Then he had some other friends who came along like, “This is cool. I want to work for you too.” I’m like, “Alright come on over. Let’s get jobs.” So I gave them jobs, his buddies and his wife and some other people. I got all these friends that want to talk about marketing with me, this is so fun.

So we had all these people coming over but the problem was that every two weeks they wanted to get paid, but we weren’t selling anything. So I’d go lock myself in the back room and be like, “Don’t bug me guys, I gotta make money so we can all hang out again.” So I’d close the door and start working and selling stuff. They’d be like, “Dude can we help you?” I’d be like, “Shut up! If you talk to me I can’t make money to pay you, so go away.” They’re like, “We feel bad, we want to help you Russell.” So I’m like, “I don’t have time to train you, otherwise we can’t make money to pay payroll.” That was this thing.

What’s interesting is, this is one of my first lessons as an entrepreneur, that was tough. We had 5 or 6 people at the time. We hired this video guy that was….there’s so many side stories, I can’t tell you all of them. He was an Indian guy who had shorts up to here and had a braid that went past his shorts. Because he told me in the interview, “Yeah, I’m a video guy.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? We could do videos!” and he’s like, “Yeah, I got all sorts of video stuff.” So we hired him and it turned out he didn’t know anything about video at all.

But I didn’t dare to fire him because I had never fired anyone and I was so scared. Everyday we’re like, “I wish he would just quit. I don’t dare to fire him.” I don’t know what to do. All these weird learning things. This went on for a while. I was launching something every week trying to make money to cover payroll and it was this huge thing and became horribly not fun for a long time. It kept getting worse and worse to the point where it was December, it was the beginning of December, it was freezing cold and I was looking at everything and every penny I’d ever made was gone. Every idea I had how I could hustle and sell to different markets was gone. I was just drained, I didn’t know what to do.

It was Christmas time, I was outside and I went to go hang up lights around my house, and someone had sent me an iPod Nano and Stu MacLarin had done an event, I don’t even know if he knows this, he sent me the links, so I downloaded the links to his event on this iPod, plug it into my ears and start hanging up Christmas lights, which I had never done before, it was a horrible job. Turns out you can hire people for really cheap to do that and the lights look really straight. Mine were like, they looked really bad. I kept stapling through the wires and kill the lights. It was bad. And my fingers were so numb. I had this little light coat on and my fingers were so numb and I had to have my gloves off to squeeze the thing and I’d put them back in to get warm and I’d go back and I didn’t want to go back inside and get warm because I was so depressed.

I knew that the next payroll was coming up in a week or so and I was like, I don’t have money. I don’t know what to do. Tomorrow I need to go in and tell these guys or it’s going to be really awkward when payroll does come and I’m like sorry guys. So I have to tell everyone this. So I stayed outside in the cold because I didn’t want to go in and I was trying to think. So I’m stapling these Christmas lights around the house as I’m listening to this audio. In the audio there’s two different speakers talking about different business models. Back then no one was calling these things funnels, but they talked about these different business models that they were doing.

One of them was an offline guy, his name is John Olmos, some of you guys have heard about him, he’s the guy that taught me about the attractive character. He said, “I have this thing I’ve been doing where I create these cd’s and tell everyone it’s so controversial that I can’t put it on the internet.” Which is the funniest thing ever. “Because of that you have to pay me $5 and I’ll ship you this cd.” He said, “What happens is I ship them this cd but then that customer financed me sending them a sales letter.” I was like, that is brilliant, we gotta do that. I remember I filmed this cd like two years earlier, or a DVD. I was like, we could do that. We could burn that DVD and we could start sending that out.

So that was the first presentation, John Olmos. The next presentation was this guy named Matt Bacak, who’s become a close friend since then. Matt was talking about his business model, he said, “What I do is send out cd’s and people who bought cd’s, I call them on the phone and we sell them coaching.” And I was like, “You can call people on the phone.” I’m an internet nerd but I was like, “Wait..” and I was super scared but I knew there was a guy that worked for me at the time, one of my 5 or 6 friends, who had sold things on the phone before

All the sudden I was like, “Oh my gosh. What if we figured out something we could do where we could save this thing. It might actually be possible.” I’m started getting more excited. I’m hanging up Christmas lights and I’m just like, this funnel was going through my head and I’m like okay I think I’ve figured out a blend of what these two guys are saying, it could actually work.

So by the time I got done hanging up Christmas lights I texted all of them, “Guys, you don’t know this yet, we’re about to go bankrupt, but I got an idea that I think can save it. Let’s meet tomorrow morning early, I’m going to walk you guys through what I think could actually save this business.” Send.

They’re all texting back, “What? We’re going through bankruptcy.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re about to.” Luckily they all came in the next day and I’m like, “Okay you guys, I got a model. This is what we’re going to do. Remember that DVD I did like two years ago? We’re going to take that, it’s going to be a free DVD, it’s going to be so controversial we can’t sell it on the internet. We’ll charge $4.95 shipping and handling. We’ll send this DVD out to them and inside the DVD we’re going to have a sales letter where we’re going to sell $5500.” I don’t know why we said that price, but they’re like, “cool, what are we going to sell for $5500?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. What do you guys want to sell?”

So we had our white board and we’re like, “If someone is going to give us $5500, it would have to be something amazing.” And we made this huge list for 2 hours of all the amazingness. I was like, “That would be awesome, but I’m not willing to do half of that stuff.” We’re not going to have them sleep at my house, we’re not going to…we crossed out all these things. I’m like, “I’m actually willing to sell this. I think people would actually buy that. That would be insane.”

So we took that and at the same time we added a newsletter. So if somebody bought the cd they joined a newsletter that was $37 a month. So they came here, joined the newsletter, $37 a month. And that was the funnel. Back then we didn’t have Clickfunnels so luckily we had one or two nerds still working for us that were able to put these pieces together and we had this really rudimentary, horrible looking funnel and it was live within a day and we’re like, “Okay let’s try it.” At the time I had a little tiny email list, this is pre-Facebook, this is Myspace days. So we push some traffic to this and we end up selling a couple hundred of these cd’s. In the cd we shipped out to them came a sales letter talking about this and it put people in a continuity program and then we called everybody about the cd, “Hey you bought the cd, how would you like to come to Boise and we’re going to give you this.” This was our hail mary pass. Please let this work.

We did that, we focused on it. We drove traffic to it, and when all was said and done, over the next two week period of time we got 800 people to get our free cd. From that, the way we used to do it is everybody was on continuity. So we had 800 people that were on this $37 continuity, but it was free for a month, so we weren’t making any money here. But we had 800 people’s phone numbers who we were able to call.

So we started calling them, and we didn’t know anything about phone sales or anything. We were like, “Hey man, you bought this cd, you want to come hang out with Russell?” They were like, “Yeah.” And in that two week period of time we sold 10 people at $5500 a piece, which ended up being $55k and that funnel saved Christmas. Is that awesome? It’s awesome.

I was able to pay all of our payroll. We had some money left over, it was awesome. And the cool thing is 30 days later, this thing started and all these people were on continuity and suddenly we had a business. This is when I learned the power of continuity. David Frye, who’s one of my favorite people in the whole world, he’s here in the audience I think, he used to always say, “Until you have continuity you don’t have a business.” And I never understood that until this. There’s David smiling over there. I love that guy. Now I found out, I had all these people.

So what happened, I don’t know the math, 800 times $37 a month, it’s like $25 k a month and we knew we have continuity now. Every single month we have $25k, that means I can pay for employees. I realized, you don’t hire employees before you have continuity. Now we had continuity. Now we actually had people covered and we could actually focus and think and that was the first funnel that saved things and turned it around for us.

View Details

Pretend this message was for you and take it to heart.

On today’s episode Russell and Steven talk about how they and others have been able to find their voice, figure out what they’re good at and be successful. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

Why no one is really successful overnight, you just don’t see the previous work put into their craft.
Why you need to figure out what part of the game you are good at and focus on that, then find others who are good at the other pieces.
And also hear about some of Russell’s inner circle members who have found success and why.

So listen hear to find out what you need to do to make your business successful.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to the camping edition of Marketing Secrets Podcast. Hey you guys, I wanted to do a really special podcast today because I think for some reason that a lot of people thought this whole entrepreneurship business was going to be easy and they’re going to get rich quick and all these types of things and the reality is, it’s hard. It’s really hard, especially the first two or three years.

You’ve got to find your voice, create your brand, build a movement, create products people actually want, figure out what you’re selling and how you’re selling it. There’s a lot that goes into it initially and I think that sometimes we get seduced by how quick and easy it is. Because overnight success stories of people making a million dollars in five months, come on the back of three or four years of work and effort and time.

Recently one of our coaching clients, they’d been struggling, and I saw they were doing the motions and weren’t having success and I realized that the reason was they hadn’t put the time in ahead of time. I sent them a voxer, about a 15 minute vox message that went over this. I edited out from that message all the stuff that related to them, because it doesn’t matter who they are, but it was a message that I think everybody needs to hear and should hear. Because you have to realize there’s a lot that goes into it. Maybe there’s another business you can start, maybe you can go start an Amazon business or things like that where you just need to buy a product and post it and that’s how it is, but if you want to be a leader, expert, change the world, it takes time.

People go to school for 12 years to try to get a job that pays them 50-100 grand a year. If you’re trying to become a multi-millionaire, you think that’s going to happen overnight. It takes energy. So I want you guys to listen to this voxer, hopefully it’s a coaching call for you. Think about the effort you’ve got to put into it, the team you need to build, who you need to become to have those huge successes. Another thing I talk about, a couple of people I mention. Anthony, I’m talking about Anthony DiClementi from Biohacking Secrets. I talk about Kaelin, if you look up lady boss weight loss, you’ll see Kaelin. I mention a couple of other inner circle members by name, I may not have said their full name, but that’s who they are, so you have some context. But listen to this voxer, use it as a personal coaching call for yourself and I hope that it gets you excited and fired up to put in the effort you need to take over the world and change people’s lives, so there you go, talk to you soon.

Steve Larsen: Hey what’s going on everyone, this is Steve Larsen and I work for Russell, I am his assistant and he’s asked me to go and clean up a lot of this podcast. So as you listen to this episode, just know that Russell is answering the question, “Really, if I’m just one funnel away, then how much farther away is that funnel?”

Russell: Yeah, I don’t know all the answers ever, but from my experience, I think you’re seeing people’s highlight reels and you’re not seeing the rest of it. Things can be short-cutted, they can speed up, but Anthony for example, if you knew Anthony’s whole story, it wasn’t like he became this Biohacking kid. Anthony was my coaching partner for three years and he was barely scraping by for three years in the weight loss market going hard and heavy targeting weight loss and women.

Weight loss is by far the most competitive market on planet earth. So it’s like to be successful there you have to be super, a very unique angle, or have an amazing story, or deal with the best sales people, or best copywriters, or whatever to dominate. Anthony tried weight loss for the 3 ½ , 4 years that I knew him and struggled, struggled and for him to have success we had to shift from weight loss into a completely different angle, blue ocean, biohacking thing, and that’s where he’s finding success.

But in that time, if you look at his story, he came down with Lyme disease. He spent two years biohacking himself on his deathbed trying to figure out how to survive. After he figured it out he went on this mission where he literally, I love Anthony because his heart is so big, I would say conservatively he probably coached a thousand people in three years, most of them for free because he couldn’t afford it because he just loved people so much and cared so much about them. And that’s how he found his voice, how he has so much certainty. When you talk to Anthony, it’s just absolute certainty. So people plug into that. Abosolute certainty.

When people follow me, with this thing that I’m good at, I have absolute certainty. I have no wavering doubt. They plug in because Russell is certain, so I need to follow that. But that certainty doesn’t come by positioning or posturing it, it’s by putting in that work ahead of time and just mastering it to the point where you just know. That’s Anthony’s journey.

Kaelin’s is different. Kaelin has such an amazing story, how much weight she gained, lost, and she happened to become one of the best sales people ever. I don’t think there’s any, there’s very few humans on earth that have become a better sales person than Kaelin, which is why they’re dominating that market. She’s so good, clear on her messaging. She’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, she’s dominating there.

Caleb’s got, he’s not an overnight success story either, he’s young but that dude grinds more than anyone I’ve ever met. Insane amounts of hours and time and effort and by the time he was 13 years old he’d read more books than I had. He had done hundreds and hundreds of Facebook Lives before anything started hitting. That kid’s put in 10,000 hours plus before he’s 15 years old. That’s not what you’re seeing. You’re seeing, he’s a 13 year old kid, he’s successful. He didn’t just step into that. Some people do, some people are insanely talented, it doesn’t make any sense. It does happen, but for most of us, it’s not that way.

I didn’t make a penny online for 2 plus years, and the next 5 years were hardly anything, it took 7 or 8 years before I found my voice to be able to be in this market and have certainty where I felt that. So how do you get that absolute certainty? It’s by putting in the time, by doing that.

Steven: I actually am the coach for the Two Comma Club Coaching program, and I love it, it’s so much fun. It’s fun to see because I’ve been doing this game now for about 4 years now, and for the first several years, I actually made no money with it at all. I was with anything about funnels, business entrepreneurship in general, and all I knew was I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I started putting my head down and working and did everything from stalks and options, real estate, commercial and residential, I went and did ebooks, door to door sales, I did telemarketing. I did everything and it was all with the back drop of wanting to be an entrepreneur and provide value in the marketplace and go do this stuff.

And I failed my face off. It was one of the most humiliating things in my entire life. My wife and I were living on loans and college. And because my wife was basically the spouse of the suffering entrepreneur, and I didn’t want to be that story and it turned into this really painful experience. But I literally was listening to Russell’s podcast, I was listening to these other entrepreneurs and their podcast. It was honestly them and YouTube motivation videos and all this stuff that just kept me going with it. And just the sheer belief that it would work and mad obsession over the topic.

If I could turn around and tell myself some things now, it would certainly be that I really wish I would have spent more time crafting my voice early on. I like what Russell’s mentioning inside of this podcast right here, telling that you’ve got to figure out the voice. And the way I did early on was by regularly publishing. I would get out there and I would just speak. There was a time, after I read Dotcom Secrets, I went and I was like, “Hey I know enough to at least teach someone else.” And I literally held a 3 hour, free class inside of a stranger’s home. They had all these people there, friends and family, and I recorded the whole thing and that became my first info product.

I didn’t know that’s what it would become. It was just pure obsession over the task, over the topic that kept me going with it. So number one, one of the biggest things everyone struggles with when they start doing this thing is they have to find their voice and if they can’t find the voice, where do they draw the line in the sand? Where does the polarity come from? Where’s the passion? Where’s the stories and the background? And if you’ve never spoken before or put yourself out there before, you’re never going to know how those things actually fit together. It’s awkward for a lot of people who are just starting out inside Two Comma Club Coaching because they have never figured those things out, they don’t know what that’s like.

So not only are they trying to create a brand new product, number one. Not only are they trying to create the sales message, which they’ve never done before either. Number three, they’re trying to find their voice. They’re trying to do three things at the exact same time. And you can do it, but when people are going out and expecting, “I’ve been doing it for two months.” But they’ve never actually been successful with it, when you look at it from that angle it’s humorous. Of course you’re not successful right off the bat. You’re trying to figure out your voice, your product and your message all at the exact same time and it’s been two months and you’re not happy with it.

So you’ve got to think of it from the other side. These guys that have been publishing for a super long time are people who have been giants inside the marketplace. You look behind every one of the success stories, and every single one of them has got these amazing stories, usually they’re rags to riches stories, or stories where there was so much failure at the beginning, but they kept their heads down and kept pushing forward on the whole thing.

So those are the three things. As you start moving forward, you’ll learn more about this in Two Comma Club Coaching, really that piece right there will put so many of the things in place for you to keep going forward. Find your voice, find your voice. And I was really against finding my voice. It sounds stupid. I didn’t want to listen to Russell, I didn’t want to listen to what he was saying. It was before I worked for him, or before anything else. But I’d be listening to his podcast and he kept saying, “Hey, you gotta get out there and you gotta find your voice, start publishing.

I was actively against that. I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to podcast, there’s no way I’m going to start Youtubing. There’s no way I want to do any of that crap. I don’t want to do any of that.” And it was at his event in 2016, I had no money and was literally building funnels and trading funnels for a ticket. And trading funnels for a plane ticket, and a hotel nights stay. I had no money, I just knew I had to be there. I’d been hustling for several years by that point.

I got there and sat down and listened to Russell and I was like, “Okay, I’ve worked my butt off to get here, I have no money, I don’t know how I’m going to make it. But what I’m going to do, is whatever he says, I’m just going to do it. Because I’ve put in the time, I just want to make this work and I know it will. I just need to keep working it and working it.”

So what I did is went and I sat down and started taking notes and all the sudden Russell stands up and goes, “Every single one of you guys needs to get up there and you gotta start publishing.” And I was like, “Crap he said it. I gotta do it.” And I went out and started publishing regularly and the first 20 episodes that I did were really awkward, they were bad. But something happened, something clicked. My voice changed, something happened, my confidence changed. I got stronger polarity. What I believed started coming out stronger.

As I went out and started interviewing the people and started talking to those in the industry, I figured out the place for me to exist in the ecosystem without being competitive with everyone else. That way I could collaborate and not compete as hard in my own little blue ocean niche. Amazingly, when I started doing that, just like those in Two Comma Club, I know a lot of you guys listen to this podcast, so that’s a little shout out to you guys. But I know a lot of you guys, what I say to you is if you go and start regularly publishing, you’ll number one, find your voice. But number two, the place for your offer to exist, where you need to create your new opportunity, your new niche, that place will bubble up and emerge out of the red ocean, the red submarket ocean.

It’s amazing what will start to happen. You’ll start to figure out the message. The market will start to tell you everything that you need to know. You don’t know enough to actually be successful on your own, you don’t. The market will tell you everything always. Don’t try to come up with it on your own. If you do that, fantastic way to fail, fantastic way to lose money. I did it for years, I could tell you all about it. Really, what this game is, is go funnel hack, which does not mean pages. If the offer is online, yes that means pages. But go funnel hack an individual. Funnel hack their voice, their offer, their message.

What you do, you start to see this picture that emerges out of the sand. “Oh my gosh. That’s what I have to go make.” Here’s the formula, here it is. That’s your best shot, you take your best shot at launching that thing and then you step back and wait. And what ends up happening is all these people will start to give you feedback. “I wish it had this.” They’ll come in the form of complaints. “I wish it had this. Your product sucks at this.” Don’t push that stuff away. Those are the things that let you know you’re doing well. They let you know what to create and do next. You take the aggregate voice, aggregate complaint about your product, the aggregate feedback and those are the things, that’s the market telling you what to go make. Then you go make that thing.

And what’s nice, when you do that, take those pieces of feedback, you number one, take your best shot. Number two get feedback. Number three you turn around and tweak it and relaunch it. Now you’re in this cool adoration cycle, but the pressure is not on you anymore. You’ve already launched the thing, it’s already up, it’s already rocking and you’re getting feedback. That’s what I’d say. That’s just my commentary on this piece right now. I completely stand by and behind everything that he’s saying with this. In order to gain confidence, you gotta live it and you gotta live in it every day. You gotta be the expert, the go-to person inside the industry itself.

Russell: It’s harder when you don’t have a story. Even the one that I’ve watched, and I know a lot about the weight loss market, I’ve struggled with weight throughout my life and coached a lot of people in that market. So I was watching it, not to critique certain things, but the one thing I know from the weight loss market, and people I worked through it is that people and weight loss are very skeptical. If somebody doesn’t have a story where they were overweight, they don’t understand what it’s like to be me. That’s their belief.

In the video you talked about how to target certain areas, how to reduce fat. I was like, cool this is a good topic. It’s something people are concerned about because people have love handles, they have this and they do want to target spots. And then the advice is kind of like, “Don’t target a spot, lose all your weight.” And I felt like that message was not, most overweight people that I know would have, that message was not sharable, but the opposite. Would have pushed them away like, “You have no idea, you’ve never had love handles.” That’s how they would have reacted.

I know that because I’ve worked with so many overweight people. And you guys should know that, you should know if you told somebody that, “Don’t worry about your love handles, you gotta lose this.” Because you told someone that face to face, you should have known that, that this was your market. You should know that would have repelled those people, because the number one concern that people in the market has when they start working with a trainer is this person has no idea how I feel because they’re not overweight.

That’s why Kaelin’s story is so central to her success, because that’s their biggest belief. That is the biggest limiting belief in that market that people have. In my market it’s different. In my market it’s like, “If this stuff works so good, why don’t you give it me for free?” That’s my market of beliefs. That’s what I’m fighting all the time. You gotta know that in your market. And that comes from doing this over and over again. Doing it, getting people offended and then doing it again, the next time they don’t get as offended. It’s kind of like the movie Groundhog Day. Every time Bill Murray comes back he relives the life, he does it wrong, tweaks it, comes back, does it again, does it wrong. Tweaks it, comes back, does it again, does it wrong. Eventually he has a good life. But how many years he was in that Groundhog Day experience.

When you do that in volume, a lot, but I also thing, defining your message better. Because where can the money be made right now? It’s not in traditional weight loss, it’s in the fads, or blue oceans, keto diets. That’s the hot thing. When we launched ProveIt we were kind of the first people coming out there and now there’s been this huge swell of thousands of different keto brands, products, things like that. Some are succeeding, some are failing but it’s the ones that are diving into this market that’s hot.

If you look at, again Expert Secrets 101, find a hot market, ask them what they want and give it to them. What they want and what they need. You gotta find out exactly what they want and sell them that and then fulfill and give them what they need. That’s the big thing, you gotta understand the market super well and the only way you do that is by putting in the time and effort. So that’s being completely honest. You have to differentiate completely how this sub-market that you’re in right now, Dave Woodwork works for us and his wife is in that market, she tried for four or five years to succeed in the weight loss market, and she’s got amazing stories.

She’s been a personal trainer forever. She’s struggled because she’s stepping to play against the best of the best. So finally she’s made the shift, her program is called Have It All Moms, it’s focusing on moms and how weight loss helps moms. It’s not just weight loss but these other parts of personal development. She’s carved out this ocean and now she’s finally getting traction, but it’s four or five years in the big leagues and she’s a great sales person, she’s all these things and she’s struggled.

So again, for you guys, you gotta find your market, you gotta find the market of what people actually want, what they’re looking for, not what they need, we fulfill what they need, but we’ve got to sell them what they want. So that’s that. There’s the art and science of this game, hopefully you’ve heard me talk about that. And I think most people that struggle as entrepreneurs are typically the A students. I’m guessing you’re an A student, by default. Because they’re really good at the science, but the art is something you feel. It’s different.

So people who are really good students struggle with that because it doesn’t come naturally. When the C students are the ones really good at the art of it, but they struggle with the science. So for most businesses I recommend for people, if you’re in that spot, figure out who you are. When I got started in this business, one of my mentors told me, “Look, in every business there needs to be a starter and a finisher. You gotta figure out who you are, then surround yourself with the other people.” And at that time in my business I was like, “I’m a starter, really good at starting, really bad at finishing.” I needed to surround myself with finishers, so I started hiring people that were really good finishers.

That’s why people always ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done?” its because I have the ability to start a thousand things, but I have a team behind me who finishes them all. But I know what my strengths are, I know what my weaknesses are. If you go to Tony Robins Business Master, he talks about every company has three types of personality types. You gotta have, an artist, an entrepreneur and a manager. The artist is the person obsessed with that thing. One of them has got to be obsessed. That’s the artist.

The next person is the entrepreneur, the person out there risking and going crazy. Going out there and doing stuff. Then there’s the manager who’s in the management roles. So I’m looking at that, inherently what are you best at? Are you best at managing? Are you obsessed with the art of this thing? Or are you the entrepreneur who wants to go out and sell the crap out of it? I think at Funnel Hacking Live, one of the presentations they talked about that concept, they called it a hustler, a hacker and a designer. In Clickfunnels, I was the hustler, Todd was the hacker, and Dylan was the designer, that was the three pieces.

And not that you can’t learn the other stuff, you can, but that’s not how businesses grow, by us figuring out our weaknesses and focusing on it. In business it’s the opposite. Find your strengths and quadruple down on them and abandon your weaknesses and plugging other people into those spots. So it’s backwards. Yes, you’re capable of learning those things, but don’t because it’s so much better to find those people and plug them in.

Even Brandon and Kaelin, you look at them and the reason they are successful is you have Kaelin who is the artist, she’s obsessed with her art and she’s also one of the best sales people ever. So you have that, but her by herself would fail. She has her husband who is the manager, entrepreneur, risking, that kind of thing. Because they have both halves, is why they’ve blown up. For me, I don’t have a spouse that’s out of the house so I brought in team members and partners and that’s why we were able to blow up.

Let’s take our strengths, I know what they are. I’m really good at this piece, let’s find somebody that that’s their strength, let’s team up and now it’s like you can have way more impact with people. Whatever that is, really understanding the market, and being obsessed with that. Whoever it is that’s the artist in your business needs to be obsessed with that. Reading 400 blog posts a day, listening…I listened today, I’m a marketing guy and there’s probably few people on earth that know more about marketing right now, than me. Not to be cocky, but I’m kind of obsessed with it. Today I think I’ve listened to 8 or 9 marketing podcasts, I bought three products, I recorded 23 videos, actually 29 videos recorded on the topic, I got done at 6, came home to eat dinner with my kids and I’m actually going back in because I’m so excited about this thing that I gotta keep going back in.

So that was today for me, because I’m obsessed with the art of it. There’s got to be someone there that’s that obsessed with it, or else it’s going to be really hard to drive it. I got the messages back, the first message was like, “Oh hey, I just did some Facebook Lives and nobody showed up. It was just crickets.” That shouldn’t bug you, if you’re an artist you should not care. You love to hear your voice and you just want to talk, study, share and learn and give and share and talk. Whether people are listening or not, it should not matter.

Whoever the artist is in the business, that’s the level of obsession they need to have to be able to succeed. So it’s understanding that, and if that’s not you it’s cool, find someone that that’s how obsessed there are and then plug in yourself where you’re obsessed, put those two things together and now you’ve got a force of nature to be reckoned with. But there’s got to be….that’s the pieces. Any business, you have to get it into orbit and you can’t do that by being a normal human, and just waking up and doing your thing. It takes raw obsession. That’s why it takes an entrepreneur to launch a business and get it into the stratosphere. Hire a bunch of MBA’s and people to plug it in and just keep it moving, but it’s obsession that get it into orbit. A rocket can’t get into orbit unless it’s got these huge boosters that just blow the crap out of it and push it off the ground.

But again, it’s tripling, quadrupling down on your strengths and backing off your weaknesses and finding people who your weakness is their strengths, that’s how you build a company and blow it up fast.

View Details

If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.

Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

How do you calculate how much to pay for a customer if you don’t know your lifetime value?
During Russell's Clickfunnels journey, what was his main source of inspiration?
Is it always best to start at the backend of your funnel and build your highest value offer first?

So listen to Russell answer these questions and drop the mic.

View Details

If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.

Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

How to make a product more scalable when it's embarrassing for people to talk about.
How Russell gets in the zone for a successful hack-a-thon.
What Russell does to prepare to have a successful mindset.
Ideas on how to warm up leads and have a conversation with a potential client.
What the number one mistake is that people make with Clickfunnels and how to avoid it.
Where to place an upsell on a call to action video.
How Russell gets focused enough to get things done when he's a hyper buyer.
How Russell manages giving back to good causes while also running his business.
How Russell decides between making recorded content versus live content.
How to target people on social media to buy your products when using a white labeling service.

So listen to Russell drop the mic as he answers these questions.

View Details

A personal message to a friend who is struggling.

On this extra long episode Russell talks to a friend from elementary school about how to go from being a technician and having a cap on his income to being a rainmaker and having an unlimited ceiling on his income. Here are some cool things you will hear on this episode:

What the roles of the Entrepreneur, the technician, and the rainmakers are in the business hierarchy.
Why getting really good at being a technician is not the way to have unlimited earning potential.
How you can use your technician skills and apply them into being a rainmaker.

So listen to Russell explain how to go from being technician to making it rain!

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to an insanely late night Marketing Secrets podcast. I am here, for those watching on tv, I’m in the car. Over there you can see Norah. It is late, insanely late. In one minute it will be midnight here and we’re about to take you guys on a very special Marketing Secrets Podcast.

Alright, I hope you guys are doing amazing. Right now my little baby Norah and I are on a mission. It’s a secret mission to get her to hopefully fall asleep. We started weaning her off the bottle about a week ago before our family vacation because we thought it would be so much nicer to not have bottles on this trip. That was a good idea, huh Norah.

But what we didn’t think about was the fact that she’s insane and now she won’t go to bed at all. She won’t take naps, since her naps happen when she finally passes on. We got back from the lake, we’re on a family vacation, we went to the lake and had a really good time, and then she wouldn’t fall asleep and we were driving back and forth and finally when I went to the store to buy something for dinner tonight. When we were coming back she passed out and she slept for 3 hours. She was so beat. Then she woke up and now she won’t go back to bed.

So this is the second night in a row. Last night I was also out driving until about midnight, 12:30 she fell asleep last night. It’s 12:00 right now, hopefully in less than 30 minutes she will be asleep. But I am on vacation having a good time. If you listen to my last Marketing Secrets podcast it talked about how vacations can be really tough for entrepreneurs. I feel like we’re not moving, there’s no momentum. We’re stuck in a spot. That’s somewhere that I definitely feel.

As much fun as vacation is it’s also hard for me, I got stuff to do, people to see, places to go. Actually, it’s interesting as I was packing the car up as I was about to leave, between hiking stuff in and out to the car and everything I was checking Facebook and it’s interesting. There was a friend who I don’t think I’ve seen him, I think the last time we talked was in elementary school. I remember 6th grade, it’s kind of a funny story. In 6th grade we were moving these big boxes and he had this big box and he dropped it. I don’t know why I remember this, but I remember him saying it was super embarrassing to drop this box of stuff and he was saying, “Someday this is going to be one of those things that people remember me by. Remember that day you dropped this huge box.” I remember thinking that was really interesting.

And now, it’s 30 years later and I remember that day, it’s kind of funny. But anyway, I remember he was in junior high and high school with me but he was a basketball player and I was a wrestler so we didn’t really cross paths a lot. But I knew who he was and grew up in elementary school and I always had respect for him. When the book of faces came out, Zuckerberg, it was kind of fun because you can go back and remember high school, junior high, and elementary school friends. And people from wrestling and different aspects of your life and you start adding them on Facebook. So he was one of the names that popped up years ago, I added him and hadn’t thought much more about it.

Every once in a while I saw posts from him, so I kind of knew what he was doing, but not a lot. He shifted his job or his business or career a couple of times and didn’t seem like he was having a lot of success. I remember it seems like last Christmas or something, he posted something really negative and I felt bad for him. But it’s also one of those things that when I first started my business and started learning about entrepreneurship and learning how to sell things and all this world became open to me, I remember at first I wanted to share with everybody. I tried to share with friends, family members, people at church, everyone I bumped into.

I was so excited to tell this thing that I had learned. I was so excited I would share with every single person. It was so mind blowing to me that most people just “Oh, cool. Nice.” I’m like you don’t understand it’s not just nice. It was so frustrating to me. But it’s funny because that was, I always tried to change everybody and save them and help them because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. After a couple of years of that I realized that none of the people I tried to help ever did anything with it. It was really depressing me, so that’s when I shifted back and started doing the business for a long time.

I think I got into coaching because I wanted to share it, and it was cool when I started coaching. It was people who would come, people who it was their idea first and came to me to learn how to do it. Those people I could mold, help and change because they had the desire first. It’s because of that I’ve been very cautious the last decade of my life going out of my way to talk to people about this stuff unless they raised their hand first.

So I saw him last December say something and I didn’t see my spot to say something, so I didn’t say anything. Then as I was leaving, I was going through Facebook, again we’re packing the cars and I’m sneaking out to do what you do with the phones. So I see this post, this long post and it was again a negative thing and he was talking about how much he was struggling and trying to make money and all these things, and I think he said that this last year he made $25,000, and that was what he made in an entire year. He was really struggling and trying to make things better for his family, life and wife and he couldn’t figure it out and was just frustrating and was just kind of venting.

How you doing Norah? She’s so cute back there. I hope she falls asleep soon.

Anyway, I felt for him. I was just like, do I say something or not. For whatever reason I decided to just reach out to him. I was like “Hey man, the problem..We haven’t talked in 20+ years, I don’t know if you know who I am. The problem is you’re not focusing on the right thing. I can help you but I don’t want to intrude, it’s not my business. I can help you, I know what’s wrong, it’s an easy fix. In the last year and a half, few years we’ve helped. I’ve been a coach to almost 200 people now to become a millionaire. Tens of thousands of people to make 100 thousand or more in year. I know the game, I know what it takes and what it doesn’t take.” I said something like that and my next post was, I wish I could read it right now. “I’m not trying to pitch you on some MLM. I honestly, if you want help I can help you because I know what’s wrong.”

He was like, “Really? Yeah, I want to know.” So I told him a couple of things and I said, “If you do those things, I’ll record a podcast for you while I’m on my trip and kind of go into more detail.” So this last 3 days I keep thinking about that and I’m excited so that’s what I’m actually doing right now and I hope it benefits all of you guys. Because I think for most people who are stuck, it’s not something that unique to you, it’s not. A lot of times we think our situation’s unique, but it’s not. It’s a pattern that happens over and over again. The key to breaking patterns is recognizing it and realizing what the correct pattern is and replacing it. It’s not hard, it’s just hard because it’s the first time most people have gone through it personally.

So that’s kind of the context. I just wanted to share this message, it’s really for him, I’m not going to go super specific, but I think it’ll be helpful for everybody. I know that typical people I talk to in this podcast are people who are entrepreneurs already and this is kind of I guess for someone who’s on that line between the job maybe and the entrepreneur. That line where it’s like, you’re not fully an entrepreneur running this way, but you’re struggling at the job thing and you’re in between. That’s what this podcast is for and I hope it kind of helps.

With that said, I’m going to jump into this. So the first thing that I kind of told him in the message, the first thing is you’re focusing on the wrong thing. And he’s like, “I’ve been focusing on perfecting my craft.” And just kind of some perspective, the industry he’s going into is film. So he’s trying to do movies and videos and all that kind of stuff. So he’s like, “I’m focusing on getting better at my craft and I’m also doing a lot of networking.” So I go, “okay, yes. You are completely focusing on the wrong two things. You are focusing on things to help you get better at your thing, but you have to shift your focus to making money.” That’s a weird concept because it’s something that I remember the first time I had that epiphany. I need to learn how to make money. I was in school learning all this crap and I’m looking at this stuff and studying and I was like, I’m not actually learning how to make money. I still remember one of my biggest gripes with college is I took two semesters of accounting and two semesters of finance and they never once taught you how to do your own taxes, which is insane. School sucks.

Just throwing that out there for those who are wondering my thoughts on the whole thing. But it’s crazy the fact that they don’t teach you that thing. And I realized I’m not learning how to make money here in school. And I started studying how to make money. It was interesting how different it was. It’s not what you’re learning in school. And now fast forward, I think it’s been, let’s see…it’ll be my 15th anniversary in a month from now and we got married with a year left in school. So 14 years I’ve been graduated from school. Looking back on it now from this sign. Sorry I’m waiting for a stop light, but there’s no stop light, there’s a stop sign. Little Norah’s still awake.

Anyway, as I look at it now from this lens looking back, it’s interesting, a lot of times we want something. I remember growing up, you always hear your parents and people say you gotta go to school to get a good education so you can make good money. We all heard that. That’s a thing that parents say a lot. So we assume that those two things coincide. Good job, good education equals more money. But not necessarily. Now I look at again from my perspective, 14 years later, it’s interesting.

I was thinking about this a lot over the last two or three days especially. If you want to look at the structure of how people make money, because there’s definitely, there’s you make money and there’s places you don’t. And most places you’re focusing on, like when he said he was focusing on getting better at his skills in networking. He’s focusing on something that’s good, but it’s not making money. So I’m going to start at the top.

The top is a pure entrepreneur, so the top of a business, the hierarchy chart, so the top is the entrepreneur who starts the business. Typically, at least the entrepreneurs that I like to work with, the entrepreneurs are passionate about something, but their mostly passionate, not just about that thing, but getting that thing out to people. That’s what defines an entrepreneur. If any of you guys have read the Emyth, by Michael Gerber, he talks about what happens with a lot people is they think they’re entrepreneurs, and they get a job at the bakery shop and start baking cakes. They see the owner of a bakery shop and they’re like, “This guy is an idiot and I could do better than him.” And then what Michael Gerber says is that they have an entrepreneurial seizure.

They think they’re smarter so they start their own bakery. The problem is that they’re not an actual entrepreneur, they’re a technician. They’re somebody who is in the business who is doing it. They’re making the bread, the cakes, the stuff but they look at the entrepreneur who they think is an idiot, so they have the entrepreneurial seizure and say they want be the entrepreneur and start their own business and say, “I can make bread better than anyone else. I can make cakes.” And they’re passionate about the thing and create the business and what happens to the business? It fails.

It has a 90+% failure rate. Because it’s technicians, it’s people who think that the key is the thing. They think that the cake is what runs the business. It’s their passion about the cake, the creation of the cake, they don’t understand that that’s not the business. In the business the entrepreneur’s job is being passionate about getting the cake out to as many people as possible. That’s where the money’s at. That’s why most businesses fail. Because it’s not the entrepreneur running it, it’s someone who had an entrepreneurial seizure and is a technician and is trying to do that thing and thinks they should start a business because of it.

My first question for everyone listening to this, are you the entrepreneur? The good news is we go deeper into this…….holy cow, a deer just crossed the path……There are ways to make money, not as an entrepreneur in a business. But it’s not where you probably think that they are. I’m just thinking for example, a doctor. Doctors make good money. How many times did you hear that you have to become a doctor to make good money, or a dentist to make good money. So those people make good money, but not there’s no limit to your income money. Because a doctor is a technician. They are just highly paid technician because a lot of school goes into it. But they’re still a technician. They’re not an entrepreneur, they have a definite cap on their income growth, always.

So just depending on what technician you pick. Let’s say you’re going into a company to get a job, you’re capped by the earning potential of that role you take on. If you’re a doctor, a dentist, a baker, support person. You’re capped at whatever that thing is, which is fine, it’s just knowing that’s where you’re capped at.

If you want no cap, the first spot you have to look at is entrepreneur. But to be an entrepreneur you have to understand that it’s not being passionate about the creation of the thing, it’s being passionate about the selling of the thing. There’s a big reason why I wrote the Expert Secrets book. It’s because typically Experts who are really passionate about their topic are also passionate about getting their topic out. By definition they are entrepreneur’s because they are trying to get the message out about that thing. They own the bakery, they make the cake, but they’re more excited aobut telling people about the cake. That’s what makes them successful about entrepreneurs. That’s why I love working with entrepreneurs.

So there’s the top of the….let me flip the car around, I’m getting out to no man’s land now. So that’s the top of this pyramid scheme of business. I don’t know if you want to call it that. But the entrepreneurs are at the top. And that’s what most people look at. The entrepreneur is the person that makes all the money. But they’re all the person who risk everything. Entrepreneurship is a scary thing because you have no earning potential at the top, but you’re also the one with all the risk on your back. For a lot of people you can’t just go out and become an entrepreneur immediately, especially if you have a wife and kids. Because you have to have security. There’s this huge draw with people who have entrepreneurial desires, but they also have security needs between your family.

So that’s a hard thing to just gamble and jump and say “I’m going to become an entrepreneur.” And I understand that. So a lot of times the entrepreneur is not the first place for people. I feel super blessed. I started my entrepreneurial journey about the time I met my wife and I was able to do a lot of things because she supported me, I was going to school and we didn’t have kids. We didn’t have this need for security at this point when I was getting started, which I’m so grateful for. I have so much respect for those that step into the entrepreneurial role when they have those things because it’s so much harder.

So it’s always easier to start being an entrepreneur and risking everything when you don’t have a wife and kids and things. So that’s kind of one thing. That’s one spot. Again, there’s different places to make money in companies, so there’s the best spot, maybe not the best spot, but one spot. The entrepreneur at the top, that’s number one.

Then underneath the entrepreneur inside the organization there’s gotta be technicians, doing the things, baking the cakes, cleaning the teeth, cutting people open, the technicians. This is what schooling is actually…the only reason school is actually good is because it creates technicians. If you want to be a doctor you have to go to school. If you want to be able to drill teeth, you gotta go to school. If you want to become a baker or a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, any profession.

Another deer just ran by. I don’t want to hit a deer. That would be scary.

But any profession, that’s what schooling is for. So when you’re going into school you are thinking about that. Any major you decide to go after, there’s a kind of associated salary range you’re going to fit into. Sometimes it’s big, like doctors make good money. But you’re always capped. A technician will always be capped, by definition of what they are. You just are. If you’re coming into a business and You’re a technician looking at this, you’re capped. Your salary is capped.

So my friend who is doing video stuff, he’s looking for jobs in a business where he’s the technician. Again, he was saying in his post that he made $25,000 last year, because the need you are filling inside whatever company you are trying to plug into. That’s what they have budgeted for that. That’s what you’re able to make. You’re capped. You can’t go above that, unless you work more hours, more days. Sometimes you find another company that has a bigger budget. That’s another thing, and again there’s nothing wrong with a technician, it’s understanding that there’s a salary that’s set for that thing. There’s a budget set and that’s what happens.

The goal of a business is not to make the technician rich. I had a finance teacher at Boise State, tell you what, most teachers I had at school were always like, “What’s the job of a business?” “To create jobs, stimulate the economy.” They always had this happy go lucky, tree hugging attitude about business. I had this one finance teacher that said the only goal of a business is to make the owners money. That’s it. If the entrepreneur, the owner is not making money, the board of directors, whoever is running it, if they’re not making money, the business dies. That’s the only purpose and only point of a business is to make the entrepreneur money. Everybody’s got to understand that.

If you’re a technician there is no desire for anybody for you to make more money than what your set salary is. You’re going to find entrepreneurs, in my company I’m very compassionate towards people and I love what they do. I love creating things for people and having incentive plans, but for the most part, as a technician you’re in that range. You have to understand if you’re going to school, that’s the earning range you’re going to be in. Are you okay with that? If you are, cool. Go for it. That’s awesome.

But don’t complain later when you come back and say I’m not making what I want. You picked a profession, you picked being a technician, you picked this piece and that’s all it’s worth. It doesn’t matter how much school you went to or how much time and effort you put into it, that’s what that task is worth to the entrepreneur. You have to understand that, technicians are essential to a business, they need to be there. That’s what colleges, universities, programs were all created for, to create those people. Those people are important. But again, that’s the pros and cons of that.

Check it out guys, look at this. Pan over. She’s asleep. 12:19, it’s a good sign. This podcast might not be three hours long now that she’s asleep. Otherwise, it could have been a really long one.

Alright, there you go. Entrepreneur, unlimited potential, tons of risk and the role, the reason why an entrepreneur’s successful is because they’re passionate about the selling of the thing. Getting the message out, not just the message. Not just passionate about making cakes, but passionate about getting the cakes in as many people’s mouths as possible because they’re obsessed with the end product. That’s the difference. There’s entrepreneurs.

Number two level down in this pyramid is the technicians, who are the one’s doing the jobs to make this whole thing happen. Super essential but have huge earning caps, depending on what technician role you picked makes your earning cap. There’s one spot, and this is the spot that I want everybody to understand because this is the other spot inside of a company where you have no earning potential. Excuse me, I said it wrong. You have no earning ceiling, you have unlimited earning potential. Scratch that, that could have been really bad and messed up the whole thing. You have unlimited earning potential, literally the sky is the limit.

That last piece, so we have entrepreneurs, we have technicians, and the third are the rain makers. They’re people that make it rain. They’re people that bring leads and money into the business. They’re the rain makers. Now entrepreneurs love rain makers, why? Because they make it rain. Do you guys understand that? That’s the secret sauce. Most technicians don’t understand that. Because all they know is I went to school to learn this thing to do this task, so they do it and do it. But the person that gets rewarded the most, outside the entrepreneur of the company, are the rain makers.

Typically in most, not most, but a lot of businesses that I own, that I’m involved with, the rain makers a lot of times are entrepreneurs who maybe if they would have started their entrepreneur journey ten years earlier, they would be the entrepreneur of the business. But for whatever reason they’re not. So they came, they can have, a lot of times we call them intrapreneurs. In their role in the company, they have the ability to grow and expand as much as they want. They’re rain makers. What do they do? They make it rain. They bring in customers and make money. They bring money into the company.

So if you look at this from an outside perspective, if you selling this stuff in college terms. It’s marketing and sales. Marketing brings people in, sales takes their money. That’s kind of what it is. And it’s funny because, I don’t know what it was, even like most technicians, if you go to school and you tell someone you want to be a sales person, the viewpoint, or even marketing, I’m in marketing, or I’m in sales, the technicians are the ones who are always looking down on you. “oh, I’m a doctor.” They look down on the rain makers because they think it’s a sub….I don’t know. They think it’s not as good, not as dignified.

What they don’t understand is that the rainmakers make the money. It is the most dignified, most important position in the entire company. Without the rain maker’s the technician has no job. Without someone bringing people into your business and then getting the money from those people, there’s nobody to be a technician to. You make as many cakes as you want, but if some dude didn’t bring those people into the store and take their money, they’re not going to buy a cake. It’s the most important role in the business, outside the entrepreneur who sets the initial risk to get it going.

So even though the technicians talk down on us marketing and sales people, it happens to be the most important role in every single business. You can tell when businesses are stupid, when recessions come and they cut their marketing teams and they cut their sales teams. It’s insane to me. I had a chance in my life to live through one of the recessions, 2008. I had a bunch of friends who were in marketing jobs and they were making it rain for the company and the company started struggling so they cut the marketing. I’m like, you’re insane. Cut the technicians, they don’t do anything. Don’t cut the blood coming into your company. Marketing and sales is the blood, it is the rain. The rain makers are the key.

So rain makers. They don’t have a ceiling, in most businesses now days. Especially if you become good at it and not a little bit good, but really good. You can come to a company and say, “I can bring in unlimited leads for you.” Guess what they will do? They will give you anything you want. All company need leads. The other thing they need, sales. They take those leads and turn them into cash, turn them into money. That’s how the entrepreneur gets paid, that’s how the technicians get paid. It’s by the rain makers. Bringing people in and taking their money. That’s it. We can try to be romantic about it, but that is it.

You have to understand, if you want to be wealthy, and I’m not talking about making good money as a technician, because you can do that. You gotta go to school, that sucks. If you want to become wealthy, become rich, make a lot of money. You have to shift your focus from becoming good at being a technician, to understanding how to make it rain. If you can make it rain in a business, you are infinitely valuable. As a technician you are only valuable as that task is to the person, to the company. They know, they got a budget for it. There you go.

So if you’re working for a company saying, I do video. Guess what? They have a budget for that. We pay video guys $3 an hour, $12 an hour, whatever that is, $20 an hour.

For my friend, the company you are working for, they budget $25 grand so that’s all the money you are able to get. Because you’re a video person, you’re a commodity. That’s the other thing about technicians is they’re commodities. It’s funny, I was talking to my sister the other day here at our family vacation or whatever, and she teaches piano lessons. I love my sister, she’s honestly in my top 3 favorite people on planet earth. She’s teaches piano and she’s like, “I’m so busy, I can’t keep up with anything.” And I said, “you should double your prices.” And she’s like, “I can’t double my prices.” And I’m like, “Why not?” and she’s like, “If I double my prices I will lose half my people.” I’m like, “okay, well you lose half your people but you double the money, that means you get double the free time for the same amount of money.” And she’s like, “I can’t do that because that’s the set price for what people charge for piano lessons where I live. So if I raise my prices, they’ll just go to somebody else.” I’m like, “Because you’re a commodity. Guess how much people pay for marketing consulting advice?” She’s like, “I don’t know.” And I’m like, “Neither do I, but I don’t look what everybody else charges and charge the same thing, I charge the most I possibly can.”

For example we had somebody contact our office and they wanted to do a one day consult with me and I was like, “I don’t have time for a one day consult.” And they’re like, “Well, how much would it cost?” and I told Brent to tell them it’s $100 grand and they can do 8 hours and they have to come to Boise and I’m going home at 5:00 to be with my kids. He kind of laughed because he knew they wouldn’t say yes to that. He went and pitched it to them and came back 5 minutes later. He’s like, “They said yes.” And I was like, “There you go.”

Want to know why? Because I’m not a commodity. When you’re a video person you’re a commodity. When you are any kind of technician you are a commodity. When you’re a doctor, you’re still a commodity because guess why? Another doctor comes along and he’s better than you or less expensive than you, whatever. They can replace you with the other person because you are a commodity. The rain makers are not commodities. That’s what you have to understand.

The rain makers are unique. They understand something that they can’t just learn in school. They know how to get, especially in school because there’s no school that I know of yet, that teaches a marketing program that is actually good. So there you go. So if you’re in school trying to become a rain maker, you should drop out today. If you want to be a technician stick to school. If you want to be a rain maker, it’s time to leave.

If you’re in school, honestly if you’re trying to do a sport. That’s why I was in school. Do that. If you’re trying to find a beautiful spouse, school is agreat place to meet great looking women and probably good looking men, I have no idea. But that’s a great spot to be in school, but just til you find your spouse and then leave. It’s time to go. If you want to make it rain, it’s time to go.

The rain makers are the ones that are not a commodity. There’s no cost associated, people don’t budget that out. Because they are like, I don’t know. If I came to a company and was like, “I’m going to build you guys a sales funnel and this funnel has potential to bring you unlimited leads for forever and make you unlimited amounts of money.” They’re like, “How much does that cost?” I’m like, “However much I want to charge you for it.” They can’t price shop. How are you going to price that? Russell Brunson charges 100 grand for a day. How do you price shop that? Go to somebody else? Ask Gary V. “What do you cost?” and he’ll give you his price but he’s going to teach way differently than I would. If you want what I got, I’m the only one that’s got it. You gotta pay me what I want to charge you for it. I’m not a commodity.

If you’re a great sales person, you’re not a commodity. Great sales people are rare. If you’re an amazing sales person you can walk into any organization and say, “hand me your leads. I just want 20% of everything. I eat what I kill. I’m going to 20% of what I kill.” There’s no business on earth that I know of, that if you walked in and said “Look don’t pay me, just give me all your leads. I want 20% of what I kill.” Almost all of them will say yes to that. Because you’re a rain maker. You have no ceiling. Just kill a whole bunch of stuff and you get your cut.

Same thing with the person who is making it rain, bringing the leads in the door. A lot of times you’re like, “Russell, I’m a video guy, I’m whatever. I don’t know how to make it rain. Right now I’m basically a technician. I’m plugged into this technician thing.” You gotta start studying, not how to become a technician, you’ve got to become good at your craft, I agree with that. You have to become obsessed with it, but you have to become good at understanding how to make money.

The study of making money is the key. So how do I make money? It’s understanding if you’re a video person, doing video is a commodity. But if I can understand how to use video to bring in the leads, it changes things because now I’m not a commodity. I’ve got a friend who charges 100,000 to make you a video, plus 10% of any money that video ever makes you. Technically he’s no better than anybody else. In fact, some would argue he’s a lot worse at video than most people, but he knows how to take that video and have it turned into cash and bring in customers. He knows how to use it to make it rain.

So for those of you guys who are in my world, I’ve got some tools to help you learn how to take whatever technicians skills you have and learn how to make it rain. So I told my friend, I gave him some advice, “I’ll record this podcast but you have to do some things for me first. First thing you need to do is go back to this podcast, Marketing In Your Car, first hundred episodes there’s a cheesy jingle. Next 200 episodes there’s a less cheesy jingle, still cheesy. And then recently we transformed it into the Marketing Secrets podcast, which I really like the name and the new jingle is freaking amazing.” Don’t you guys agree? So we’ve got that.

I said, “Go and listen to every episode, start at episode one and go through all of them. What’s going to happen is you’re going to immerse yourself in how to become a rain maker. You’ll learn a bunch of random crap and none of it’s going to tie together, but it’s going to get your mind immersed in this mindset. And if you don’t like me or my voice, you can go find someone else. But find someone who is obsessed with marketing and sales. And he ranks the stuff that people pay unlimited money for and start immersing yourself. Listening to it all day every single day so your mind is just wrapped into the concepts. With geeking out and going deep with my podcast, your mind is going to get into it but you’re not going to have a blueprint, but you’re going to have all these thoughts going through your head all over the place. It won’t be a path, but it will be immersion. Immersion is the key.”

Tony Robins talks about this a lot and I’m a big believer in pretty much everything tony says because he’s a giant and he’s got stage presence like nobody else and he’s amazing and a billion other reasons. Tony’s the man. He taught me about immersion. If you want to learn something, don’t dabble. There’s dabblers out there all over the place, who dabble. My guess is things in your life that you struggle with are things you have dabbled in and things you excel at are things you immersed yourself in. That’s just how it works.

If you want to learn how to make it rain, you’ve got to immerse yourself in the concepts of people who are making it rain. So number two what I told my friend. I said, “There’s two books you’ve got to read.” And I shipped them out to him. First book is Expert Secrets. In this business there’s two sides of the business, there’s the art and the science. The art really is the selling and messaging and positioning, all those kind of things. Storytelling and that kind of thing, that’s the art. So I said, “Read the Expert Secrets book first because that’s the art. Second read the DotCom Secrets book, because that’s the science. It’s the art and the science to making it rain.”

When you read both those books, there’s two different perspectives that you’ll feel in the books. One is very much like the structure, the science, the Dotcom Secrets, the science to how the game is played and the Expert Secrets is the art. A lot of people think they have to master all of this, and you don’t. Especially if you are someone who would love to be an entrepreneur, but for whatever reason you’re not able to. You want to be an intrapreneur in a company. Go into a company and be an intrapreneur for a company. Look at that and say, “I don’t need to know all this stuff. But I gotta understand it all. I need to understand the art and science and figure out where my skill set fits into that.”

So my friend that’s doing video stuff, you have a skill set that in the right hands is worth a lot of money. In the wrong hands its worth 25 grand a year. If you find a company that’s growing, the right company, the right person to plug into and come and say, “I want to make it rain for you.” Brandon Fischer who started doing video stuff for us 2 ½, 3 years ago. He came in and I met him and my brother does video stuff for me, we didn’t really need another video person, but he came to me and was like, “Hey, I want to learn what you’re doing. I’ll do video stuff for free for you.” I was like, alright and he started doing it for free. He did some amazing stuff and started capturing stories for me. He captured Liz Benney’s story of her telling her experience with Inner Circle.

Basically he didn’t come to me as a video guy, he came to me as, “I can capture the story that will make your company look a million times better to make it rain.” So he captured the story of Liz Benney, so we took that video and put it on a website, started driving traffic to it. That Liz Benney video, I couldn’t track it today, but that video has probably made me at least 2 million dollars if not more. That video helped me make it rain. That video asset to me wasn’t worth 25 k a year, it was worth a heck of a lot more. Because it helped me make customers, convert those customers, and get money from those customers.

But he didn’t come to me as “I’m going to be a video guy.” He came to me like, “Let me serve you first.” The best thing about rain makers, if you’re good at what you do, which is why it’s important to be really good at your craft. That is important. Become obsessed, literally become so obsessed with what you do you become the best in the world at it. Or at least the best that person’s ever met. Become obsessed with it. That’s important.

The second thing is figuring out how to use your skill to make it rain and becoming obsessed with that. That’s the missing key. Because then you become an intrapraneur, you come into a company….Don’t come in and try to negotiate a huge fee, because number one if you negotiate a huge fee, the first thing you’re going to do is lock yourself in as a technician. Technicians get paid a salary. As soon as you negotiate you lock yourself in and then you’re there.

If you come in the other way and say, “I’m going to work for free and make it rain and then I just want a piece of what I bring to you.” If you bring it that way and come in and help make it rain, it’s completely different. Jay Abraham, one of the great marketing, strategic minds of all time, his whole thing is he would come to a company and say, “I’m going to come and work for free I just want 20% of the increase.” He’d come to a company and add 40, 50, 60, 100 million dollars to a company and just took 20% of the increase. That’s what rain makers do. That’s what sales people do. You are creating opportunity. You’re creating money for them and taking a percentage of what you create. That’s the key you guys. That’s the key how to be an entrepreneur inside of an organization and have no limit.

Guess who they don’t fire in a company? The person who makes it rain. If you go into a company and you make it rain, that’s it. You write your own paycheck from that point forward. So how do you do that? Number one, immerse yourself in this stuff, in the marketing and sales. Immerse yourself. I would recommend doing it with the podcast. Because I think I’m obsessed with podcasts. It’s the best way to have it ring through your mind all the time. Start at episode one of my podcast, click play and go until you’re done. A lot of you guys, start over.

This is not for my own ego, partially for my own ego, but mostly for you guys. And again, if for some reason I talk to fast or I’m annoying or whatever, I don’t care. Plug into somebody, plug into Grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk, or plug into John Lee Dumas, I don’t care. Whoever you resonate with, plug in and go. Don’t unplug. Every single day, all of your free time, you’re driving, you’re walking, your bathroom breaks, be listening to podcasts constantly. That’s going to give you the immersion, because immersion is the only way for you to get the connections. This connects to this; you’re going to start seeing the big picture.

Number two is you need a strategy and a blueprint. For each of you guys, there’s two books that I’ve written. I’ve put my heart and my soul. I’ve read thousands of books, sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stuff, to be able to figure out what actually works and put it into a book you could read in a day. So read the Expert Secrets book, number one, and then read the Dotcom Secrets book. Expert Secrets will teach you the art, Dotcom Secrets will teach you the science.

Then you’ve got to look at what your skill set is and where does that plug into the art and science. Again, you don’t have to do everything, but figure out what you are good at. What I would recommend doing, this is kind of the next step, is those who have gone through my certified partner program, we certify people to build sales funnels, the ones that are the most successful, the ones that bit, realize they’re not the best at everything. Henry Kaminski, one of my buddies was in the inner circle for last year, he talked about when he first came in, he was a graphic designer. He’s like, he didn’t say it this way, but similar. He understood the art and the science. “I’m really good at graphic design but I don’t know this other stuff.” So he started studying and learning it. He realized there’s pieces to this.

If you read Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets you will realize there’s pieces and you become an expert in all of it or what he said he did, “I built a voltron team.” Some of you guys, if you’re and you don’t know who Voltron is you can go Google it. Or you might remember Power Rangers, might be a better one for you guys. There are different versions. But Voltron is basically, there were these five, same with Power Rangers, same story, probably the same everything. But there’s five people who had their own super power, they went out there and they were really good. But there was a big bad guy who would always come and they couldn’t defeat him individually. They had to group together and become Voltron and all five pieces came together and they’d fight and they could win.

So Henry said, “I realized I was a good designer, but I’m bad at strategy so I had to find this strategy person to partner with.” So he partnered with his strategy guy, Dave Arsonal. Then he’s like, “I need someone good at selling.” So he partnered with a salesman. He partnered with three or four people and built this Voltron team and he went out there and in less than a year he made a million dollars with his little company.

Because he understood, “We’re rainmakers and I’m good at this piece but I need a couple of people together and we can make it rain. We need someone who can drive traffic, someone to do sales, and I’ll do the art.” He did that.

So for you guys and for my friend, after you understand the art and science, you’ve immersed yourselves, you’re learning all these kind of things, you buy the expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets book, read both of those and understand the art and science of how to make it rain. Now you’re looking back to say, “How do I fit in this? What am I passionate about? Am I good at the story telling part, am I good at funnels?” Figure out those pieces and then you can go to companies and look at that and say, “I’m really good at this piece. I can bring this thing to you.” Or find a partner, find people and come in and say, “We can do this thing.”

A good example of this you guys, I don’t normally share these kind of numbers, but I wanted to just kind of help. Some of you guys have seen the Harmon Brother’s videos, some of you guys know that we are about to launch our Harmon Brother’s video, which I’m really excited for. They did Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri, Chatbooks, Fiber Fix, a whole bunch of great videos. They make these videos and they’re good, really good. They go viral and they’re amazing.

I wanted to hire them to do a video for me so I messaged them two days after they’d actually messaged me, which is kind of funnel. They had this funnel, the Fiber Fix funnel, they said the video went viral but the funnel isn’t converting and they wanted my help. I was like, “Funny. I just wanted to email you to see if you’d do a video for us.” We got on the phone and tried to talk through it and both of us are rain makers. Our videos make it rain, we know what they’re worth. I was like, “How much does it cost to create a video?” I was thinking maybe $50, 60 grand or whatever. With a very straight face he was like, “We charge $500 thousand up front plus 20% of ads spent.” I was like, “What?!” and he looks at me straight, he didn’t say this in so many words but, in the words of this episode he said, “We know how to make it rain, so that’s what we’re worth and that’s what we charge.” A few months later I wrote them a check and now they’re going to make it rain for us.

Same thing, they came to me with the Fiber Fix funnel, “We want you to fix this funnel, how much does it cost?” I’m like, “you can hire someone fix the funnel it will be 10 grand, but for me it will be a quarter of a million bucks.” And he’s like, “Whoa, why are you so expensive?” and I was like, “Because I know how to make it rain.” So then they did their deal, because it worked.

As I went with the Harmon Brothers and we did the video, it’s been the most amazing experience, I can’t wait to show you the whole behind the scenes video. There’s some on Funnel Hacker TV, you see bits here and there. But it’s amazing, it’s not 2 brothers who do this whole thing. It’s these guys who started a business and then their process is really cool. When we hired them, basically they said, “We’re going to do a writing retreat.” And they found three amzing writers to write three different scripts for us. So we go to this cabin and they have three writers come and read their script. Each script was insanely amazing, but three different comedic scripts.

And these guys again, are writers that they hired, they’re sketch comedy writers. They each wrote three and came back and said, “Which of the three do you like the best?” we picked what we liked the best and then all three guys took those, in this cabin, we went back and all three of them went and took the best script and they took all the jokes, the best jokes, wrote a new script and came back and showed it to us again. It was even more funny. We went back and forth for two days until we had the script.

Then after we had the script, they went and said, “Okay, for this script to happen we have to have props.” So they hired someone to build stages, and they needed videos and hired video people. They hired all these people to make this amazing thing. Last weekend we went and filmed it and hopefully we’re about a little ways away from launching it.

Again, with them, it wasn’t just them. They had built a Voltron team of people that could go and execute to make it rain. You have to start understanding that. Come back to where we started, the hierarchy of business. There’s the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is there and they are obsessed with getting the message out about their thing. Not about the thing, about getting the thing into other people’s hands. That’s why I love entrepreneurs, because they’re tied into this whole marketing thing. Good entrepreneurs are obsessed with the marketing and selling of the thing. They are the ultimate rain maker.

Number two is the technician who do the thing, which are essential to the business, but again you’ve got a cap, you’re a commodity. Understand that there’s a cap and you’re a commodity, but you’re in there. You’re going to have a good, typically secure financial thing, all those kind of things. You get security but you’re not going to have unlimited income.

Then you’ve got the rain makers. So for you guys looking at understanding what a rain maker does and what it is and how the process works. Figuring out how to take your skill, your super power and uncommoditize yourself and make you unique, make yourself rare. Make it so people pay you half a million dollars if you make them a 3 minute video. Is that crazy?

Someone pays me a quarter of a million bucks right now to make them a funnel. For me, not that it takes me that long, I just know what order the pages need to go and what message in each page. I know how to make it rain. I’ve been obsessed with this thing for over a decade.

For you guys, it’s time to become obsessed. Become obsessed in your own company. And if you’re the entrepreneur in your company listening to this, become obsessed. You’ve got to be the lead rain maker. Find the technicians, plug in the right people, and like I always say, find A players, not B players. A players are 32 times more effective than B players. Find A player technicians and pay them well. Because you don’t want to go find other technicians. Plug in the best technicians you can find, then go find rain makers. And if you try to cap rain makers, they will leave you. Understand that. You, as an entrepreneur, find rain makers and give them the ability to have unlimited ceilings in their income. Because if they do that, again, a rain maker is just an entrepreneur who for whatever reason, life circumstances isn’t able to go out on their own to do it, which is totally cool. There’s nothing wrong with that.

If it weren’t for all the intrapreneurs in our business, our company is 99.9% intrapreneurs. If it was not for my intrapreneurs we would not be where we are today. I try to create our businesses in a way where people can grow and have unlimited earning potential. That’s the key.

For you guys listening who, that’s you and you’re stuck in the technician role or you want more, or you’re in this thing where you want to be an entrepreneur but you can’t or whatever. This is where to focus on. Learning how to make it rain and then building a team around you. Finding people, other pieces and networking, not so much finding jobs, networking to find people to help you to be able to make it rain. As soon as you have a team, as soon as you personally or your team can do that, you can go to any business on planet earth and write your own paycheck.

Then it comes down to picking the right businesses, and that’s a whole other lecture for a whole other day. Because I’ve seen some funnel consultants who go and they get paid ten thousand dollars to build a funnel, other guys get a hundred grand, the only difference is who they are pitching to. It’s interesting, I’m privy to share the details, but the Harmon Brother campaigns, if you look at the Purple Mattress, its $1000 mattress. Because every sales makes $1000, it’s been one of their most successful campaigns. Chatbooks has been amazing, probably the most viral video they’ve had, but each sale doesn’t bring in, the value of each customer is a lot less, so it’s harder to continue to make that one rain.

Same thing with all you guys, if the customer or the client that you’re working for, if they’re average customer value is $30, if you’re working for a restaurant, making $30 it’s not good. But if you’re working for a customer where each customer is worth 25 thousand dollars, it’s a lot easier to justify what you want to charge people. Stuff like that.

Alright, well it’s late. It’s almost 1:00. I gotta get my 6 hours to go to the water park. I’m going to end today’s podcast, but I hope that helps you look at how business works and understanding that for you to be successful and make money, you have to understand how to make money. You gotta learn how to make money. Don’t just learn your skill because if you do that you’ll become a technician, which is fine if that’s where you’re happy. But if you really want financial freedom and wealth and no limits and no ceiling, you want to be able to grow, it comes down to studying money and understanding how it works and understanding the marketing and the sales, getting people in the door and getting their money from them. It’s the most valuable part of any business. I don’t care what the hoity-toity doctors tell you. I don’t care what all the people in school and colleges, it’s the most dignified, most important role in business.

If it wasn’t for it, business would stop. The economy would stop. So it’s figuring out how to plug in your skill set into that piece of business. Because that’s where the money’s made. When you’re part of people making the money it gives you the ability to have percentage of that. So I hope that helps. So for my friend who’s listening and everyone else listening, once again, immersion. Get the blueprint. Figure out what your unique abilities and talents can plug into that blueprint to make it rain for a company. When you do that, you got what you need and a whole bunch more.

So I hope that helps you guys. I hope that helps my buddy. I won’t say your name because, you know. I appreciate you and hope to hang out with you someday again. Everybody else, have a good night, talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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Here is a bonus interview with Russell Brunson and Dr. Accurso.

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I think I figured out why it's so hard for all of us to go on vacations.

On today's episode of Marketing Secrets Russell talks about why, as an entrepreneur, it is so hard to go on vacation, and how he gets through it. Here are some of the cool things to listen for in this episode:

What the difference between entrepreneurs and everyone else in regards to feeling happy or sad is.
Why constantly having momentum and feeling like he's moving forward is so important to Russell.
And how Russell gets through down time when he feels like he's doing nothing.

So listen here to find out why entrepreneurs don't relate to being happy or sad. ---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I hope you’re excited for today. I’ve got this weird thing; I think a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from this. Maybe it’s just me. But today I’m going on vacation for a week. I’m actually looking forward to it, but at the same time it really stresses me out. It’s one of those things that’s funny because everyone always tells me, “Russell, you need to go on vacation. You’re going to burn out if you keep doing the stuff you’re doing at the pace you’re doing it.” All sorts of stuff.

But it’s weird because…..sorry I’m trying to do it with the new camera tripod while I’m driving.

Anyway, it’s weird because when I’m at the office and working and doing my thing I never feel stressed. Everyone’s like, “Are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed?” I’m like, not really. I feel like I’m kind of in my flow, my motion or whatever you want to call it. But then I go on vacation, I get super stressed and anxiety and sitting there and not doing stuff is really hard for me. That’s why reading on vacations, at least I feel like something’s progressing.

It’s interesting, at Pirates Cove mastermind we had Alex Charfen come and help him to kind of figure out how to monetize his entrepreneurial personality type content, which I’m excited for. It’s funny because I told him I first heard him speak 2 or 3 years ago on the entrepreneurial personality type and it was amazing. I felt like I connected with him and I was like, now when I hear something like that I want to give somebody money for something. There’s no way for me to give him money. It’s funny, I asked him if I could buy the entrepreneurial personality type from him and he’s like, “No.” and then he’s like, “Why?” and I’m like, “Because I don’t know exactly what I’d do if I had it, but I could make a crap ton of money with it.” And so he joined the coaching program right afterwards, so I could help him do it.

So it’s kind of fun. We’re helping him go through the process now and he’s going to kill it, it’s exciting. But one thing he talked about that was interesting about entrepreneurs and if you haven’t studied Alex’s stuff, it’s worth it. And it’ll be soon in a format, it’s going to be a podcast, it’s going be a training program, a bunch of stuff. He’s kind of going through the whole Expert Secrets process now to figure out how to take it to something. I’m excited, when it’s done, I’ll be the first customer. And I think that all of you, because you’re all like me, should as well.

But it’s the entrepreneurial personality type, but he’s talking about personality traits of entrepreneurs. And one thing that’s kind of weird, I think I’ve heard him give the presentation three times in his core, main presentation and all three times there’s this one part where he talks about how entrepreneurs don’t identify with happy or sad. I was like, “Whatever, I identify with that.” And then the more he started talking about it, the more I was thinking, when am I happy or sad? People always say I look happy. But I’m just kind of a happy person.

It’s funny, this is probably more personal than you guys want to know, but I went and got my testosterone taken, actually three years ago when we were launching Clickfunnels and it came back at 160. The doctor literally told me, “Your grandma’s got higher testosterone than you right now.” And 6 – 8 months later I did it again and it was like 350. And then I got it done this week and I was 450. But every time I’ve gotten it done, the doctors always told me, “How are you standing here? You should have no energy, no motivation.” And I was like, “No, it’s the opposite. I have so much motivation, so much energy.” He asked me all the symptoms, “Do you feel tired.” And I was like, “Sometimes.” And he’s like, “Do you have memory?” I’m like, “No.” He’s like, “Do you feel depressed.” I’m like, “No.” all these things and at the end of it he’s like, “So why are you here?” I’m like, “My testosterone is really low.” And he’s like, “You have no symptoms of it.” And I’m like, “It’s just because everything’s so exciting right now.”

And I started thinking more about his with Alex’s stuff, that entrepreneurs don’t relate with happy or sad. I started thinking, there’s sadness obviously, when someone dies or things like that. But as a whole, you wake up in the morning and it’s not like I’m happy or sad. So when he was telling me that, I was kind of confused. I wonder how most people view happy and sad, it didn’t really make sense to me, and then the next slide, the next portion he said a word and I got chills. I was like, “Whoa. That’s what I do.” And he said, “Entrepreneurs don’t feel happy or sad, what they feel is either momentum or a lack of momentum. They’re moving towards something or they’re not. They’re moving away from something.”

That’s what we relate to. What we relate happiness to is motion forward. And what we relate sadness to is not progressing, not moving forward. I think it’s just fascinating. Momentum, movement, that’s what drives entrepreneurs. It’s not happy or sad, it’s movement, momentum. I was thinking about that today, I’m going on this vacation. It’s funny because I’m leaving today, I was up late last night. I was up early this morning. I’m trying to get stuff done, and I almost enjoy the process right before vacation, getting so much stuff done because I’m freaking out because I gotta leave at this time. I’m running and running, I’m moving, momentum. And then you go on this vacation and you stop.

Everyone wants to just chill out. They want to sit, they want to just sit at the beach. I don’t know what it is, sitting at the beach it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s just weird. For me, I have to have momentum in this experience, this vacation or else I’m going to drive the rest of my family and friends and everyone that’s with us, nuts. They probably don’t even know, they’re like, “Why is Russell twitching over on the side?” And it’s because I need momentum, I need something.

So that’s when I’ll sneak away and I’ll read. Or I’ll be sitting there, they’re all talking and I’m thinking about something. “Oh my gosh, I could do this.” And I’m creating while I’m sitting there thinking because I’m nervous. It’s just funny, my wife will be like, “You’re on vacation, you’re not allowed to talk about business.” And I’m like, “If I don’t talk about business, everything halts and stops progressing in my life.” And the lack of momentum, the lack of movement, the lack of direction is what will then make me depressed and sad and stuck.

It’s a funny line that we have to deal with, especially all of you entrepreneurs who are out there. Because we just see the world a little differently and I think a lot of people think we’re freaks because of it. There’s nothing bad with it. I don’t think it’s something bad. It’s why businesses are created, why there’s momentum in the world. I think it’s because of entrepreneurs who’s entire soul drive is momentum towards moving. We have to have that.

So while we go on vacation because we love our wives and kids and family members, it’s probably the hardest, most stressful part, which is so weird because it’s like, “Go relax. Take some time, you’re going to burn out.” And it’s a little different. Anyway, I’m excited. I’ve been plotting, I have 3 big vacation this summer, I’ve been plotting all of them, what books to read, which order. What courses I’m going to study, what things I’m going to be moving. It’s just funny how that’s been the most exciting thing for me, planning what I’m going to do when I’m not doing anything. I’m such a nerd.

Anyway, there you go, that’s us entrepreneurs. So if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t relate to happy or sad, and you do relate to momentum and movement and you stress out about vacations, that’s where I’m at and I relate with you. Nothing else on your family vacations is somewhere you’re stressing out because you do nothing, I get you. So while that’s happening think, ponder, vision, dream. At least for me, that’s what keeps me going and lets me function like a normal human being with everybody else. So that’s all I got you guys. Have an amazing day and have a good vacation if you’re going on one too. Talk to you guys soon, bye.

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The secret to get people through the failure gap.

On today's episode Russell talks about disagreeing with a designer on what a customer needs from Clickfunnels and how they were basically saying the complete opposite of each other. Here are some of the interesting things you'll hear in the this episode:

Why listening to what customers want is a good idea, but how it can only take you so far.
Why giving you're customer little wins on their way to their goal, will help them stick around.
And some of the wins are that Russell is giving his customers to help keep them as members of Clickfunnels.

So listen here to find out how to confuse activity with achievement to keep customers from leaving. ---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, welcome to Marketing Secrets. I’m here today in the Clickfunnels kitchen, the first time I’ve ever filmed in here. I’m excited. You guys want to see a quick view of what the kitchen looks like? Oh, there’s Dave. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool stuff. We actually built this kitchen because for a lot of the products we work with, for some reason we always need kitchen scenes, so we always rented different kitchens. And then we’re like, if we build a kitchen make sure we have a good scene so we can actually film stuff. So we do, but since we’ve had it we’ve never used it for filming.

For today, I want to share with you guys something kind of interesting. And I want to make sure when I say this that it doesn’t come off bad. Because it has a good purpose, but it’s important for you guys to understand. Some of the background behind this, to set it up so it all makes sense to you guys. We had a designer that worked for us for a while to come on and help with user interface, UIUX, those type of things in Clickfunnels, a really smart guy. What he liked to do is call and interview customers.

At first I was really excited. So he’d go and call 40 or 50 customers and interview them, finding out what they want, what they didn’t want. All those kind of things, which I thought was cool. We’ve never done that before. Some of you guys might have actually talked to him, which is cool. Based on that he was trying to build UI and structure based on customer’s feedback.

A couple of things I found with it. One is it was kind of almost a frustration, because I came to him saying, “This is what I want to have done.” And he treated me kind of like if I was a customer, “Hey, cool. These are good ideas.” I’m like, “No, you need to do this because I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’m not a survey.” We always kind of went back and forth and in his mind it’s like, we need to find out what the customers want, which I agree with. But also this comes back to Henry Ford’s quote about if I were to ask my customers what they wanted; they would have said they wanted a faster horse. You have to also understand that customers don’t always know the vision where we’re going. That’s why we’re creating stuff, we’re visionaries. We know where we’re trying to go.

So it’s kind of interesting, so he no longer works with the company, still an awesome guy, but that was kind of this frustration I had. I remember for a long time we’ve wanted to update our on-boarding in Clickfunnels, and we wanted to do a whole bunch of cool things we haven’t been able to do. This week is actually fun for me because we’re focusing on that.

Another side story, I was listening to Growth Hacker TV, there was an interview with a guy who bought the Warrior Forum. He also owned Freelancer.com and a bunch of other companies. He was talking about how they grew to a billion dollar evaluation. And one interesting thing he said is that they buy these companies and then they look at the traffic coming through and spend a lot of time optimizing the processes inside the processes to make more money from all the traffic coming, which is kind of the phase we’re in right now.

We have anywhere from 800 – 1000 new people a day that sign up for Clickfunnels, just organically. They’re coming from who knows where. And thank you for coming, I don’t even know where you came from but I’m grateful to have you here. And they’re coming in and we lose a bunch of them the first month, there’s a big drop off. After that it stays really steady, but there’s a big drop immediately. So we’re trying to figure out that process. How do we capture people and keep them in?

There’s a lot of cool stuff we’ve done that decreased our churn rate, which is the number metric we look at. It increased our retention. But right now we’re in a big overhaul, how do we simplify the sign up process? How do we make everything easier? It’s fun, you guys will see some new stuff coming to Clickfunnels here in the next 60 days. A lot of new stuff will be coming live, which just simplifies the process and makes Clickfunnels easier to use. So we’re excited for that.

But I was listening to this guy, and he talked about that’s what he was doing. They just worked on the optimization of the sign up flow and that’s how the companies blew up. They didn’t really focus on the traffic and these other things. And we’re always focused on the traffic. But it’s like, how do we make sure the funnel’s right so we’re not losing people out of the holes in the bucket?

So with that said, there’s a bunch of on-boarding stuff that I wanted to do and I know Todd wanted to do, so we kept trying to get this guy to do that. We want prize, we want to do free t-shirts, we want badges, we want to gamify the process. And he kept coming back saying, “How does gamifying the process help the people get the end result? We need to get people to the end result and this is just keeping people busy in the middle.” And it’s funny, Todd mentioned that this morning to me and I Voxed him back, there’s this quote from Dan Kennedy that I heard back in the day that actually ties this in, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. So I ended the Vox and said, “I’m going to go find the quote and come back to you.”

So I ended up finding the quote and I posted it there in Voxer and the quote said, “You’ve got to confuse activity with accomplishment.” Now I’m going to be careful when I say this because some of you guys are going to look at that and it might be frustrating or confusing or whatever. So I posted that and in the thing it said, Dan Kennedy, “You have to get your customers to confuse activity with achievement.” So Todd read that first before my Vox, and he thought I was saying, “Oh the designer was right. That’s just going to get people confused. Focusing on activity as opposed to achievement.” But if you listen to my Voxer, it was actually the exact opposite.

So what’s kind of funny, me and this UI designer both said the identical thing but for the exact opposite side of the argument. He was saying you don’t want to give people activities that keep them from the achievement. And I was saying, you want to give them activities so that they feel achievement, so someday they get to achievement. You want to confuse activity with achievement. Does that make sense?

So Kennedy said that, basically, as a retention strategy. People come in and are going to leave. He said, no you need to give them things to do, so they have activity that’s happening. Because the activity is what keeps them engaged. If we look at our Clickfunnels stats right now and numbers and things like that, the interesting parts are people that stick are people that have a custom domain, they log in at least 2 ½ times per week. There’s all these stats. People that stick are people that are going in and doing stuff consistently. So we know that’s the metric. People logging in and using it are the key. So how do get them to log in and use it?

Well just telling them to build a funnel, you’re going to have achievement, you’re going to achieve a funnel. People will try for a little bit and then they’re going to leave because they didn’t achieve anything. Because the goal is this huge thing. The goal is you’ve got to eat the whole entire cow. That’s the goal. If you’re giving your customer the goal to eat the cow, the problem is they’re going to come in and if they don’t eat the cow really quick, they’re going to leave.

So what you have to do is confuse achievement with activity. Give them activities to do that make them feel like they’re achieving something along the way. So they come in and you set the table, you give them their appetizers, they eat that and they achieve something. For us we’re gamifying the process. You come in, watch the video, build your hero funnel, we send you a t-shirt. So you had activity, so you felt you achievement, even though you didn’t achieve the thing you want yet. You felt achievement, which then drives you forward to do the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing.

All of us want our customers to have the achievement at the end, the problem is that they sign up and then there’s the achievement, there’s this huge gap in the middle that they’re going to fall into, disappear and die. So because of that we have to confuse activity with achievement, because that activity will make them feel micro-achievement which will get them to the big achievement at the end. That’s the goal, that’s the message for you guys.

As you’re creating your training programs, software, ideas, products, services, whatever it is you’re creating and doing, I want you thinking about that. You have to go and create activities that get people to feel small wins, small achievements so that it will drive them through this chasm, this gap, to get to the big goal, the big achievement that you want them to have. If you don’t have those, if you’re not confusing activity with achievement initially, they’re never going to get to the achievement.

So that’s kind of the message for today. I thought it was kind of interesting. I thought it was funny that we both we had the same argument for why we wanted to do this on-boarding process. But he was saying it was a negative thing, but I was saying it was a positive thing. I think it’s very positive, and I think we all can and should be visiting it. So I hope that helps you guys, and with that said, have an amazing day. Go back through your programs, products, services, member’s area and figure out how you can weave those things in, because as you give people little wins along the way, it will give them the momentum they need to get the big wins. That’s all I got for you guys today. Thanks so much for everything, see you guys soon. Bye.

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In our 30th episode of Funnel Friday's Russell and Jim take some time out from building funnels to chat about the Expert Secrets Book Launch and Russell getting his message out to the world.

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If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.

Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

What are the most painful lessons Russell has learned to be able to build the amazing team he has today.
How to get a huge Facebook following like Russell.
If it's a good idea to try to influence someone in a 9 to 5 job and help them in their journey so that they become successful and quit that job.
The process that goes into publishing a book besides actually writing or marketing.
How to use a funnel to get people to come to a pre-launch signup event.

So listen to hear Russell Drop the Mic as he answers these questions.

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Who know doughnuts could be so helpful…

On today’s episode Russell and his kids talk about why they like to go to Krispie Kreme doughnuts instead of some of the other doughnut shops. He also shares a story to relate why its good to show your customers behind the scenes of what you do. Here are some of the fun things you will hear in this episode:

What it is about Krispie Kreme Doughnuts that stands out from their competitors.
Why seeing how beer is made inspired a marketing guy to put it in their commercials.
And what Russell does to give his customers a similar experience.

So listen to Russell and his kids talk about this cool way to market your business.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, today we got a special episode. We just got done cleaning the church and then we went and got a prize for the kids. What was the prize we got guys?

Kids: Krispie Kreme Donuts and the hats.

Russell: Krispie Kreme Donuts, and the hats. We’re driving the new Funnel Hacker Jeep, which we have a camera mount in here. So now I can do Marketing In Your Car and Marketing Secrets while we’re driving and not have to worry about getting hit and dying.

Kids: Marketing in Your Jeep.

Russell: Marketing In the Jeep. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, if you haven’t go look on Snapchat or Facebook or whatever. It says Funnel Hacker on the side of it, it’s kind of fun. And we had Norah in here yesterday so that’s why Bowen’s sitting in Norah’s baby seat, because that’s the last seatbelt we had. So what should we tell those guys about today? We gotta tell them a marketing principle.

So let’s do this, I want to talk to you about why you like going to Krispie Kreme versus the other place?

Kids: Because they got good donuts.

Russell: Because they got good donuts. Why else?

Kids: It’s not very far away.

Russell: Okay, it’s close proximity. Why else?

Kids: We haven’t had breakfast.

Russell: You haven’t had breakfast yet. Are they healthy?

Kids: They have a good price. No, they’re not healthy. They have a good price, they’re not far away, and when you go in you see them make the donuts.

Russell: Oh, this is the key. This is the key, Ellie, that I want to talk about. So when you go into Krispie Kreme they let you, say it loud so they can hear you. Aiden said it too. So there’s a glass window and you can actually watch them make the donuts. The donuts come through on a conveyer belt, you see the frosting put on them, you see them dunk under the thing. First the dough right, drops them into the cooker thing that cooks them, then the frosting comes on top and they put the sprinkles. You get to watch the process.

Kids: They sometimes, rarely, give you free samples.

Russell: And sometimes they give you free samples for hanging out.

Alright so here’s the marketing lesson for all of you who are listening today. So Krispie Kreme does a really cool thing to make kids want to go to Krispie Kreme versus DK Donuts, Dunkin Donuts, all the donut places.

Kids: Dunkin Donuts is DK Donuts.

Russell: No DK is a small brand, Dunkin is a huge chain. Anyway, what Krispie Kreme does is allow you to watch the process, which is really interesting. Because my guess is most donut shops have the same process, yet……..You guys we gotta stay on point for the show. They’re right, DK has bunch of other options, sizes and varieties and Krispie Kremes are all the same thing. But the moral of this is that they let you watch the process of how it works.

I know I’m going to forget the story because I’m in the car with four kids going crazy. I’m going to forget it right now, but the message I know all my old school marketing buddies are making fun of me because I can’t remember the name and people or which book it was from. But there was a guy, who was actually a beer company and they were selling beer and this marketing guy came in to, I can’t remember now, this is blasphemy. I can’t remember the name of it.

I just hit a squirrel. I missed it. A squirrel went underneath the car. That was close.

Anyway, there was a marketing dude, he comes into the beer company and he’s trying to figure out the hook and angle and big idea of why everyone should give them money versus the other beer companies. And the marketing guy comes in and wants to see the process and how it all works and he goes in and watches these guys. He sees how they make the beer, I don’t know, I’m not a beer drinker. I’ve never drank so I have no idea how it actually works. But they showed how they made it. And the marketing guy was so fascinated. They’re like, “That’s how everybody makes beer.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but nobody else has seen this. Nobody else even knows this is how it all works. So I want to show that process.”

So he made a commercial and he actually showed the process of them making the beer and that became this huge campaign that blew up the company. So Krispie Kreme is the same way, they show the process. There’s a reason I do Funnel Friday every Friday, because I’m showing the process.

Kids: You didn’t do it this Friday.

Russell: I didn’t do it this Friday. Good point. And Funnel Hacker TV and all these things, why am I doing that? Because I’m showing the process, I’m letting people see how I do it, how I consume the product. And the more they do, the more they see me drinking my own Kool Aid, the more likely they are to also drink said Kool Aid.

So the moral of the story from this Krispie Kreme episode for you guys is to let your audience see the process of how you do whatever you do. We are in the reality show era of the world and your audience wants to view what’s happening. That’s why I’m showing this right now, me and my beard in my car with my kids in their Krispie Kreme hats, and being annoyed at me. Bowen was telling me, “Your mustache is ugly dad, but your beard is cool.” He wants me to shave this.

Dallin: You have a mustache.

Russell: It’s kind of weird huh. I need to shave.

Dallin: I don’t know everything, never mind.

Aiden: I’m free ladies.

Russell: Aiden just said, “I’m free ladies.” You’re the coolest!

Dallin: What did he say?

Russell: He said, “I’m free ladies.” And jumped out of the car.

Dallin: You need to send this to me.

Russell: That was amazing. I love Aiden, that our little six year old, if you’re listening and not watching. If you’re watching on Marketingsecrets.com you just saw Aiden in his Krispie Kreme hat tell you….that was hilarious.

Dallin: Send this to me please.

Russell: The moral of the story, the reason why I’m doing this with my hair messed up and my beard, with my kids and our donuts….

Ellie: You have a beard?

Russell: Isn’t it sweet? You want to feel it, it’s really scruffy. It kind of hurts, I gotta shave it. The reason I’m showing you this stuff behind the scenes because I’m showing you my life. I’m showing you how we do what we do and that’s what draws people. If you read Expert Secrets, you know the goal is to draw people into you and your personality and all those kind of things. So draw them in you guys. Do it, open up your life a little. I know it’s scary sometimes. That’s what Instagram is for, your stories. Facebook Lives, podcasts, etc.

Dallin: The real moral of the story is that Aiden is a ladies’ man.

Russell: Aiden is the ladies man. Anyway, that’s the moral of today’s story. Does that sound good to you guys? With that said, thanks so much for tuning into marketing Secrets. If you have not read the Expert Secrets book go to expertsecrets.com. You should go there and read it because this is just one of those secrets that’s going to help you blow up your message.

Dallin: And if you haven’t read the first book too, read it.

Russell: What’s the first book called?

Dallin: Dot, I forgot what it’s called.

Russell: You’re close, Dotcom…

Dallin: Dotcom Secrets?

Russell: Yes, Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets. They should read them both right?

Dallin: Yeah.

Russell: Which one’s your favorite.

Dallin: I didn’t read it.

Russell: Anyway, appreciate you guys, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

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What was going through my mind when tipping at IHOP.

On today’s episode Russell talks about going out to breakfast with his daughter for her birthday and how watching the server work so hard to make a small wage made Russell wonder why he didn’t work somewhere that he could make more money, and how that relates to being an entrepreneur. Here are a few interesting things in this episode:

How Russell would increase his ticket sales if he were still a server.
How waiters increasing ticket sales relates to being an entrepreneur.
And why if you can’t be the cheapest in your industry, you should be the most expensive.

So listen to Russell’s awesome advice on how to increase your ticket sales and make more profit for yourself.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Secrets while I’m in my car. This is a flashback from a podcast earlier. I’m doing this right now because, first off, I hung out with Justin Williams last weekend and he yelled at me, “you used to do podcasts every single week, three or four times a week. But now that you’re not in your car, you’re not doing them very often.” I’m like, crap he’s right.

I’m driving to get my haircut today because it’s huge. I figured out how to mount this thing in my car so I can do it while driving, so nobody yells at me. That’s what actually happened, I was doing the podcast with the camera, when I did marketing in your car with my phone nobody ever yelled at me. But when they saw me on video I got yelled at by everybody, so I stopped doing it that way. But now that it’s mounted up I can drive and talk and not even pay attention to you guys. No yelling at me, alright. That’s the deal.

Alright, so with that said, today is a cool day for a couple of reasons. Number one, it’s my daughter’s ten year old birthday, which is insanely cool. So this morning, I’m actually flying out today, so this morning I had a chance to go and take her out to breakfast. Her breakfast of choice was IHop, and I was like, “Come on, we can take you to Waffle Me Up or any of these cool places.” and she was like, “No, I want IHop.” As we’re driving there I’m like, “There’s only two kinds of people that like IHop, Ellie.” And she’s like, “Who are they?” and I was like, “Grandma’s and little kids. Watch when we get there how many grandma’s are there.” So we got in there and we counted and there was 13 or 14 grandmas in there and then me and her. So I was like, that’s it. It was kind of funny.

Anyway, that was really fun, and then she had a birthday party. So I went and raced and got her a bike this morning and took it to the birthday party, and I’m actually heading to get my haircut because I’m flying out to Utah today, two cool things happening in Utah. Number one is the Harmon Brothers are making our viral video. They actually started filming it today, and to be completely honest, it’s kind of killing me. I wish I was there, I want to be watching it. But I couldn’t today, so I’m flying down there tomorrow to catch some behind the scenes footage and all that kind of stuff for our Funnel Hacker TV show. So I’ll be flying down there, it’s gonna be really cool.

And the second cool thing, is I’m actually going to a meeting with Timothy Ballard, who is the dude who runs Operation Underground Railroad, which is a charity or organization, I don’t know exactly what it is, but they help save kids who have been abducted and put into sex laboring. So we’re going to be helping build funnels and helping build that whole mission. It’s a passion project I’m really excited for. That’s what’s happening on this trip. So if you’re watching Funnel Hacker TV you’ll see the behind the scenes of that stuff. If not, go to funnelhacker.tv and go hang out with us over there too. There’s a lot of fun stuff happening.

Alright my message for you guys today, and this is something that I don’t know why more people don’t think about this, but it’s important. We went to IHop today, as you know. My daughter ordered the pancake with the fluffies and the sprinkles, there were sprinkles on it, and then bacon and an egg. Her cost is like $3 or something like that, then I go and order scrambled eggs, a side of bacon, a side of avocado, because that fits in my macros for all you healthy nerds. So our bill was like $12. And I look at the server and the server is running around, grabbing our stuff and his and grabbing waters and grabbing A1, because I love putting A1 on eggs, if you haven’t tried it, it’s insanely good. I did it one time because I had steak and eggs, and I put A1 on the steak and some of it spilled on the eggs and I ate it that way. I was like, this is an egg topping, not for steaks. So if you haven’t had A1 on your scrambled eggs yet, you should totally try it. It’s amazing.

Anyway, I digress. Where was I going with this whole thing? So the server is running around frantic, I get the bill at the end of it and I look at it, and it’s like $12.43 or something. As someone who tips, and I’m a good tipper, so I didn’t tip him that much, I left a lot more money than that. So if I were to say, we’ll give him 10% of that, means he earned $1.25. That’s what he made from me, for all his efforts. Or if I do 15% it’s like what $2, if I do 30% it’s $3. So that’s what most people do. Especially, the grandmas at IHop, they have their little calculators out and figuring out, “Okay, I owe him $1.13.” and give exactly the tip, but if you’re bad they’re going to give you 5%, if you’re okay you get 10, if you’re great you get 15. That’s how it works.

I’m looking at this, and the server was a young dude, and I’m like, “Man, he’s killing himself for this little thing.” And I was just in the office before I headed to get my haircut, which now I’m stuck in traffic and my haircuts in 3 minutes and if I miss it I’m going to go crazy. So I was talking to them, “Look, if that dude instead of getting a job at IHop where the average ticket is $12. If you’re doing the same work but got a job at a steakhouse or a sushi place where the average ticket is like $50-$100, he’d do the exact same amount of work and get way more money.” Because people tip off a percentage. So if my bill is $12, you’re getting 1.20, that’s 10%. If it’s $112, you’re getting $10, or whatever the math is, for the exact same amount of effort.

So the moral of the story is if you’re serving tables, go and sell more expensive stuff, because you are getting paid a percentage of the ticket price. So you gotta sell the most expensive thing. That’s why as a Mormon when I go and I go to restaurants and they always try to sell you alcohol because alcohol has a huge profit margin, it’s big ticket. And they can get you to buy a lot more stuff. So we never buy the alcohol and those other Mormons who are out there know, if you’re at a nice restaurant, and you don’t order alcohol, they don’t treat you as good, because they’re like, “Crap.”

So I always tell people when they ask me, “What do you want to drink?” I’m like, “Oh we don’t drink, but don’t worry, we tip really, really good.” Because I want them to know, I don’t want them to treat me like crap because I didn’t drink because my ticket price is going to be smaller. Good server’s understand that. I warn them ahead of time, I’m a really, really good tipper. I tip 30, 40, 50% sometimes 100%. I’m a really good tipper as long as you treat me good. If you treat me bad, I’m still a good tipper, but I’m a great tipper if you treat me good.

So kind of the thought, if you’re serving tables, you gotta be selling the highest ticket thing, and if I was serving tables again, which is the only job I had for real is serving tables, and I really liked it. It’s all about that, ticket price. If I were a server today, I would have people order dessert first because most of the time at the end of the meal you’re not hungry anymore. If you’re not hungry anymore you’re not going to buy dessert. So then my ticket price went down, so my tip just shrunk.

So I’d be going ahead of time like, “Look, a lot of people at the end of the meal are full, I’m going to give you a 10% discount if you order dessert first.” I would do that because it would increase the ticket price. Everyone wants dessert when you go in, but when you’re offered it, it’s hard to eat it because you’re so full.

Number two, think about Olive Garden. They started doing this a little while ago and it was brilliant. After you’re done eating they say, “Hey, what would you like to order for tomorrow?” And they had a second meal. So you’d order a second meal to take home and eat the next day. Now you just doubled your ticket price because you sold them two meals instead of one. IF I were serving tables today, the first thing I would be doing is offering dessert, take them their meal and at the end of the meal be like, “That was good, huh? I know you guys aren’t going to be coming back tomorrow, but if you want you can order off the menu right now and I’ll go package it up and you can have it tomorrow as well.” And I don’t know what percentage take it, but I know there’s a big percentage that take the second meal and now I just doubled my ticket price. And the tip will be based on the ticket price, not based on what they ate while they were sitting there.

So I’d be thinking, increased value, how can I increase my ticket? So that’s if I was serving tables again. Obviously I’m not serving tables, I’m serving entrepreneurs and a lot of them. But guess what I’m thinking, the same thing. It’s the same stuff. I know I get paid based on a percentage of what our growth is. As the entrepreneur in the company the way that I make my money, I do have a salary, because I think you legally have to do that, however that works, you can do all the W2’s and all that techie, nerdy tax stuff. But then the rest of my payment comes from a percentage of profit share. The more profit, the more I get to share. So I’m always thinking how can I increase my profit share? How can decrease costs? How can I increase the ticket value? How can I sell more expensive stuff? How can I sell more things?

And that’s what my mind said, because I know I get paid a certain percentage of what I get people to consume. So I need to get people to consume. Same way you do it if you’re at a restaurant. And what’s interesting is, a lot of time, speaking to you right now, most of us we undervalue what we do. We try to be the discount leader because that’s what we’re used to doing.

So a lot of times we put our own pricing values on other people. Like I wouldn’t may $1000 for this, so you won’t sell it for $1000. You don’t understand, that’s worth it for somebody else. So don’t try to discount your prices. So a lot of times that’s what we do, we try to discount our prices, lower ticket. We’re trying to go back to IHop and sell even though the money we make as entrepreneurs is based on the ticket price. So the bigger the ticket price, the bigger money you make. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, Dan Kennedy told me this.

“There’s no strategic advantage to being the second lowest price leader in your market.” So if you can’t be Walmart, there’s no strategic advantage of being like, “Walmart’s the cheapest, and we’re the second cheapest.” Because then you look like an idiot. There’s not strategic advantage whatsoever. But there is a huge strategic advantage of being like, “I am the most expensive guy in my market.” So if you can’t be the lowest, then be the most. Don’t be the dude’s in the middle. Because there’s no, it just doesn’t work that way.

So I want you guys to think about that. Because as entrepreneurs, you’re just like the server. You’re serving customers, serving audiences, and you get paid based on the ticket price of what people are spending. That’s why funnels are important. If I just sold people my free book and that was it, guess where I would be right now. I’d be broke. I did a Facebook Live yesterday showing 3 funnels we had inside of our book launch. Now, when all is said and done, when our book launch was over, we did over $3 million dollars in collected revenue. Obviously, that wasn’t net, that was collected gross.

What’s funny, I look at all these people who do these big product launches. $2, $3, $5,000 product launches, most of them are happing making a million to three million dollars. We did the same thing and we were giving away a free book. How? It’s because I’m just like the server. I offer dessert first and I had upsells and I offered a second meal. I did all these kind of things because I’m trying to increase the ticket price. Because that’s how I get fed as an entrepreneur. Plus it gives me the ability to serve that audience better.

The waiter that lets you order dessert ahead of time, so you still get it. The server who lets you order food and take it home, he’s serving you at a higher level. That’s why he gets paid more. He knows how to increase the ticket price, but he’s able to make the restaurant more revenue, but second off gives you a better experience. You get to have a great meal twice. Your wife doesn’t cook tomorrow, or whatever that might be. Maybe it’s you cooking, or whatever. But it all comes down to that.

That’s the moral of today’s story. I hope that helps some of you guys. I’m sure some of you guys are freaking out trying to be the cheapest possible person. And it doesn’t always work that way. Obviously you gotta look at what the market will bear, but like I said, it’s way better to be the most expensive than the cheapest.

So there you go. I’m here, I’m going to get my haircut. I’m only 4 minutes late, hopefully she didn’t cancel my appointment because I gotta get rid of this thing before I hop on a plane or I’m going to be super embarrassed. Thanks everybody for listening. If you would like to see the video version of this, go to marketingsecrets.com and you can watch the video there. Or if you’re watching the video version, go over to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast, we’re at 360 or 70 episodes now. So come hang out with us there. A lot of fun stuff happened and a lot of things you’ve missed that I want to make sure you get. With that said, thanks everybody, we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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Why having resources will actually hurt you as an entrepreneur and how to become more resourceful.

On today’s episode Russell comes to you from his favorite place on Earth, Pirates Cove. He gives a mini tour of the premises and talks about how he was able to afford the $100,000 that it took to rent it by being resourceful. Here are some of the cool things in this episode:

Find out how Russell was introduced to Pirates Cove and what he had to do to be able to afford to initially bring his family and friends there.
Find out the difference between having resources and being resourceful. They sound similar, but they are not the same.
And hear a rarely told story of how Russell was able to be resourceful early in his career to be able to afford to make his first idea come to fruition.

So listen up and enjoy as Russell talks about how he was able to be resourceful enough to be at Pirates Cove without spending a single penny.

---Transcript---

Hey Everyone, this is Russell. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast happening today from Pirates Cove.

Alright everyone, if you’re watching the video of this, you can see I’m at the most ridiculous place on earth. If you’re listening to this, go to marketingsecrets.com and actually watch the video. I’m right now at a place called Pirates Cove, at a mastermind group. It’s insane.

See behind me, these are my kids swinging on the ropes and having fun in the water and a bunch of other amazing things. This is pretty much the craziest place I’ve ever been. It’s my favorite place on earth. Some of the back story about Pirates Cove. Again, those of you watching can see some of the scenery of this place, but basically, the back story when my twins, which this is Bowen, one of my twins right here, when they were about 6 months old, we were speaking at an event here in Las Vegas, which is where Pirates Cove is at. One of my friends had come to this place and kind of told stories about how amazing it was. He started explaining, and no matter how cool he made it sound, you’re like, “That sounds cool.” He’s like, “No you guys, you have to see it. I’m going to take you and we’re going to try to find it.”

So we started driving around, all over Las Vegas, all over Boulder City, trying to find this place called Pirates Cove, and we couldn’t find it anywhere. So we gave up and went out to eat in Boulder City, and we’re sitting there and all the sudden the owner of Pirates Cove walked out and my buddy’s like, “That’s the owner.” So we walked up to him, “hey you don’t know us, but I’ve been to Pirates Cove, it would be super cool if you could let us see it.” The guy was so cool and was like, “come on up.” And he gave us swimming suits and we swam the entire day. Like I said, Bowen here was only 6 months old, he was in diapers, we had the most amazing time ever.

And if you see this place, it’s basically on the side of this mountain, it’s a private residence, there’s 5 houses on it, there’s waterslides, in fact, I’ll take you guys up on the video so you can see the top. There’s a kid waterslide and a really cool kid pool, and then up at the top there is this huge waterslide that’s for adults, that is crazy. You go down this huge slide and then it enters into the middle of the part, there’s a huge boat, and a pirate mast, you actually jump off it. In fact, on Funnel Hacker TV you can see some video of me jumping off it. It’s pretty crazy.

So I’ll keep showing you as I’m walking around. I want to teach you guys a really cool lesson. So after we came I was like, “I want to rent this.” I want to take my family here and show everybody. So the next year we called the guy up and we were like, “We want to rent Pirates Cove, how much would that cost.” And he was like, “Oh it’s $10,000 a day with a weeklong minimum.” It was $70 or 80 thousand dollars. I was like, what? I didn’t have that kind of money at the time. I was like, “gah. But I really want to rent pirates cove, there’s gotta be a way I can rent this and show my family and my kids and experience this again.”

So the wheels in my head started spinning. And again, this comes down to Robert Kiyosaki 101. Poor people say, “I can’t afford that.” Rich people think, “How can I afford that? What can I do to be able to afford that?” So I’m thinking what do I gotta do to make $70,000 to rent this place, but obviously catering and everything else. I was like for me to do that, it’s going to cost a lot of money. I’m going to need almost a hundred grand to do it. So I was like, okay what if I found a whole bunch of cool people and invited them to come to this thing and I sold tickets to it?

So that was the idea, so what we did is basically. We went and I put out a little page and said, “10 people pay $10,000, and that’s $100,000 and covers the cost of the entire mastermind group and then we can rent it. We’ll just have a really good time.” We’ll have for it half the week for all the mastermind and when the mastermind is over, we’ll still have it for 2 or 3 days at the end, then we’ll invite my family members, at the time a bunch of employees, things like that. And that was kind of the game plan. We did it and it worked and it was amazing.

So that was the first time I had a chance to experience Pirates Cove for a whole week. Since then we’ve done it, I think this is the fourth time we’ve done it. We did it 3 years in a row then we took off 4 or 5 years, because it’s a lot of work as well. And then this year we decided to do it again. So I’m here right now with 10 entrepreneurs and we’re just having the most amazing mastermind meetings during the day when it’s 116 degrees out here. Then at night we’re playing and having fun. Our kids are here and it’s insanely cool. So that’s happening right now at Pirates Cove. Again, if you want to see some visuals of this place, go to Marketingsecrets.com and watch the video.

But the lesson I want to tell you guys is this, and hopefully you kind of got a little piece of the lesson. It comes back to what Robert Kiyosaki said, poor people say, “I can’t afford that.” Where rich people think, “How can I afford that?” So I couldn’t afford this place, I couldn’t afford to rent it, but I wanted to experience it and I wanted other people to experience it. So I had to starts thinking outside the box. What do I need to do to be able to afford that? How do I get other people to help chip in so we can actually experience this and make it an amazing thing?

In fact, a lot of my early joint venture partnerships came from people I invited to Pirates Cove. I say, you take someone to Pirates Cove, they think you’re pretty cool afterwards, which helped. I was trying to build relationships and grow companies and things like that. But for you, what I want you thinking about, a lot of times, as an entrepreneur, I’m not telling you to go rent Pirates Cove and do something crazy like that. But a lot of times the reason why entrepreneurs aren’t successful in business is because they have this weird resource problem. “Ah, Russell I don’t have the resources, the time, the talents.” It’s all I have don’t the resources. You have to understand that entrepreneurship is not about having resources. That’s a fallacy, it’s incorrect.

Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs not because they have resources, but because they’re resourceful. Sounds very similar, but it’s different. They’re resourceful. I was resourceful, I had to think outside the box. How can I create this thing? A bunch of you guys have heard my rant many time about venture capitalists. I don’t feel real entrepreneurs take VC, because they’re coming in saying, “ I don’t have the resources, let me go ask somebody to give me money, then I’ll have resources to go and build something.” By definition you doing that, you’re not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are resourceful, they look at things and say, “how can I afford that?” They look at something and say, “I don’t have the resources, I have to be resourceful, I have to think of other ways to do it.”

My very first thing I ever created, Mark Joyner, who is my first mentor and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Here’s my Ellie, she’s here hanging out too. You want to say hi? You having fun? I’m almost done, babe.

Okay, so when he kind of retired from the internet marketing, coaching business, he put out a thing called The Farewell Package, and he sold it and I bought it. And at the time I had no resources, I paid a thousand bucks for this course and it was all the money we had and my credit card was maxed out afterwards, and I had no resources. I was like, okay everything I bought from Mark Joyner, I needed to hire programmers and developers to be able to execute and actually create that thing, but I didn’t have the resources. I’m like, “Crap, what am I going to do? I don’t have the resources to create it.” I’m like, I’m an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs are resourceful. So I gotta be resourceful, what should I do?

I was like, okay, I have ideas. I know if I did have money, what I would do. So I was like, this is what I would create if I did have money. I wrote it out and went, at the time we had this little forum with everyone who had purchased his product. I was like, “Look guys, I bought this thing with the last of my money, I’m completely broke. But I know what I would do if I had the money I would create this thing.” And I pitched everyone on this thing. I was like, “The deal is, I’m broke. I have no resources, but I am very resourceful. And I know a lot of you guys are in the same situation, so my question for you is how many of you guys would like to partner up together and we pool our resources and become resourceful and work together.” And I posted that and said, “I gotta a quote and it costs about $5000 to build this idea I have. I got 0 dollars, so I need 50 of you guys to give me $100 and we can create something from our resources, become resources.”

And I had 120-130 people like, “I’ll do it, I’m in.” all these people saying, “I’ll donate $100 to this thing, to be a part of it.” And I was like, “cool.” So I collected all my, I ended up, I had 120 people say they would and then as it often happens, only 55 or something actually gave the hundred bucks. So it was $5,500 that I suddenly had in my paypal account and everyone bought together this package and then I went and took the money and hired the development team and they started creating it and that’s how I launched my first viral website. A lot of you guys don’t know that story. I don’t tell it very often.

But it was about not the resource, I had 0 resources. All I had was a credit card with a $1000 bill on it, because that’s what I paid to buy his course and 0 dollars. I didn’t have a job, I was wrestling. So I was making exactly 0 dollars a month, 0 dollars a year. And my wife was making $9.50 an hour, so that was our resources and now I have a thousand dollars on my credit card and I was freaking out because I don’t know how to pay a thousand dollars.

So luckily I was resourceful and I found people that allowed the funding from other people who wanted to be a part of this project, we launched it and started building a list, used that to launch the next product and on and on and on and here we are 15 years later at Pirates Cove with 10 of the most amazing entrepreneurs in the world, and I’m here with my family and my friends, a bunch of my employees and my partners are coming and I didn’t pay a penny to be here. Because I was resourceful.

So for you, I want you guys to understand that’s why we’re entrepreneurs, we are resourceful. You are resourceful. All you gotta do is stop trying to ask people for money to fund your idea, and just start creating, being resourceful. What can I do? How can I get other people involved and get other people to believe in my vision. When you start learning how to sell, people will come to you and you can create cool things. So there is my message for tonight. Those of you guys who guys who are watching the visuals behind me, hopefully you had a cool little glimpse of Pirates Cove. We’ve got a couple of Funnel Hacker TV episodes coming out that will show the craziness. But hopefully you guys enjoyed this and you start thinking about that in your business and your life. It’s not just business, it’s all aspects of life. How do you be resourceful? You rarely will have the resources you need to get started. IF you’re resourceful you can do it. So that’s what I got. I’m out of here you guys. I’m going to go get my swimsuit on and I’m going to jump in the water, bye everybody.

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Segment recorded from the “Drop The Mic Show” where Russell takes 10 questions from funnel hackers and answers them live.

On this bonus episode of Marketing Secrets Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

How teenagers can use Clickfunnels to become more financially independent.
How to find out if there is a market for your product.
How Russell keeps his sanity and keeps his family happy while being a busy entrepreneur.
How to move your business into higher ticket sales.
How and where to put in an upsell in a supplement funnel.
Whether or not you should be running multiple businesses or focusing on one core business.
What one thing made Russell's business explode.
What to do when you launch a funnel that doesn't work out.
How to go about raising money for a non-profit organization.
How to go from marketing just a product to marketing an awesome experience to be able to charge more.

So listen in to hear Russell drop the mic as he answers these questions.

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After working with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, there is one common thing I’ve found that will instantly let me know if you’ll succeed or fail.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how he could tell with 100% certainty within seconds of meeting an entrepreneur if they would be successful. Here are some of the interesting things to listen for in this episode:

What quality does Russell see that successful entrepreneurs have and unsuccessful marketers are missing.
Why Russell thinks that most people don’t want to take the leap required to be successful.
And find out how all this can also relate to other areas in your life besides business.

So listen below to find out if you possess the quality that equals success or if you need to switch your focus in order to become successful.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Tonight I’m going to show you guys the one tell-tell sign to know if you’re going to be successful in business or not. And it works 100% of the time.

Hey everyone this is Russell. We’re on day 4 or 5 of binge all nighters while my wife and kids are away out of town. My wife doesn’t get back until a couple more days, but of my kids are coming back tomorrow, which I’m so excited. They were supposed to come back today, then they didn’t.

So now another day to pull an all-nighter. So it’s about 1:00 now. Today we have built and launched one, two, three, four funnels. And what’s funny is that none of them are new funnels, they’re all just re-builds of existing funnels. And this is hopefully a lesson for you all. Because I hate all my funnels. Even though they work pretty good, but they’re still not done. But guess what I did? I launched them and made a bunch of money with them and now I’m fixing them again. I’ll probably be fixing them again later, and they keep getting better and better, but they’re never done. So don’t be like, “My funnel’s not ready yet, I can’t make money.” Just do it. Just launch it and make money and then fix it along the way and keep fixing it. Ready, fire, aim. CLickfunnels gives you that ability to change things and make them better and better. That’s what I do, and you should too.

Alright, before I pass out, because I’m kind of getting a little loopy. It was fun, Steven and I spent like 30 minutes, I think we were getting tired and I gave him my internet marketing history lesson according to Russell Brunson. I showed him all my old sites on the way back machine. My first product, my first three software products, it was fun. We filmed most of it so hopefully it will show up on Funnel Hacker TV. Who knows, but we’ll see.

While we were talking, it was funny he was talking about how in the past he’s had a lot of business partners and things and how some people basically, all the business partners he’s had, none of them ever became successful and he was the only one that came out the end that was. He and his wife were discussing why did that happen and why didn’t it. As he’s saying that, I remembered something. I told him, and obviously nowadays it’s different, people come to our events now it’s different because we’ve raised the prices and we’ve attracted real entrepreneurs and things like that. But first 5 or 6 years of my company we were selling to beginners. And we were breaking my cardinal rule, which is don’t sell to broke people. But we were and we had these events and people would come and not that they were all broke or anything, there were some amazing people that came through, but it was definitely a different audience, different crowd.

I was telling myself, I would walk into our events, we had smaller events, about 40or 50 people, and I would welcome everybody and have them introduce themselves and within 5 seconds of them introducing themselves I knew with 100% certainty and accuracy who was going to succeed and who wasn’t. It was crazy. I always felt guilty. After they introduce themselves should I tell them, “Hey there’s no way you could ever be successful in this business. You should leave.” Or should I let them go through.

Part of its like, some people buy because success. Some people buy because they want entertainment, the excitement. They like chasing the dream, the idea of the dream. So I feel like that’s sometimes as valuable, if not more valuable, than what you give them, if that makes sense. I can’t remember where I learned this from or where I heard it. It was really good, but the concept was basically that, it was from a TV show, someone shared it. But basically, a lot of people don’t want to take the leap and actually do the work. Doesn’t make sense because those of you who are producers, that’s what you thrive off, producing, doing and moving forward.

But a lot of people don’t want to take that leap. Because they have this dream, vision of what’s going to happen and if they do take a leap and it fails, then they lose their dream. So for me, I know that this life is short and for a lot of us, there’s a lot of things that I do that I spend money on that are never going to be real, but I enjoy it and it gets me dreaming, it lets me dream and to think about something. It gets me excited. So that’s part of it.

So I never told those people when they introduced themselves, “There’s no way you’ll be successful, you should leave.” Because again, I feel like there were other things. I don’t try to impress……sometimes for us, and everyone here listening is different. Some of you guys, success is the reason you do this. And that’s your value, that’s what you’re looking for and sometimes we try to force our values on other people. I have my mastermind group, my inner circle that you guys know about. People pay 25 grand a year and some people come because they want to learn and execute. Other people come because they want to hang out. And if I try to push them to execute, it bothers them and they leave. They say they want success, but they don’t really want success. They want the networking, people, friendship, connection with other people like them. And I totally respect that now. I used to struggle with that when I was first getting started. But people give you money for different reasons, and most of the time it’s not for why you think. So don’t push your own beliefs on them because it’ll screw things up.

So anyway, people would come in and I would know that. I asked Steven, “Do you know how I could tell? I’m curious if you could know.” So my question for you is that. How did I know, what is the tell-tell sign with 100% certainty and accuracy, I knew within a second if people were going to be successful or not, in this business? Not in life, they can be successful in other things, but in this business. I’m curious of what your thoughts are, so think about it for a second. Because I’m going to tell you what the answer is and I’m a little nervous to tell you because some of you guys are going to be like, “Crap, does that mean I’m not going to be successful.” And I don’t think that that means you’re not going to be successful, but it does if you don’t shift what you’re chasing and what you’re thinking about. Because everyone I know who has been successful, it’s been the opposite side.

So again, we would come in and after the first session I would be like, “Okay, here’s the three people that are going to be successful.” and everyone else in the room would be like, “Yeah, I don’t know how but I feel that too.” And I kind of identified. This was the difference. Those who never had success, when they introduced themselves, or when they talked about it or thought about it, or presented anything, they were in the business because they wanted to make money. Those are the people that failed. You listen to that, what, Russell we all want to make money. That’s why we got in this business right. That’s why we’re here. That’s why I’m studying you, Russell. You teach people how to make money, and I want some of that.

Do you guys remember Wedding Singer, one of my favorite movies of all time? When Drew Barrymore goes to marry or whatever, he’s all mad so he goes to the bank and he’s trying to get a loan or trying to get a job at the bank to make money so she’ll like him. And Norm McDonald, not Norm McDonald…what’s his name? He’s the banker, and he’s like, he asks him his qualifications and Adam Sandler’s like, “Well, I like money. I’d like some more of it. You’ve got some money.” And it’s just this funny thing. I totally slaughtered it, but it’s really funny. Go watch Wedding Singer.

It’s really late. Alright, so where did I leave off. The people that were not successful were the people that wanted to make money. The people that were successful are people that were passionate and excited about the marketing. That’s the key. Isn’t that weird? Those who are excited by the marketing are the ones who were successful. It was weird.

I remember hanging out with Daegan Smith one time and he told me when he shifted from not being successful to being successful was when he got excited and passionate about the marketing. He became obsessed with it. It’s interesting because the business owners that I like to work with, the entrepreneurs, are the entrepreneurs running the business. Why? Because they become passionate about the marketing of the thing. Whereas bigger businesses that think they’re in the business of selling the thing. Apple you are not in the business of selling iPhones. You are in the business of ….. Excuse me, you’re not in the iPhone business, you’re in the business of selling iPhones. That’s what Steve Jobs understood. That’s why he was a big deal. That’s why he gave key note speeches. That’s why all those things happened. Because he knew he was in the business of selling the thing. Not of the thing.

That’s what I’ve found. When people introduced themselves, “I’ve been studying Russell. I’ve been geeking out, reading books. I love the market, I’m so excited. I’ve got this passion and I want to sell it.” I’m like boom, that guy’s goingto be successful. Or that girl’s going to be successful. If they come in like, “Hey yeah, I have a job, I really want to make some extra money.” And whatever or “Hey, I’m just not happy with where I’m at, I want to make extra money.” Every time it was money focused they failed. Every time it was “I’ve been reading this stuff and I’m excited.”

Hopefully, because unfortunately most educators make things really boring. I feel bad. Through my college and high school careers, most teachers were really boring. I tried my best to make marketing exciting. Because it is exciting. It’s exciting for me. I actually started, on Sunday I recorded, I decided I wanted to start a religious podcast and I recorded the first two episodes. It’s hard because I listen to other religious podcasts and they bore me and I’m like, “How are you guys boring? Do you not understand? What is happening? I love religion because the greatest act in the history of the world happened. There was this guy in Jerusalem, it wasn’t just a guy….This thing happened and it is so exciting when you understand it, what it means.” So I’m trying to make my podcast exciting. Because I’m as excited about that as I am about marketing.

My goal is to try to make the marketing exciting for you because I know that that’s what gets people into it. It’s not the thing, it’s being excited about the marketing thing. And that’s the moral of today’s lesson. So for you, if you’re struggling, I think better than…..the best advice I can give you is become obsessed with the marketing. Become obsessed from reading the books and understanding the stuff and how it works. You become obsessed with the marketing, that’s how you’ll be successful.

So don’t dabble, go deep. Get excited, get obsessed. Hopefully my books do that, hopefully my podcast, Funnel Hacker TV….that’s why we’re putting out so much content because I want you guys to see how fun this can be. It’s exciting. It’s the most exciting thing in the world. The most exciting business in the world, the most exciting time. You literally could have your own TV channel on a phone. That’s insane. We’re in such an exciting time, and I want all of you to be excited. Hopefully I’m exciting enough.

With that said, I really need to go to bed. Steven needs to go to bed, it’s 1:08. And being 1:08 is not that big of deal except for the fact that it’s like 5 nights in a row, or more. Anyway, I’m going to go. But I appreciate you guys. Get excited by the marketing. And if you do that, it’ll all work out. It always does. But you gotta be passionate about the marketing. It’s true of anything in life. If you read Expert Secrets, you know what we’re talking about, the external and internal journeys. Those who focus on the external journeys are the ones that typically fail. Seek an internal journey. Making money is external. Understanding marketing, changing people’s lives, serving, telling stories, that’s the internal. So those who have read the book, that’s the clue.

But it’s true with everything. Weight loss, losing weight, if you’re goal is to just lose weight you’re probably not going to do it, just so you know. It’s a hint. What’s the opposite? What’s the internal thing? If you become passionate about that, get excited about that then you’ll lose the weight. If your goal is to, pick any market. Whatever the external goal is, if that’s your real driving passion, you’re not going to succeed. Sorry. Sorry to break it to you. Because I wanted to lose weight for a long time and I didn’t, guess why? Because I was excited about losing weight. Anyway, there’s a hint. Hopefully that helps. No more hints, I gotta go to be. Appreciate you guys, talk to you soon. Bye.

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How I got more done today then most people will get done in the next three months, and I did it by leveraging this one simple concept.

On today’s episode Russell is hanging out in a tent in the office because his family is out of town. He talks about how he gets stuff done quickly. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:

Find out why Russell is sleeping on a cot, in a tent in his office instead of at his house.
Find out why it’s important to find people with unique abilities to help you complete tasks quickly.
And listen carefully and you may hear Russell read a newly finished script for the Etison Editor inside of Clickfunnels.

So listen below to find out how over the last 14 years Russell was able to build up a good enough team to get tasks completed in a day that might take another company an entire quarter to complete.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. If you’re watching this on marketingsecrets.com, watching the video, I’m actually right now inside of a tent in the office. The reason why is because my wife and kids are out of town and I told everyone I was going to camp out at the office. Everyone’s like, “Oh cool. Yeah.” But I was like, “I’m literally going to camp out at the office.” So I brought a tent in and I brought a cot that I almost broke and then Dave brought in a real cot and this is actually incredibly comfortable, so I’m probably going to sleep here tonight. People will show up in the morning and be like, you are so weird.

The reality is, my house right now is under construction and my entire kitchen is gutted, so I can’t even go to my house, I’m living in the pool house and it’s just like, I know it’s first world problems, but anyway. So now I want to talk to you about one thing before I crash because we got a lot of stuff done today. A lot. This is my to-do list and it’s crazy how many things we got done. And tomorrow is another big day as well. And two of my kids come home tomorrow, which I’m insanely excited for.

But what’s kind of cool, let me sit up a little bit, is people always ask me, “Russell how do you always get so much stuff done in the day?” And I really think it’s a couple of things. First off, I do to-do lists like this on pieces of paper with big old marker. Because something about markers, something about crossing things out that is so therapeutic. Because working today, it was like 2:35 or so in the afternoon and I had only crossed off two things so I was like, angry. So I called over my team and I’m like, “Okay, lets cross stuff out.” Everyone’s like, “How can I help? How can I help?” and I’m like, “Steven do this. Dave do this. Melanie do this.”

Everyone was kind of doing things to help us get stuff busted out. And then I’m looking at this and I’m like, what are the things I have to do? What are the, Dan Sullivan called them unique abilities? What are your unique abilities that you have to focus on? It’s funny because I was dinking around doing stuff that wasn’t necessarily my unique ability, I was doing stuff that was, I don’t know, just stuff. I was like okay, a lot of things I could get other people to do, but there are some things that I have to do. So I knew one of them was, we had this new, we’re going after Instagram so we’re starting this drop the mic show that’s going to be our Instagram play to kind of build up our audience there.

But I needed a cool intro video to pitch the concept and stuff like that. I had to write the script for that, so I did that. And I had to figure out a really cool way to demo this stuff on Instagram, on the computer, which was cool. So I went and recorded the voice over and Steven went and edited it and made it the coolest audio intro ever. So that was awesome.

And then we’re a couple of months away from doing our big re-launch of Clickfunnels, at about our 3 year mark. And I don’t know if you guys have seen our old explainer videos, but I needed to update these. So I had to re-write the copy for the first one and I wrote a new explainer video for the Etison editor, which is the web editor. It’s kind of fun, I’ve been like, how do you write an exciting explainer video for a website editor? It’s not, it wasn’t a funnel, just the editor alone.

I actually had somebody today message me on Facebook and ask me, “What’s the script you write for explainer videos?” and I’m like, “I don’t know what the script is. You just have to find the right hook.” So I was sitting there probably 30 minutes. What’s the hook? Why does somebody care about this? I was stuck at what’s the hook? What’s the hook? And then finally I got the hook and I was like, oh my gosh this is it. And then I started writing. As soon as I got the hook everything just started flowing. It was really, really cool. In fact, do you guys want to hear it? Would that be of value?

I’m going to jump off the cot, like I said I am literally camping in the office. So let me jump off the cot. I’m going to read you guys the script so you can see. So the hook that I came up with is I just remember back, what’s a good hook for the editor in Clickfunnels and things like that and I remember that somebody while I was at Joe Polish’s event, I remember we had to write these cards. Like what you do for a company and my card I wrote , we helped take the power back from the tech guys, because there was some InfusionSoft guys there and I wanted to talk about that.

So I remembered that and found the quote “Take the power back from the tech guys.” So I’m like, that’s the hook. Okay, now I know the hook. I was trying to remember a story that ties to that. So I’m like, okay, the hook is the tech guys having the control. So it’s almost like you’re handcuffed. So then I start typing and got into the flow state. So I’ll read this to you.

“Have you ever felt handcuffed as an entrepreneur? Tell me if this sounds like you. You’ve got an idea, it comes to you in the shower or when you’re trying to sleep or often times it’s in the middle of a boring conversation when someone is trying to talk to you about who knows what. When you’re trying to nod and act like you’re actually paying attention, what is really happening is you’re looking and searching for your next big idea. Then, boom, it hits you. You have the idea, you see the vision, you know what you need to do and you know how this thing will change the world.”

And then all the sudden it’ll zoom on the hands and they’ll be handcuffed and it’ll pan back and see a bunch of tech nerds sitting around in a room.

And it says, “And then they got you. You don’t know how to code, you don’t know how to design. You’re being held hostage by the tech nerds that you used to tease in school. Yet somehow things you think should be so simple, things that should only take a few minutes, somehow become hours and then days and then weeks. With each passing day the excitement for your big idea gets dimmer and dimmer and dimmer until one day it’s gone.”

And then we’ll show the idea in a graveyard, with an entrepreneur standing next to it having a funeral. “There’s money wasted, there’s time wasted with little or nothing to show for it.” They’re still handcuffed and the tech guys walk away with all the cash. “Then when all seems lost it hits you again. Yes! Another idea, another million dollar problem that you want to solve. But the problem is you know the pain that would go into getting the tech guys to actually build out what you know needs to be done. And this is where most entrepreneurial dreams die. Somewhere between the idea and your tech guys ability to create the pages you need to sell your big idea.”

Alright so that was this hook. It is that we’re handcuffed as entrepreneurs. So I start telling the story and thinking about that. That all just started flowing, it’s kind of cool. So I’m going to keep going.

“What happened to the good old days where the person who was excited to sell and able to sell, could just stand in front of people and actually sell? Well here I am telling you that those days are officially back. I want to introduce you to the Etison Editor inside of Clickfunnels to let you take the power back from the tech guys.” Then the guy will break the handcuffs and stand there like a free man.

“Yes, the Etison Editor was created so that entrepreneurs like you, who aren’t programmers, who don’t know how to design can easily build pages inside of a funnel that are proven to convert. Let me show you how it works. First pick the type of sales funnel that is scientifically pre-designed to sell your type of product, choose the style of page design that you like best. Click a button and the entire funnel is built in less than 10 seconds. Every page, every step, everything. You can change headlines and your images, add a video, countdown clocks and more. And if you really want to customize a page, we have dozens of amazing elements you can choose from. Just like a painter would pick a color from a pallet, and then drag and drop it onto the page. Move them around to your heart’s content and then send the funnel to go live. In less than 10 minutes you can create what would have taken those tech nerds weeks to do.”

I make fun of them over and over again. “And now the webpage inside your funnel sells as well as you do. Yes, the Etison Editor inside of Clickfunnels lets you take the power back from your tech guys. No longer be handcuffed and held hostage by tech people. You can take control of your marketing and start making sales today. With Clickfunnels we believe that that’s how it should be. So try the Etison Editor today and be free from your tech guys forever.”

So that was the script. That was something I had to write. I’m the one who’s in that pain, who had gone through that experience over and over again. I had to do that, I can’t be focusing on these other things. So that’s what I went and focused on and worked on. Was writing this script. And then I actually wrote another script for another thing. So I ended up writing four scripts today. And then went into our padded room back here and recorded the voice over’s and I got my brother doing the audio editing. Steven did some audio editing. It’s just all these other people.

So the way I’m able to get so much stuff done is, it doesn’t come overnight, so don’t think it’s going to or it has to, but over the last 14 years of me doing this, I’ve built up my team of people who can do all the pieces. And everyone on the team has a unique ability that they’re good at that I’m not. So I know when I have a project, okay there’s people on my team and they each have their unique abilities and I have mine and to get this thing done it takes all of them. So instead of me trying to do Steven’s job or Jake’s job, or Dave’s or Scott’s or any of these other people’s jobs, I just gotta focus on mine. And then everyone do their kind of thing.

Because any one of these projects, I didn’t do all the pieces of it, I did just my piece of it. And because we have a team, it’s able to go fast. So I recommend for you, start building your team. For some reason as entrepreneurs, we think that we have, I don’t know why these, most entrepreneurs don’t think this, but for some reason internet entrepreneurs do, we think we have to do everything. We have to be good at copy and design and pages and everything. But you don’t. You just have to find people and build a team.

I think that for all of us, think about where you’re at right now and look at where you’re weak and where you’re strong. It’s funny because for a long time I always fought, I wanted to be in control and owner, that was my thing. I always wanted to be in control of the business. And now, looking back, it’s the stupidest thing ever. When I gave up control I found good partners and people and connected them and built a team. That’s when things took off.

So for you, I want you guys, the moral of today’s story I guess if you want to call it, is, obviously I’ve been listening to Dan Sullivan, so those of you who have listened to Dan Sullivan recently, he talks a lot about unique abilities. So my moral of the story for you guys is to really identify what’s your unique ability that nobody else can bring to the table. Figure out that thing and look at what are the unique abilities you need to get this thing off the ground. Or get this thing into orbit, or wherever it’s at to get it where you want it to be. If you’re happy with things, then don’t stress about it. You’re good. Just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to grow or change or whatever that shift is that you want to make, then look and say what unique abilities do I need on my team to make this happen. And then go start finding those people, start looking for them. Start going out there.

I guess that’s the message for today. Using your unique abilities and others to get crap done fast. Maybe that’s the title. Because that’s the secret. We got a lot done today, its insane. Honestly, almost any one of these little check marks on this list, is something that a normal company does in, I don’t know, a quarter. We did a lot of it today. And tomorrow we’re going to finish these things up. And tomorrow we’re re-launching one, two, three, four, five funnels. That’s awesome. They’re all mostly done, so it’s just going to be busting them out. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Get them all live.

And then what’s going to be cool, if I have time at the end of the day I’m going to be working on a Funnel Hacker App, which is insane. We have this new app coming out, which is going to be cool. Then if I get all that stuff done, then by the time my kids get here it’ll be nice. Then the next set of fun projects happen. I’ll be pretty proud of us if we get these things done. Hopefully that helps you guys.

Identify your unique ability and bring others to your team that have other unique abilities that complement yours. That’s how you’re going to take over the world the fastest. With that said, have fun. I’m going to go to bed in my tent here in the office. And they say it’s not good for man to be alone and I agree, that’s why I’m literally sleeping at the office tonight inside of a tent on a cot. Such a nerd. I love it. Anyway, thanks everybody. We’ll see you guys soon. Bye.

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People who read blogs… read blogs, people who watch videos… watch videos, etc…

On today’s episode Russell talks about figuring out a new formula for conversation domination on every platform. He also mentions the cool new way he’s doing coaching. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:

Find out what cool new way Russell is doing coaching with his Inner Circle members.
Hear what Russell just realized while trying to build his Dream 100 list by looking at his email list and Facebook list side by side.
And see what the simple solution is to dominating the conversation in every platform.

So listen below to find out why its important to realize that podcast listeners listen to podcasts.

---Transcript---

Hey this is Russell, welcome to Marketing Secrets. Today’s show is about conversation domination.

Hey everyone this is Russell and I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I have a really cool thing I wanted to share with you guys, and if I’m being completely honest, I am completely fried right now. It’s Friday, my wife just left out of town with three of my kids and left me with two. So she was up packing until 3 in the morning, I fell asleep at 1 and at 3 she left, so I woke up to say goodbye to them and the kids. And then at the same time my little 2 year old, Norah woke up and so I brought her down in bed with me, but she went crazy for the next two hours. Screaming, jumping, and kicking. She knew mom wasn’t around, anyway it got kind of hard.

Finally at about 5 or 5:30 I put her back to bed and then I came down and fell asleep for 2 hours and woke up and so it was like a 2 or 3 hour night. Then I raced to the office because we had funnel Friday today, but luckily Jim forgot. I was like thank heavens, because it gave me a chance to get stuff done. Then I had what we call Decade in a Day. So those who are in my inner circle, we do this cool thing called Decade in a Day, which is a coaching program part. When the first come into the program they get to be part of Decade in a Day and then every time they renew they get Decade in a Day.

What it is, is me taking a decade of my experience and jamming it into one day for them. The way it works, we actually changed it, in the past we used to do it different but I figured out a new format and today was the first day and it’s so cool. If any of you guys are doing coaching programs, this is the way to do it. So we have 100 people in the inner circle at any given time. So what we did is we went and took each of their, basically each person got thirty minutes and instead of me just coaching them one on one, when they get the value and that’s kind of it. What it is we coach them and I use Zoom, which is a new webinar platform that is becoming the coolest thing ever. And then we Zoomed each person in the inner circle Facebook group.

So I had person number one, brought them on, to ask questions, then I click record and stream to Facebook and then it streamed the presentation. So for thirty minutes, I had them introduce themselves really quick. And then we talked about business and I coached them for thirty minutes. And while it’s happening its streaming live to the other 99 inner circle members. And everyone in there is giving feedback and dropping recourses and all these amazing things are happening in there. And the call ended, and I ended it and zoom lets you just end Facebook live. I started the next one and pulled the next person in and go. Boom. We do that for thirty minutes. And then it ends.

So everyone watches the new one starts and then it’s archived in the inner circle members area, that person’s story for thirty minutes with me coaching them. Everyone else starts dropping feedback and comments. We did that, I think 8 times today. So it was kind of crazy. But it was amazing because it was me coaching and then also 99 other fellow inner circle members all coaching as well, dropping resources, links, ideas, resources. It was amazing. So I’m really excited about the new addition to the inner circle, which is awesome.

And Steven who is behind me over here, he just got done with the Two Comma Club coaching, which is the tier before the inner circle, the Two Comma Club coaching and he spent 4 hours doing Q and A today. It’s insane, people. I’ve been doing this now for a long time and our coaching programs have become second to none. It’s exciting.

Steven: It’s a lot of fun. Changing the world, you know. It’s a cool feeling seeing people’s lives like, “I got it.” And then they go out and do it and get results and it’s just fun.

Russell: So fun. So that’s what we’ve been doing today. I[‘m about to take my kids to Studio C, which is really, really fun. Studio C is, if you haven’t, go to YouTube and search Studio C and you’ll see who they are, it’s amazing. Anyway, we’re taking Aiden, who is one of two kids left at home with me tonight to that. So we’re heading out here in a few minutes. But I was just having a conversation with some of the marketing team here and I wanted to share some of it as Iw as thinking about it Because I thought it was really interesting.

So the conversation we had comes back to there was a guy named Howie Schwartz when I first got started who was big online. He had a course called Conversation Domination and it was about getting in Google and as soon as you typed your name into Google all 10 spots would be you, you would dominate the conversation. Anyway, I don’t know what, I haven’t heard from Howie for forever, I don’t know what he’s up to nowadays.

Anyway, the concept of conversation domination I thought was awesome. You type in your key word and you’re all 10 spots and all the paid ads are all you. You dominate the conversation, you’re the only person there. So as I’ve been doing this whole new social media thing, which you guys are watching me do, and hopefully learning and following and modeling and funnel hacking. That’s my thoughts, conversation domination. I want when you open up any platform, that I’m dominating the conversation. I’m in your podcast feed. I’m in your YouTube feed. I’m in your blog RSS feed. I want to dominate the conversation on every single platform so everywhere you look, I am the only alternative. I think it’s important.

But what’s interesting, this is the, I think I know now why. I will always wonder why nobody else is doing this, outside of Gary Vaynerchuk in our market. In my entrepreneurial business market, there’s people probably in other markets, but in ours the only person is Gary V. I think I finally realized why. Because my business is built off email. So we built a big email list. We’ve had over a million entrepreneurs that have been on that list. Active, probably have a million or so. But what’s interesting is, I assumed okay I’m going to launch in Instagram. I’ll send an email and all the sudden I’ll have a million people on Instagram. Then I’ll go to my blog and push there and I’ll have a million people there.

But the reality of what I’ve found is that’s not true. Think about this for yourself. How do you like to consume content? What’s your platform? Because everyone’s got one or two that’s their favorites. Do you like reading blogs? Maybe you’re a blog reader. Or do you like listening to podcast? You’re a podcast person. Or do you like watching video, do you go to YouTube? Or do you check your email? DO you go to Instagram, Facebook? What’s your platform of choice?

And I thought that everyone was on every platform but that’s not the case. There’s a small percentage that are, but if we take our Facebook list and we run next to our email list, and look at those side by side, our Facebook and email list, the crossover in the middle is shockingly small. I assumed they were the same people, but they’re not. It’s just fascinating. When you understand that, a big shift that we’re having, I thought we’ll try Facebook ads to build Instagram, and that kind of works, but not really.

Because Facebook people are on Facebook because they like Facebook. Instagram people are on Instagram. So the more I started thinking about this, the conversation we just had with our team, we’re like, we have to realize that people that read blogs like to read blogs. People who listen to podcasts like to listen to podcasts. Does that make sense. People that watch YouTube videos like watching YouTube videos. People that are Instagram, are on Instagram. That seems stupid right?

Think about that. So what we’re talking about, and I’ve been talking a lot with you guys. Maybe not with you guys, but internally with our team, about the Dream 100. The Dream 100 for us has always been email focused, up until this point. Finding all the people on the list and Dream 100 the crap out of them and get them to promote our products and services. It’s worked, we’ve built a huge company off the back of that. Recently I did an episode a few weeks ago talking about how are you using Dream 100 for SEO? And by the way, we are executing it and it’s working awesome. So listen to that episode and do it.

But think about this, if I want people to read my blog I don’t need to go and become really good at Facebook ads to get people to read my blog. You can, there’s crossover, but what’s better, whoever are the people who read blogs, read blogs. So if I want to launch my blog and make it successful, who are the other people that have successful blogs that my people are already reading. My dream clients are already reading. Because people who read blogs, read blogs.

So I needed to find those people and Dream 100 them, and pay them or partner with them or whatever to get them to write a blog article about me because blog people like to read blogs. So if I’m reading a blog and I read a blog about someone and I go over to their blog, someone’s blog needs to promote my blog. Someone’s podcast needs to promote my podcast. Somebody’s YouTube channel needs to promote my YouTube channel because people who watch YouTube, watch YouTube.

So it’s kind of shift in my thinking. That’s how the Dream 100, as I’m getting more granular with it, it’s fascinating. If you hear me on podcasts, you will know to hear, normally I do podcasts peoplr are like, “Where can I get to know more about you Russell.” And I’m like, “go to Russellbrunson.com, there’s a bunch of stuff there.” But no! If I went on a podcast, be like, “hey, you like listening to podcasts, go to marketingsecrets.com, there’s my podcast, you can subscribe. It’s awesome.” Because podcast people listen to podcasts.

If I’m on a blog, I’m going to talk about my blog. If I’m on a YouTube channel I’m going to talk about my YouTube channel. If I’m on a Facebook feed, I’m going to talk about my Facebook feed. Understanding that, that’s number one. And again, there will be a little bit of crossover, but the majority of your blog readers will come from other blogs. Because blog readers read blogs. The majority of YouTube Subscribers will come from other YouTube channels because YouTube people watch YouTube.

I never watched YouTube videos until 3 months ago when we launched our YouTube channel. I didn’t care about it, I didn’t watch, I never went there. I didn’t understand, it was so foreign to me. Now I get there and I’m in this world and I’m like, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. And people that like YouTube, they’re on YouTube all day long, all the time. People who like Facebook are….

So you start understanding that as you’re doing your Dream 100. You become more granular with your focus and your traffic and all those kind of things. I want you to remember that. You wanna have conversation domination. The key to that is the Dream 100. Going back, Dream 100-ing people and getting people who are bloggers to read your blog. And people who are podcast listeners to listen to your podcast, so on and so forth across all the platforms. That’s awesome.

Do you think that’s awesome Steven?

Steven: It’s amazing.

Russell: For those of you guys who are not watching this on a YouTube, if you’re listening to the podcast, Steven is behind me and he’s screaming excited too. So I hope it makes sense to you guys. I’m dropping gold bombs. Some of you guys will not be prepared for it yet. If you’re not go search fro the Dream 100, I think I’ve done podcasts or videos. I’ve talked a lot about that.

So if you’r enot familiar with the Dream 100 yet, go and study it and then come back to this. There will be a point in your business when this concept will be the biggest way for you to scale from wherever you are to the next level. Its huge for us, what we’re focusing on while we’re trying to go from 8 to 9 figures a year. We got a good shot of maybe hitting it this year. It’s going to be a stretch this year. Next year it’s going to be easy. But this year we might make it. We got a couple of things happening that are going to give us the ability to potentially hit that. It’s going to be fun.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to mention to you guys. Hopefully you have enjoyed this podcast, please go to iTunes and rate, give me stars. Even one or two stars if you want, but if you really had a good time give me 5 and tell people what you think. Also, if you have your own podcast please tell your podcast listeners to listen to my podcast, I would really appreciate it. If you have a YouTube channel, please tell your people to listen to my YouTube videos. And if you’re a blogger, please blog about my blog, that would be very amazing. I hope that helps you guys. Appreciate you all. I’m going to go home and play with my son. We’re going to go to Studio C and have a blast. Peace, have a good night. See you all again soon. Bye everybody.

View Details

Why these things can and should move you forward as opposed to pulling you backwards.

On this episode Russell talks about having entrepreneurial scars and why you should embrace them rather than be embarrassed of them. Here are some of the insightful things to listen for in today’s episode:

Why it’s okay for entrepreneurs to fail and how to embrace your failures.
Why taking risks and failing can be important for the future success of your business.
And why Russell thinks bankruptcy was not only a gift from our founding fathers, but also a gift from God.

So listen below to find out why it’s okay to fail, as long as you are able to learn from your mistakes.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. Today’s episode is called entrepreneurial scars.

Hey everyone, so I wanted to, honestly, this podcast I just wanted to hang out with you guys and talk because it’s been interesting. I’ve been working with so many entrepreneurs and recently just as I’ve been working with some people and watching people who had insane amounts of success at one time and then who had something happen. A failure, a bankruptcy, whatever, just fill in the blank. The second time around, a lot of times, they really, really struggle.

I start looking and I’m like, why are they struggling? They had this huge success and it’s almost like they have fear and embarrassment like, “I failed in the past.” As I kept talking about this with some of the guys on our team it was like, it’s almost like they have entrepreneurial scars. It’s interesting, us as a person who went through the process, a failure, a lot of times there’s ups and the downs it hard. We have scars, emotional scars, but I think sometimes we feel like those scars are on our faces and other people can see them.

What’s interesting is that people don’t. Those are just things that are inside of yourself. But because they’re there and you feel like they’re there and other people can see it, it keeps you from having success the next time. Because there’s so much fear around these scars, these things. And as I was talking about this, this morning, I shared a story and this will hopefully kind of tie these things together a little bit better for you. I’m not going to name names or anything.

But there was a guy I know and he was a successful politician. At the top of his game, doing everything amazing and people loved him. And when you saw him in that spot, and it’s not like national politics, I don’t know anybody in national politics. I don’t follow politics at all. But it was a local person. And you saw him on the news and all this other stuff and he was dynamic, charismatic and everything was awesome. And then he got caught up in this political scandal or whatever and it’s funny because, again, I don’t follow politics, and I don’t care that much. But I was aware of the things that happened, and he’s no longer in there and there was someone else.

Then fast forward 3 or 4 years later, I met him. What’s funny, it was in a different situation, and he wanted to talk about business stuff. And I was really excited because I was like, “I know who this person is. How cool. I want to meet him and talk to him.” And as I talked to him, it was funny, not funny I shouldn’t say that, it was interesting to see the scars that he’d gotten from this thing were so deep, he was struggling to progress in other parts of his life. Business and all these other things because of the scars he got from this thing that didn’t work out right.

You look at the thing, it wasn’t good, but 3 years later, I’m almost surprised that I knew about it, but I did. But he was carrying those scars in his conversations with you. If he would have come in the way that I’d seen him before, confident and all sorts of things, I probably would have done the business deal with him, but because he had these scars and just the way he approached me, he didn’t have the certainty or all these things. They were gone and I could feel it. And that uncertainty kept me from doing the deal with him.

And I remember thinking after I finished, I could tell he was still carrying around the fear and embarrassment and shame of that thing. I don’t care about that thing. I couldn’t care less. Move on with your life and come back. That person I saw on TV, if you would have approached me that way, I would have done this deal.

The same thing is true with entrepreneurs, there’s someone I know who is super successful, knew how to funnel, blew up and made a ton of money and then it went away and now they’re kind of struggling. And what’s interesting is I know that back story because I know the person and things like that. Even with that, I look at the person like, this person is a rock star. They’re awesome. They’re amazing. But as I see them interact with other people, I see these scars that this person has are keeping them from taking over the next thing.

And it’s funny because I don’t think 99,9% of every single person in the world has any idea, their little scars are there for this person, but because he knows that they’re there, because he knows he failed. He knows that things disappear and didn’t work out the way he wanted. He has this fear and has these approaching the next situations, he’s struggling because of that. Because of these scars.

And I think it’s interesting that these entrepreneurial scars that we have, first off they’re invisible. Nobody sees them. Some people may be aware of them, but nobody sees them except for you. So because you are so aware of these things, it keeps you from having the confidence and success you need to move forward.

It’s funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur who was about to go through bankruptcy and they were freaking out and so scared. And I kind of asked them why and they didn’t say, “Because I don’t want those scars.” But what they said afterwards was, If I get out of bankruptcy, what’s my wife going to think and my in-laws and family?” all these things and I was like, “You have to understand, bankruptcy, think about this, failure for entrepreneurs, the founding fathers of this country gave us bankruptcy as a gift, so that entrepreneurs like us would risk and try and move forward and roll the dice and hope for something. And if it wasn’t for that gift, and you may think it’s a gift for the founding fathers, but I think it’s a gift from god. But if it wasn’t for that thing, America wouldn’t have succeeded as a nation. Everything that’s amazing wouldn’t have happened if entrepreneurs didn’t have that risk.

If it was like, if you go bankrupt you go to jail until you pay off all your debts. Not a lot of people would have taken the risk, I don’t know if I would have taken the risks. But because the worst case scenario is bankruptcy, you clear off your balance sheets and start over. That’s the worst case scenario and that’s the greatest gift we have.

So if we hit that and we go through it and all the sudden we have these scars, I went through bankruptcy and have all this fear. Then you go through the next thing, it’s like, no, that shouldn’t be a negative thing. That means you tried, you attempted. Even after you attempted and had success and it went away, you had success.

I remember I was doing a deal with this guy who was super successful. In fact, he did these consulting things where it was 500 grand a day with a minimum of ten sessions, so it’s like half a million bucks to get this guy to work with you. And I had a chance to hang out with him and I was talking to him and talking strategy and he was asking about my story. I tell him my story and I’m pretty open with things now. I have realized that my scars are what actually draws people to me. That’s why at Funnel Hacking Live I spend an hour and a half on stage talking about all my failures, it draws people toward me, which is kind of making the point at the end of this podcast.

But I’ve had my share of ups and downs. And as I told him the whole thing he’s like, “Oh good.” And I’m like, “What do you mean, good?’. And he’s like, “you cycled.” I’m like, “what do you mean cycled?” And he’s like, “Entrepreneurs who haven’t cycled at least once, I refuse to work with them.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” “Cycled means you build something up and then you crash. If you haven’t cycled yet, then guess what? You’re still drinking your own kool-aid. You still believe that you are the most amazing human being on Earth. You don’t realize until after you cycled, that it’s not just you. You aren’t the greatest thing to walk this planet. There’s market conditions, there’s people, opportunities, luck and all these amazing things that happen that make you possible. That make you as an entrepreneur successful.”

And as he said that, first off I was like, that feels better. Cycling sounds way better than failure, than bankruptcy. But I thought it was interesting that he wouldn’t work with entrepreneur unless they’d cycled once. And I was like, Man, how many people go out there and do their big risk and have some success which gives you all t his pride and confidence and stuff. And then you lose it and because of that failure you never try again. Or you try it but halfway because you feel like you have these scars and you feel like other people are judging you or you are judging yourself for all these kind of things. Where the reality is that we don’t se those things.

Nobody knows about the failures until you tell them about it. But if they do know about it, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, as I found as I share my scars, it’s draws people closer, like I mentioned earlier. I think the reason people will do business with me a lot of times is because I’m vulnerable, I share those things.

So for you guys, I wanted to talk about it today because first off, it’s okay to have those scars, but don’t hide them. Share those things. When my kids get injured and they’re super cute and do it all the time, I tell my boys, “Chicks dig scars. That’s a good thing. That’s awesome. Black eyes are awesome.” I remember one of my black eyes I got in wrestling; I don’t know if you guys are watching the video, you can still see the scars over both of my eyes. I had this one where I hit my buddies knee and my eye had swollen shut and I had 15 stitches and couldn’t see out of my eye for 4 or 5 days. I was at school and I was all embarrassed because of the scar and as I was walking around people were like, “Dude your eye looks awesome. You’re a wrestler.” People connected with that more than me looking good and my hair being, worrying about what I look like.

So I think the moral of this podcast and I want you guys to understand, is that we all have entrepreneurial scars. If you don’t have them yet, you’re going to have them. But don’t let those keep you from the next success. My friend who is a politician, I don’t care what happened. He could go and do and be successful, but because he’s carrying these scars, he’s not. You have to be willing to get rid of those, or not get rid of them, embrace them and share those things. Look, I screwed up, this is what happened. But this is what I’m doing now and this is what I learned from it, how I’m changing.

If I look back on my career, there’s a lot of things I’m embarrassed about. Things I messed up on big time. Maybe I should do a podcast someday about my biggest regrets. I have regrets in my business. There’s things I did that I’m embarrassed about, I wish I wouldn’t have done. Looking back now, I would have consulted myself, “Do not do that.” But I wouldn’t have known the path unless I’d gone down some of these paths and realized what things weren’t right.

I’ve always tried to be fair to my customers and my employees and stuff, but I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve sold things that I thought were really good and found out later they weren’t. There’s things I’m not proud of, but if I let those scars keep me, how many people’s lives that we’re touching and effecting now that wouldn’t have been touched had I not embraced those scars and told people, “Look I messed up in the past.” And I have, and we all do and it’s okay. But I don’t want you guys to not progress because of that.

Hopefully this gives you some comfort. Look, if you’ve gone through bankruptcy that’s okay. If you messed up and did something stupid, that’s okay. That’s what this life is about. About making those mistakes and owning it, and if you do it’s almost like plastic surgery. It makes these scars disappear. But they don’t need to disappear. Like I said, embrace it. Because that’s what’s going to draw people to you.

So I hope that helps. It was on my mind today, I though it just want to share it. I hope that that was good for you guys. Again, as entrepreneurs, we’re risking stuff every day. We’re risking our name, money, other people. I wake up in the morning scared with 119 employees as of today. If I screw up, how many people lives have I let down because of that. Those things are real to me and I understand that. But I’ve got to risk those things because how many people’s lives can we effect because of those things.

And if you’ve gone through bankruptcy, don’t let that stress you out. It’s a gift from the founding fathers, from God. It’s given us the ability so that we can risk and not lose everything. We can risk……..and if it wasn’t for that, again, progress would stop if entrepreneurs weren’t risking. So it’s not a bad thing. If you….

Anyway, I just wanted to give you guys that as a gift. And if you any of you guys are struggling, some of you probably are. Some of you guys are going through bankruptcy or gone through bankruptcy. Maybe it’s not bankruptcy but you failed. You launched something that didn’t work. You built a team of people and the product didn’t work and you had to fire people or let them go. All the ups and downs and disappointment. As entrepreneurs you have so many things on your shoulders and I get that.

I hope this message helps relieve some of that pressure for some of you guys. Because if you don’t keep risking, trying, keep getting those scars, where is the world going to be? Where are you going to be? Where’s your family going to be? Where are the people you’re serving going to be? They need you and it’s worth the risk, worth the sacrifice, worth the fears. Because if you’re going to affect those people, when you deliver on what you know you have and you change their lives, it makes it all worth it.

It’s interesting, just to kind of close this down. I looked at where our company has come to where we are today. And I looked back during my last cycle. 7 years ago when everything collapsed around me and I thought the world was coming to an end and I was depressed and sad and scared and all those kind of things happened. Looking at it now, if I didn’t go through that, Clickfunnels and this process never would have happened. I never would have met Todd, I never would have met who built Clickfunnels. I never would have built this team. I never would have had the opportunity. I wouldn’t have known the things I know to be able to execute on this. A lot of things we’re steering clear from today are because of the mistakes that happened back then. And if I would have made those mistakes today, some of them would have been catastrophic. Way more people’s lives would have been effected.

Whereas, I had a chance to suffer those things, get those scars on a smaller scale, so I don’t have to have those things now. Hopefully, if I learned my lesson which I’m trying to do. So look at those things as gifts, embrace them, share them, and don’t hide from them. Because those scars will draw people to you and we all have them. Don’t let that keep you from your mission.

Hope that helps. Appreciate you guys and see you guys all on the next episode of Funnel Hacker, no that’s wrong. What is this episode? Marketingsecrets.com. So sorry, I was recording Funnel Hacker TV earlier today. So marketingsecrets.com podcast. That’s what this is. By the way, if you want to go see our tv show, go to funnelhacker.tv, we have a whole bunch of behind the scenes episodes, a couple of new episodes as well of different stories. In fact, by the time this is live, the same day, we have our next show going live. So go to Funnel Hacker TV as well, check out the shows.

If you like the podcast, please share it. Please go to iTunes and leave me a review. I don’t care if you give me one stars, two stars. If you give me five that will be way cooler. Please do that. Thanks again for everything guys and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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Who was J. Peterman and why should you care?

On this episode Russell talks about taking inspiration for writing good copy from the J. Peterman catalog (of Seinfeld fame). Here are some of the fascinating things you will hear in this episode:

Learn something new about Seinfeld, like that the J. Peterman catalog was actually a real catalog that really had great copy.
Hear a couple of excerpts from the catalog that are amazing and see for yourself why it's so awesome.
And find out how Russell made a book about copywriting seem sexy.

So listen below to learn something new about Seinfeld that you can tell all your friends the next time you watch the show, while also being inspired by the amazing copy contained in the real catalog.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I just wanted to jump on real quick, spur of the moment. Because I wanted to share something with you that is important. It has to do with the show Seinfeld, but I knew as soon as I said Seinfeld some of you would be like, “I read your book, Russell. It’s the Seinfeld email sequences.” But it’s not, I got something completely different that you guys probably didn’t even know about yet.

I don’t know about a lot of you guys, a lot of you guys are into marketing now and you’re loving it because we’re talking about it and making it exciting and sexy, but I want you to understand. Marketing has been the old timers, most of them are dead now, they’re no longer alive. The legends, this is where the coolest stuff comes from. So people ask me what I do for fun. I spent $4000 buying these right here. These are a whole bunch of swipe files of ads from dead people, because they’re so amazing.

Anywhere, where do I get weird stuff like this? Someone’s already asking. I get stuff like this on eBay. I just recently got a purchase that showed up today that I wanted to show you guys. It’s marketing, for someone like me, it’s the greatest marketing thing on planet Earth. Here’s a snapshot of what it is. That’s all you get.

Based on that, who can tell me what this is? It has to do with Seinfeld, it’s a pop quiz. I want to know your answer down below. Anyone who gets the answer to this quiz, I will have so much respect for you as a marketing person. There’s something that has to do with this and Seinfeld. Anyone who knows what it is, post it down below. I want to see if any of you guys know. There’s hints, it’s an old catalog from 1994. What does that have to do with Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine, and the crew? Any one of you guys know.

I’ll give you guys another hint. I’ll give you the title of the top. It’s going to be backwards on Facebook live, but this is one of the official J. Peterman catalogs from 1994. Anyone getting close to knowing what I’m talking about. Okay. Alright, Kramer’s roommate?

Okay, for those that don’t know, I’m going to explain what’s happening. Most of you guys, hopefully everybody has watched the show Seinfeld. Do you guys remember that Elaine got a job at the J. Peterman Catalog. Do you remember J. Peterman was this eccentric person and he’d go on vacations and go buy hats and then he’d write all this amazing copy in these catalogs and Elaine became one of the copywriters and had all these people and it became this huge spoof on multiple different seasons. What most of you guys probably don’t know is that the J. Peterman catalog is a real thing. It was a real thing and any old school direct response copywriters know and you study stuff like this.

The other day I was doing an interview, a podcast interview with some Ecom sellers and they’re asking, “How does this funnel stuff work for ecommerce people?” I was like, “You guys! Do you not know who J. Peterman is?” and they’re like, “That guy from Seinfeld?” and I’m like, “No! Are you serious?” You need to understand your roots, where did you come from? You are marketing and selling and you need to understand your roots. Understanding these roots, there’s so much gold just waiting there for you to take it.”

So anyone selling ecommerce or anyone selling anything. You need to understand who J. Peterman was. J. Peterman was a visionary, a genius, an amazing copywriter who built a huge company based on these catalogs. I went to eBay and searched for J. Peterman catalogs after that interview because I wanted to get some to show all you guys the foundation and history where this whole thing is coming from. And if you have a ecommerce site, this is a hint.

So here’s 4 J. Peterman catalogs, I got Dave and Steven here geeking out on them.

Dave: Geeking out big time, awesome stories.

Russell: So he doesn’t just say, give us an example of one real quick. Hold on. “Here is a blue shirt to sell” or “Here is …..” This is the best one? Do you want to read it in your marketing voice? This is, what is it? Slinky cord….a lot of you guys will have this on your ecom story, ecom funnel, “it’s ugly green pants and a white shirt.” So listen to the copy. On every single page in the Peterman catalog, just see why this company grew so big and what you guys should be doing to the copy on your ecom and Amazon lists and all sorts of stuff. So ready to read our order?

Dave: Absolutely. “A bedouin horseman chased you half way across the desert. (A beautiful woman on a camel in the desert alone is too ripe a target to dismiss.)

Your heart leaps in your throat again and again, an exquisite torment the Arabs, katu’l-kalb, or “heart cutting.”

Delirious, half dead you reach the emir’s palace. A Galla slave rears his horse in your path….you notice he is speaking in Peter O’Toole’s voice. Just then you awaken in the Royal Suite of the Lanesborough in London, “Lawrence of Arabia” blaring from the television set.

You rush back to sleep, Slinky Silk Cord Tank Top. And Slinky Silk Cord Pants. Not harem pants, but close. 100% flowing, loose silk. More romantic, more interesting than you remembered.”

Russell: Now that is how you sell something. That’s called good copy. You don’t put like brown, orange or yellow, add to cart. You sell your stuff. Every page of this catalog, they’re selling…they don’t even have pictures. It’s like painting of the pictures because this is pre-pictures, apparently. But every single one has amazing cpy to sell it. It would behoove most of you to go to eBay, I don’t know how many are still available, or even Google it. I’m sure you can find it online as well. But search for the J. Peterman catalog, the original ones. These one’s I bought here on eBay are from 1994. The older the better because stuff like this gets better with time.

Steven: The whole thing is a story in one line of description. Look at this.

Russell: So this is….Steven’s going to order this one. This is the Famous Miss Blue. The famous Miss Blue Hat. So if this was on the Shopify site, this would be one button, add to cart and this would be all they would get.

Steven: Yeah, basically. And a picture of it.

Russell: So what would J. Peterman do?

Steven: J. Peterman would say something like this, “You know who I mean. It could have been you. One day you arrived by train, but from where? Nobody knew.

You carved a plantation out of 1,000 acres of dry land which the smart money called worthless.

You diverted a stream and proved them wrong. You wore a big Panama hat, big like a man’s. but you didn’t look like a man. Sometimes you wore it held on with a chin strap, sometimes you wore it down your back.

You became rich, I guess. Anyway, you had a piano, I heard it. I saw you and those……” Anyway, it’s really cool. And at the end it goes, “I remember all that.” And it all kind of rhymes as you go through it. And it’s literally one line…”Made in Ecuador. Leather chin strap. Approx. 4-inch brim. Memorable. $40”

What? I want this hat now. It’s for a woman.

Russell: Alright so, what the lesson and moral for today that I want you to understand, is that copy is the king. It’s the key to everything. I told this on the Marketing Secrets podcast, a lot of you may not have heard this. But copywriting is not sexy, it’s not exciting. So when I wanted to teach copy…..in fact, if I call it copywriting guess what all of us do? We all fall asleep, our eyes glaze over. But if you read the expert secrets book, guess what that book is? It’s my contribution to copywriting. Teaching you how to tell stories, how to do it the right way. How to do epiphany bridges, how to tell kind of like bridges, how to position the offer. All those kind of things. It’s copy, it’s copywriting.

So that is the study that you guys gotta understand. Understand, wherever you’re coming at, some of you guys have been doing this business for years. 6 months, 5 years, 10 years. But there is people that have gone before us that have mastered this stuff. So the reason why I do good today is because I study the old timers. The old timers are the key, you guys. There’s so much of this stuff. If you have an ecommerce site and you want to do well, master J. Peterman. Buy his catalogs, read the copy, understand that.

If you want to understand how to do newletters, go read Gary Halvert letter. Go read, you know go back to the foundation where this stuff all began because that’s the key.

So anyway, there you go you guys. There’s our sneak attack episode of the J. Peterman catalog. If you liked this please share as much as you can. I’d like for more people to hear about it. But now you guys are all in on the secret. So understand that you guys. Copy is the key,it’s the secret. Next time you watch Seinfeld working at the J. Peterman catalog, now you’ll know the joke behind the joke. What she’s talking about and why it’s cool. All sorts of stuff like that.

So that’s all I got you guys. And if for some reason you’ve been living under a rock and you don’t have the Expert Secrets book yet, just go to expertsecrets.com because it is my contribution to copywriting. You know I always said I would never write a copywriting course or product because it’s not sexy or exciting and just not that cool. So I called it something different, but it’s copywriting, that’s what that message, that book is all about. Helping you understand how to write good copy, tell good stories, all those things tied together. So that’s what I got you guys, have an amazing day. I hope you guys had a good job. We will talk soon. Bye everybody.

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Here is a recap of a 7 day internal launch that made over a million dollars and what we learned along the way.

On today's episode Russell gives the details of the 7 day launch strategy and what worked and what didn't. Here are some insightful things you will here on this episode:

A step by step guide to what Russell did for each of the 7 days in the launch.
What mistakes were made and how Russell and his team were able to make tweaks on the fly to make it better.
And what Russell learned from the experience and how it can help others with their own businesses.

So listen below to get a cool step by step guide into the 7 day launch.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the 7 day launch.

Hey everyone, this is Russell and welcome back to Marketing Secrets podcast. So today I’m going to be talking to you guys about this launch right here and the reason why, is my inner circle members keep asking me, “Hey Russell, can you please show us what happened behind the scenes of the 7 day launch?” They want the stats, numbers and details. So I thought I’m going to kill two birds with one stone. Because I wanted to talk about this on the podcast anyway. So this is for the inner circle members and for those of you who listen to the podcast, I hope you love it.

I’m not going to go deep into the numbers, I will just tell you that this launch in 7 days did over a million dollars in coaching sales, which is exciting, so it worked. I initially learned about this concept from one of my friends, Brendon Burchard. If you watch Funnel Hacker TV, the behind the scenes show, you will see some of the behind the scenes of us kind of going through this. He was in Las Vegas and I flew out there and there’s a whole episode on funnelhacker.tv where you’ll see me flying to Vegas, hanging out with Brendon and getting ideas on how he did this.

So I’m not going to go too deep into all the strategies, just because I know he is launching a course later on this year. I’m going to buy it, you should all buy it, we should all buy it, it’s going to be amazing. Going deep into the deep in the details and giving the swipe files and stuff like that, but if you were watching you probably saw it, first off. Second off, you probably got the swipe files just by getting my emails and stuff. So you’ve got some feedback, if you’ve been funnel hacking and watching, you’ve had a chance to see it.

Basically the way it worked is we did the book launch for the first 30 days, which built up a lot of pressure and excitement and we made a lot of book sales and upsells and everything else. At the end of it I wanted to do something cool. I wanted to figure out how, those who wanted to go deeper, how do I offer a coaching program that’s not me being, I didn’t want to feel like I was selling again because it’s just…..You know how it is, after a while people don’t want to keep being sold. I’d say it’s not like I wanted to sell a coaching program, to help people want to go to the next level with it, which is exciting. But then second off, I wanted to give and serve.

So when Brendon gave me this idea I loved it. So basically how 7 day launch works is, and those who saw it, basically what happened is Monday I started promoting it, Tuesday I did this long training. So if you’re watching the video you can see day 1 I basically did an episode from 11 until noon-ish, I can’t remember exactly how it all went. And module one was you becoming an expert.

What’s interesting is the book promo is all about Expert Secrets, but there was stuff like as soon as you read the book there’s this weird finality where it’s written and done and you can’t edit it or touch it again. And there were things as we’re selling it that I was like, “Oh…” during my interviews all these things kept coming up. There was stuff I wished I could share and there was pieces I wanted to just do.

So what’s cool, is giving the ability, because I don’t have to re-teach the book, because people have the book, but here’s a master class of what’s next. If you read the book and you’re like, “What’s the next piece? What is it?” So this one here I went really deep with you becoming an expert and finding your voice and it was just training and it was awesome.

So what we did is we emailed, so on Expertsecretsmasterclass.com, by the time there was a video, they embedded the live video from YouTube, people could watch and promote that through email. But then we also setup Facebook Live, I think there’s just those two platforms. So when we started this and clicked record, I came on and said, “Hey guys, we’re recording a course, it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to jump up here and start recording, be back in a minute.” Then we clicked go and it was like life. So I taught this entire thing, training. It was awesome.

Then during the breaks we had testimonial videos streaming of our coaching program of the FHAT event, The Funnel Hack A Thon event so people could keep seeing success stories. I took a break so I could go to the bathroom and reset. We came back and taught number two, which is creating an irresistible offer. And that was it for day. I think I was up there for 3 hours, it was awesome. When all was said and done, I think we had 20 or 30 thousand people watch it between YouTube and Facebook. Gave tons of good will and it was really, really cool.

A lot of people who, they’ve been stuck on these two pieces, I had a chance to go deeper on that and give them everything. So that was day number one. And then this is where it replayed for 24 hours and then it disappeared. People had the chance to watch it for 24 hours, and some did, and then it disappeared.

Then day two started. Day two I wanted to do the big domino, it went really deep to help people understand that. Then we had a break again, and then what I did at the latest session, actually did a webinar. Now, it’s a little different from Brendon, when he did his, basically at the end of day two is when he pushed people to a video sales letter, which sold a product. Me, I just did a webinar. One of the big things that was kind of interesting. When we created this offer, part of this training is really cool and desirable. A lot of people aren’t going to be able to watch it live, and you pull it down and you stage, because people actually want the content and the training.

At the end of this I’m not selling this as a course because it’d be hard to sell because people are like, “I missed part of it, I should have watched it!” and all these kind of things. So instead it’s like, if you join the coaching program you get all this course for free, and notice I didn’t say the recordings of this product. Because recordings seem really cheap. Getting this course, the Expert Secrets Master Class, the perceived value is way higher, it’s the course not the recordings.

If you watch the videos back I tried to say that, I think a couple of times I messed up and said recordings. I was trying to get it perfect. So that was here, and then what’s cool is that happened and sales started coming in for the coaching program. Because there was a webinar and they got to watch me do the webinar but then I was actually selling the coaching program on the webinar.

Now what’s happening, as soon as it was done, it’s funny because it’s the first time I’d ever done this webinar. We created it the night before, it was perfect webinar, hacked style. So it was one headline, three secrets, a board with things. I pitched two offers, which is usually a wrong thing to do and it was in this case too. We had 2,000 or 15,000, it was just complicated when you get to the stack. So sales did okay, but I was kind of honestly, when the camera shut off, I was sitting there kind of depressed. Dang, that did not feel right. They didn’t convert right. Some people bought but it wasn’t right. I was just like, dangit.

I was frustrated and that night I was kind of stressing out about it and realizing that. So then we made some tweaks and changes. And the cool thing is day three, I came back and broke down the campaign and showed them and went through the webinar again. And what’s cool about the second webinar, or the second training is because I was going through what I did and what worked and what didn’t work. I knew what hadn’t worked the first time. So I had this really cool opportunity to weave in different close, different stack, different things, to close the deal from the day before.

I’m going to talk about why this is so key here. Because I think I figured out something amazing. But after that section, sales started coming in like crazy. The second webinar where I broke down what I did here, but then use that, and hopefully you guys watched that, if not you missed it. But I was weaving in all these closes throughout it, it was kind of a cool thing. But I was just breaking down what we were actually doing.

Then we had a break and at the end I did a virtual book tour, which is kind of a bonus training of how we got traffic and then that was it. When that one ended, sales were coming in better than the day before. I was able to fix some of the things I had done wrong back here, which was good. But there was something wrong with the, there was something….it still wasn’t quite big so I was sitting there and I was kind of… I don’t know about you guys, but when you nail it I have all this energy afterwards. When I don’t I just feel this lack of energy. When we got done afterwards I was like, it was good but I still felt this lack of energy.

I felt this weirdness around this pricing strategy and if you look at pricing it was $2000 to do the online version, or $15000 to do the online plus come to Boise, plus get Fill Your Funnel and a bunch of other really cool things. And it was kind of, there was complexity in it. So we were talking about it, “Maybe we’ll open up a payment plan.” I hate payment plans and all those other sorts of stuff. Then I had this idea and I was like, “Wait a minute, what if instead of a payment plan, what if…” So this is the pricing strategy that turned this campaign from….at the end of day two we probably had $150,000 in sales to two days later we did over a million dollars in sales. What was the difference? This was the piece that was key, it was pricing.

So we shifted this, if you guys watched it, I came out and said, “Hey a lot of people are asking for a payment plan, unfortunately we don’t have a payment plan. But I did decide to turn this coaching program into a $300 a month one. So you come here, it’s $297 a month, or you can get lifetime access for $2000 or you can upgrade to the $15000 and com to Boise and get all this other stuff as well.

So what’s interesting, I know some of the guys on my team were nervous, “Oh no. If it goes $300 a month, everyone’s going to take that and it’s going to draw whatever…” What’s interesting is that we had people take that, but what it did was become almost like a decoy offer where it made everybody buy the $2000 offer, it’s crazy.

Tons of people bought, suddenly $2000 seemed cheap versus $300 a month and it was cool for 2 reasons. One, it got people to buy that. Number two it was cool because it got a whole bunch of people on a $300 a month coaching program as well, which is one of my goals this year. How do I create a $300 a month? To be honest Frank Kern has a $300 a month thing. Ryan STewman has a $300 a month thing. I was like, “I want a $300 a month training program.” So it kind of forced us to do that, but the cool side effect, it created this really cool thing where now $300 a month or lifetime access for $2000. So it was a huge discount there, which pushed everyone to the $2 grand.

When we had Neurocell, our supplement, it was kind of similar the way pricing was. We had one bottle, three bottles or four bottles. We had a pricing strategy where basically you had to be a moron to buy one bottle. Where if you had any brains at all you’d buy the four bottles. It was $80 a bottle, or it was $40 a bottle if you get three. It was crazy and it pushed everybody to where we actually wanted them. And by doing this it did that as well. It helped me do two goals.

One was to help me build up a $300 a month coaching program, number two it pushed people to what I actually wanted them to do, which was the $2000, which was really cool.

Now it’s been fun because people are going through there and the training for those who are going through it, it’s super in depth and intense and crazy and amazing. It’s getting me excited to watch what people are doing. So that was some of the break down. Basically the last 3 days were urgency and scarcity and that’s what pushed it over the million dollar mark.

That’s, by the way, a million dollars collected. A lot of people use, can I say this publicly? The company basically went bankrupt, so I can. There’s a thing we in the industry call stomper math. In stomper math, there’s a company called stomper net and they used to do launched and they’d be like, “We did 18 million dollars.” But it was not collected, it was if all the payment plans go through for the next 5 years then they would have made 18 million or something like that. I hate that. Stomper math, this was like a 10 million dollar launch. But in real math, not common core, but real math, we collected a million dollars. So after we rebuild stuff we’ll be higher. Anyway, I thought it was cool.

Urgency and scarcity from this point forward, and again, the offer was basically the thing that I wanted to sell wrapped in with the recordings of this, excuse me not the recordings. I said a curse word. You get the Expert Secrets Master Class course for free as well.

So that’s kind of it. So those who were in the Two Comma Club coaching program, all the recordings of this are in the members area. So you can go back and watch them. I highly recommend at least watching these first three. These first three were probably some of the best presentations I’ve ever given, ever. I’m really proud of them and it will help you implement. The first three for those of you who are listening are The You in Expert, Create Your Digital Offer, and The Big Domino. There was something about the training, the way it worked. This training is just, I’m really proud of them, they turned out amazing.

Anyway, we probably will be trying to evergreen this funnel in the near future, I’m not sure exactly how to do it yet. But in the future if you go to expertsecretsmasterclass.com, it may be there, the evergreen version where basically you opt in and we have a 24 hour countdown and it disappears after 24 hours. I don’t know, I haven’t figured that part out yet. We may or may not try that in the future. But yeah, that was kind of a breakdown of how the campaign worked and it was a lot of fun.

Tons of reciprocity, tons of goodwill, a lot of people weren’t able to buy, they still got tons of stuff from that. And what’s been interesting in my business, as I’ve been watching this, the more I give away, it’s people have success with the free stuff, in fact Dan Henry is one person who said this specifically. A bunch of other people said, I feel like I owe you because I’ve made so much money from all the free stuff. Dan, I remember when he joined the inner circle, he’s like, “I feel like I owe you $25 grand for all you already gave me. So I’m just going to give it to you so I can be in your inner circle, but I feel like I owe it to you anyway.”

And that’s what I want to do. I want to give people such good stuff, they can run with it and have success. So much so that in the future they’re like, “Man, I need to buy all Russell’s stuff, because I feel like I owe it to him.” So it’s kind of a good spot to be in. That’s what I’m trying to focus a lot more on.

That’s kind of how the whole thing worked, it was really fun and enjoyable. The big key takeaways are number one, just giving and building this huge reciprocity streaming this huge, live streaming to YouTube and to Facebook. I think when all was said and done it was like a quarter of a million people that had seen parts of this training. It might have been more than that. It was amazing.

Having an offer, a really good offer with a really good pricing strategy behind it, when Brendon comes out with his course later this year, hopefully he’ll….he’ll probably use this process to launch it. But watch how he structures his offers. I think that’s the key of it. What he does, he’ll do this whole training and be like, “Hey expert academy, my $1000 course, I’ll give you a 50% discount, so you get $500, plus you get this for free.” It’s all about creating an irresistible, amazing offer. It took us a couple of tries and while this thing was happening, tweaking our offer before it got right.

That’s another thing you’ve got to understand is that we’re tweaking offers in the, as they’re happening. In the middle we’ll be like, “Ah, it’s not working. It’s not converting. Change it, tweak it.” If your thing’s not converting, change the offer, don’t like, “Ah it didn’t work.” If you would have seen the behind the scenes, and I think we probably filmed some behind the scenes of that from the behind the scenes Funnel Hacker TV show.

But we’re shifting and changing and modifying things on the fly because it’s happening in real time and it’s kind of crazy. Anyway, this was a really cool thing to kind of end the launch with. You know it added an extra million dollars to the bottom line, which was cool. It helped us figure out the pricing strategy for long term when we do evergreen-ness. How to actually sell the coaching, what the right messaging…Forcing myself to do a webinar live, helped me figure out what was wrong with my webinar hook. Then having me do a webinar where I recap the whole thing gave me another deep ability to fix the things and know what to do when I make this thing an auto webinar and sell it as a coaching program in the future.

And this is the other thing I learned that was awesome. When you do a webinar, and maybe this only works in my market, I’m not sure. Or like a business market. But doing a webinar and then the next day showing them what you did. The second webinar made us more money than the first. So one cool thing I’m going to start doing is, I think with some of my webinars is if somebody registers be like, “Hey, if you watch to the end, what I’m going to do is send an email with a break down where I’m going to show you behind the scenes. I’m going to show you the webinar funnel, what we did. I’m going to let you funnel hack what I just did. I’ll give you the share funnels, the emails. But you have to watch the webinar to be able to get access to that.” And it should force people to consume the webinar, which will create sales and things like that.

That was a cool thing, doing a double webinar. We did that back in the day. 8 or 9 years ago we used to double things like that. We’d do one and one right after. I forgot about them and it was, I think there’s a correlation here, doing a double webinar and the second webinar is showing something, but just keeps closing sales. But it’s a different presentation. I’ll test with that and let you guys know what we figure out.

Figuring out your pricing strategy was big. There’s so many cool lessons from it. Hopefully you guys watched it and experienced it. You had a chance to see behind the scenes of the numbers and metrics, the big takeaways and aha’s we learned along the way. Anyway, it was pretty awesome.

Hopefully I’ll see you guys. Thank you again for listening to Marketing Secrets podcast. If you are not on iTunes, please search on iTunes, leave me some feedback and listen to it there. Because on iTunes, it’s cool because it’s not just, I think this is episode 5 or 6 or whatever we’re on Marketing Secrets, but on iTunes you get access to all of the back episodes, like 350 episodes from when I was running the Marketing Secrets show under a different name. It was called Marketing In Your Car. I highly, highly recommend you guys going back and binge listening to all of those because they are good and they are worth it.

A lot of our biggest success stories people have a chance to binge through everything. Watch the video here if you’re watching on YouTube, but go to iTunes and subscribe go binge listen to everything. Catch up with us. You can be hanging out with all these things and all this stuff will make a lot more sense to you. Anyway, that was it for the 7 day launch. I hope you guys enjoyed that and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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The dream 100 isn’t just for JV partners… it’s the key to ALL traffic.

On this episode of Marketing Secrets Russell talks about immersing himself in SEO stuff over the weekend and how that has got him thinking about getting creative about getting traffic. Here are some of the cool things he mentions in this episode:

How you can use Dream 100 strategies with people who write magazine articles to get more traffic.
How you can find out who is dominating each platform (i.e YouTube, Instagram) and use them to build your Dream 100.
And find out why Russell is looking at strategies he used 10 years ago to help gain traffic.

So listen below to hear how to do SEO the right way using the Dream 100.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets. I’m here in my house today about to head out to my son’s kindergarten graduation which is pretty excited. It was cute, we were talking about it last night and he was like, “What’s graduation mean?” so we had to kind of explain that.

But I’m super excited. We’re heading out and so many cool things, but the one downside to doing a podcast where it’s also a video, so those who are listening on iTunes, you go to marketingsecrets.com there’s also a video version of these. I used to do them on my phone all the time, which is a lot easier and I could do it more often. So I had a bunch of things on my mind that I wanted to share with you guys, that I have had a chance to til right now. So I had a few minutes and wanted to kind of just hang out with all my marketing secrets people.

So a couple things, one is if you listened to last week’s episode, or the last episode I did, it talked about faith. You have to have faith first in a mentor, business, products, all those kind of things. Because otherwise everyone would do it, it takes away all the joy and excitement and the fun and all those things disappear. There’s a book, a lot of my Mormon friends know. It’s called Faith Proceeds a Miracle. Without getting into the content of the book, just the title was right. Think about that. Faith proceeds a miracle, you want a miracle, launch a business, change the world, whatever. It starts with faith. Faith in yourself, the process, in it all. I’ll leave that there.

So today what I want to talk about, if you listened to me talk recently I’ve been talking about how transitions going from zero to a million dollars a year, a million to ten, and ten to a hundred and it’s interesting, the different mindset tweaks and the creativity switch. To go from zero to a million is all about figuring out your what and how. What is it you’re selling and how are you going to sell it. Once you figure that out it’s easy to get to a million bucks.

Then a million to ten is all about figuring out acquisition funnels to get people in, ascension funnels to ascend people up and monetization funnels, and that’s the next phase in the process. The third phase is traffic, like how to convert cold traffic and more traffic, things like that. And our job as entrepreneurs is to shift our creativity from figuring out the what and how, as soon as you figure that out it’s transitioning our creativity to the front end and back in ascension funnels. After you figure that out and get those in place, it’s transitioning to our creativity in traffic and lead generation.

So what’s cool is that in our company, the first two phases are done, and it’s fun because the Two Comma Club coaching, which we launched a couple of months ago, is all about focus and getting people from zero to a million, the what and the how. And then the inner circle is about the second phase, which is going from 7 to 8 figures, which is all about figuring out the acquisition, ascension and monetization funnels.

And the next phase is where my next group of people, I’m thinking about opening another group, called the inner, inner circle. I don’t know what it is. It will be really, really, obviously a lot more expensive, but the goal of that one is going to be traffic, and creativity in traffic, because that’s what we’re doing right now, it’s my focus. Thinking about this. All weekend long, I started geeking out on SEO again, which I swore I would never do, I hated SEO. But as I started thinking about this, SEO, I’ve had times in our company where we were ranked number one for work at home, and internet marketing, internet marketing strategy and all these other cool key words.

But we did it the gray hat way, shades of gray…I don’t know. There’s black hat stuff that we didn’t really do, there’s gray hat that we definitely did, and then there’s white hat that’s too annoying and takes too long. But this weekend I started re geeking out on it and thinking about it. And looking at the white hat strategies, I always hate them because they seem so slow and organic, like SEO is supposed to be. But then I realized that it doesn’t have to be slow and organic, it just has to, you get the right things to the right people.

And it’s funny because I was geeking out and studying and learning and all this stuff, and I had this weird impression that I was just, the way to rank in SEO, it’s the same principle. We talk about this inside the Fill Your Funnel Course, I talk about it in Expert Secrets. I talk about it over and over again, it’s the concept of the Dream 100. The Dream 100 is key. Chet Holmes, who I learned it for, used that to sell advertizing in magazines. And also he used it to get his screen play written and published by Hollywood.

I’ve used it to generate affiliates. But the Dream 100 is also the key to SEO ranking, it’s also the key to Instagram influencers and it’s the key to YouTube, all these traffic strategies in Dream 100 are the key. Some of you guys are like, “Russell, no it’s not. It’s all about whatever….back linking, keywords.” But think about it. We hired Neil Patel to come do a training with us. We paid him $20 grand to come hang out for the day and kind of just look at our stuff and give us feedback on the SEO side. He said basically, “Blog every single day, you need to get links from the best sites, like Forbes and Ink and things like that.”

And the data service was $20-30 grand a month, but they get you some links from these high quality sites. And at first it was magic to me. I don’t know how to get a link from Forbes, that doesn’t make sense. Then we started working with Andrew O’Brien, who does our PR stuff, and that’s what he was doing. Getting links from all these sites. We’ve been written in Forbes a couple times now, and Entrepreneur and Ink and we’re getting these links back and we’re seeing rankings.

And what’s interesting though, I’ve been interviewed by all these different writers and sites, and I realized, they’re just people, just like all of us. And the Dream 100 works on people. So let’s just say I wanted to get ranked for whatever, instead of me going back and doing it all black hat link building and all that crap we used to back in the day that was really fun and automated, it was really fun. Not going to lie. But instead of that, what if you just build. Here’s the Dream 100 list on people’s site, that I want to write an article about me or let’s say you go to Huffington Post, here’s the Dream 100.

Because Huffington Post, Fox news, all these have tons of writers, so make your Dream 100 list of the writers who write those sites, and we focus on the Dream 100 towards them. To get them to write about us. Let’s say there’s a hundred writers, I do the Dream 100 strategy to the top 10, or 20. Doesn’t have to be 100 people. But the top 20 writers on Huffington Post or Forbes or whatever and we market to those people and those relationships with those people and all the stuff we talk about in the Dream 100 and I get those people to write articles. Now let’s say I get 10, 20, 30 articles written from Forbes, Ink, Entrepreneur, that will rank me for most major keywords. Who are the sites that are already ranking for our key words. Dream 100 those people and figure out how to get on those pages.

I don’t know what It’s called, but let’s say you type in internet marketing, I might not be able to get ranked number one in internet marketing, but who are those top 10 people, but let’s Dream 100 those people and become friends with them and maybe I can get a banner up on their site or a pop up, or email number one in their email sequence. You know a million other things. There’s so many ways to do it. The dream 100 is the key. It’s interesting.

It’s key there, in YouTube, let’s say you want to dominate YouTube. Okay, who’s my dream 100 there that already have visitors and eyeballs and what can I do to get to them. A good example, JP Sears, who I love his videos. He’s one of our Dream 100. We met him and paid him a little money to come to our event, made a video with him, and he shared that video we made of him telling his thing on his page and got a half a million views. Half a million people from one person on my Dream 100. On a Facebook and YouTube channel, that’s it.

It makes you think, it works everywhere. Instagram, I want to dominate Istagram, Twitter, wherever you’re at, who are the people that are already dominating? Dream 100 them, build relationships, rapport, buy ads, all those things. So we have a traffic meeting a little later on today and this is the topic of the traffic meeting, within my internal team, Dream 100. And we’re going to be doing SEO and YouTube are our two biggest. And basically YouTube is because we’re trying to….SEO started because we were trying to do better on SEO on our videos and then I kind of geeked out all weekend on it.

I don’t know about you but I’m a big fan of immersion. This is kind of my learning style. I’ll get excited about learning something and I’ll go deep really fast and don’t sleep for 3 or 4 days, which is what I did this week on SEO. I studied all the best people, going deep and trying to figure out what’s relevant, what’s not, how it changed, what’s the game, what are the tools, trying to get really cool pitch. That’s number one, immersion, number two for me is finding a mentor, so I found 2 or 3 people that are really good at SEO that are going to be mentoring me. That’s the game. Immersion, mentorship, domination, Dream 100.

So for you guys, some of you guys aren’t going to care about SEO or Instagram or whatever it is, but think about the channel you want to dominate and that’s the plan. Build a Dream 100 list, immerse yourself for a weekend and just geek out and figure out the strategy, get the lay of the land, find a mentor or two, and go deep.

So those who are in our Fill Your Funnel course, by the way, this is what you’re getting access to. This first month, we already know Facebook, I think as good if not better than anybody, so John who is my partner on, he’s going to be, he’s doing all the Facebook training, so that’s this first module. Then module two we’re going deep into YouTube, which will be next month. We’ll go and geek out on it. Then the next, my guess the month after, will be SEO because I’m kind of geeking out on it. Whatever I’m geeking out on at the time is what we’ll be bringing all the Fill Your Funnel people in on too. So it’s exciting.

So those that got on Fill Your Funnel at the Funnel Hacking Live event, you’re welcome. It’s going to be so much fun. Those who aren’t, we’ll probably open that up in the next month or two for those who haven’t. I want you guys all thinking about this. Get your creativity, how can we get creative to get traffic? What are the different ways? You will notice over the next three months, three months there’s two big focuses that I have in my company. Number one is acquisition and number two is retention. So we have a really cool retention strategy we’re building out that has to do with nude squirrels. That’s all you get right now, it’s awesome.

And then acquisition, you’re going to see a whole bunch of stuff from infomercials to viral websites, to viral videos, to social. I hope you guys are watching what I’m doing, because there’s a lot of cool stuff happening. It’s interesting, I was telling my team this yesterday, a lot of the strategy we’re doing now are things we did ten years ago that nobody does anymore. Since I’ve been around that long, I remember it. I remember we had success with it. These viral sites we used to do back in the day. I could get 100 thousand, 200 thousand members in 2 or 3 weeks and they’re amazing. And we’re going to do it again. You guys are going to love. So you will see it, but watch it, model it. Because this is Russell focusing my creativity on traffic and what’s going to happen.

So if you’re watching close and taking notes you’ll see what’s happening. Because right now Clickfunnels is 750th most business website in the world, and it’s actually way more than that, but if you’re using custom domains then obviously it doesn’t count towards traffic. That’s just people, it’s us driving traffic with Clickfunnels and people using Clickfunnels in their sub domain. I would say if we were to take all traffic coming through Clickfunnels, we’re probably in the top 300 most business websites in the world.

We’re about to turn up the heat a lot. It’s exciting. That’s all I got for you guys today. I just want you guys thinking about this traffic creativity. How do you focus your creativity on traffic. If you don’t know how to do that, just watch me and model what I’m doing over the next few months. You’ll see a lot of it hitting hard in the next three months, that’s my next phase. Anyway, that’s what I got you guys, appreciate you all. If you are listening on iTunes, please leave me a review, I would appreciate it. Even if your review is Russell talks too fast, that’s cool. But please leave a review. If you are on marketingsecrets.com watching this video anywhere else, please share the video it helps me to keep wanting to do these and spending time with you guys. Appreciate you all, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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Without this, what's the point of even trying?

On today's episode Russell talks about why you have to have faith in yourself first in order to be a true entrepreneur because nothing is guaranteed. Here are some of the interesting things in this episode:

Why Russell won't give a friend the answers to why his product isn't selling.
Why Russell believes that you have to take a leap of faith with your business first, in order for it to be successful.
And why Russell thinks life would be boring if everything were guaranteed to work out.

So listen below to find out why it's so important to take a leap of faith.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. If you are watching this at marketingsecrets.com, you can go watch the video of me showing you something cool, if you’re just listening on iTunes, that’s cool too. But if you go to marketingsecrets.com you can actually see what I’m going to show you guys.

Last week I did a podcast, or a couple of days ago, about planting seeds of doubt. I got all these people messaging me, “Russell, you’re so mean.” I was like I’m not trying to be mean with this. I’m trying to explain a really important marketing principle. So I want to show you guys something to prove this whole thing works. A lot of you guys know Steve Larsen, he sits next to me everyday building funnels. When he first started working for me, at the time I had a water filter machine, it was an Athena that we paid $3 grand for. I always loved it because it was this really cool thing, it filtered our water and did all this cool stuff.

Then he told me, “Well, if you’re using that brand, it actually doesn’t work, there’s only one brand that is any good.” And it’s the company he used to work for called Echo. I was like, “Really, why?” and he’s like, “They have this patent. Most water machines, the way they filter, after 5 or 6 filters it builds up all this residue and it starts working. This company has a patent where what they do, every time you turn it on, it pushes through and breaks off the stuff, so it keeps working.

Now I have no idea if that’s true. He may have made it up for all I know. But he planted a seed of doubt, and that seed of doubt became so big that my Athena water machine that I loved, in fact my kids called it magic water. Every single day we used to go and make magic water out of it. It is now sitting, as you see here, in my garage, in this big pile of water. We ripped it out of the wall, I actually cut the plug because it was hard to get to. It’s just sitting there now, I don’t know if it works. I have a seed of doubt.

Then I was going to get a Kong and he’s like, “And he’s like Kong can’t do it either. These guys are the only ones in the world that have a patent.” So because of that, guess what I have right over here. You’ll never guess. Yes, it is one of the Echo machines. Sorry it’s kind of a mess here in the laundry where we have it. Because my wife doesn’t think these look very good, and they are kind of ugly. But now, I come here and this is where I get all my water from, it’s the Echo machine.

Now again, I have no idea if it actually is better, could be worse for all I know. But he placed a seed of doubt that caused me to rip my old machine out and put a new one in and not go with other competitors. So the marketing principle is true, whether you’re doing that yourself or through other people. How can you place a seed of doubt. So there’s a follow up for yesterday for those who think I was mean. I’m not being mean guys, I’m just teaching good marketing principles. So that’s what I got.

Now I got one more thing I want to share with you guys. Because this is important and I think a lot of people struggle with this. It’s having faith before you take action. Entrepreneurs, for you to be successful, you have to have faith first. You don’t know that your product or service is going to work. If you had that guarantee, then everybody would do it. It’d be like, I’m guaranteed, in fact that’s why people go to school because they’re like, “I’m guaranteed to get a job.” Turns out you’re not, at least not a good job. But people, because they guarantee it, they do it.

Entrepreneurs should be about not guaranteeing. You have to have an idea and then you have to have faith in yourself. If you don’t have faith in yourself, then you’re not going to do it, and then you’re not going to have success, and then it all disappears. It all hinges on faith. It’s weird, I don’t know if you guys are religious or not, it doesn’t really matter to me for this thing, but religion’s the same way. We get the, we have to have faith first and we take that step forward and then the truth is manifested back to us. Like, “Oh, that thing you did was actually right.” But if you knew ahead of time, what’s the point? There’s no challenge, this whole life becomes really boring if there’s no faith. If you knew the answer to everything before you went into it, why would it seem to be fun, it wouldn’t. We’d be bored out of our minds.

I’m telling you this because I had a funny experience today that I wanted to illustrate becusae it kind of illustrates this, why a lot of people struggle because they don’t have faith first. They’re waiting for the perfect answer before they move. So there’s this guy, I’m not going to mention his name, he’s a cool. But three or four times over the last two years, he’s messaged me asking about my inner circle and he’s always like, “I’m going to join man.” And I’m like, “Cool, here’s where you apply.” And he’s like, “I have some questions first.” And he always asks a bunch of questions, he never applies. And this happened I think at least 3 maybe even 4 times in the last 2 years. I’m always like, “hey man, go to inner circle where I can work with you. I do my best coaching almost a million entrepreneurs, but I can’t talk to every person individually. I wish I could but I can’t.” I have a hundred people in inner circle that I’m voxing every single day on my phone, trying to keep up with them as well as running my own company and my family and my church and the scout group and everything else I’m doing. It’s insane.

I can’t help everybody, I wish I could. But the people I can help, they’re in the inner circle, that’s just how it works. So get in the inner circle and I can work deeper in your stuff. So he messaged me today, it’s kind of funny. He said, “Whatcha think?” and he showed me his funnel, “compliments of Clickfunnels.” And I was like, “Cool man, you got it done. It looks great.” And he said, “The problem is,” this is the best, “The problem is I can’t get it to sell for the life of me, when people try it, they’re hooked. But getting people to buy it out of the gate, no bueno.”

So I went back and decided to look a little closer. I kind of smiled, and I sent it to Steven Larsen as well, “Hey, what do you think about this funnel? I want to know in 3 seconds.” And in 3 seconds he was like boom, boom, boom. I was like, “Exactly, the very same one’s I saw as well.” And I was like, I could just tell him, but then he didn’t, he missed the whole point. So I came back and I said, I was trying to help him out. I was like, “I won’t give you the answer, because you didn’t join the Inner Circle the 3 times you asked me about it. Ha ha! But here’s a hint.” Then I gave him a link to a certain funnel and said, “The answer’s in this funnel.” And it is, everything he’s looking for is in that funnel. I mean it was a huge heads up, hopefully. We’ll see if he runs with it or not.

But I sent that and just kind of said it that way and he said, “Was my video wrong?” asked me if it was the video, “It’s not the video.” Although his video could use some help. He said, “The reason I didn’t join was because I didn’t think the Inner Circle could help me with my specific problem with …” and he named his product, “I didn’t want to just throw $25K at the wall, not knowing.” So I got that and started laughing. I laughed out loud and I read it to Steven and he laughed because first off, the inner circle is all about personalizing your problem. What is your problem? And you message me and I tell you the answer. So it’s the most personalized coaching program on planet earth for our industry.

So I don’t think it would help my specific problem, and I didn’t want to throw $25k at the wall, not knowing. So I didn’t want to have faith and just assume that you know what you’re talking about, seeing as you’ve helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, and you have all these people that pay you $25k a year and they renew every single year, because you keep helping them. 10 or so are all supplement companies, I didn’t know, I’m not going to pay you.

And then he said this, “After looking at “blank” if you have some big ideas on how to blow it up, you know the $25k would be chump change for investing in your help, then obviously that’s a no brainer.” So if I can come to him and say, “Hey man, I know exactly what it is. Give me $25k and I’ll tell you these things and I guarantee you’ll make more than that. Then he will do it. Then he will take a leap of faith when there’s no leap of faith to be made.

I’m just like, my goal was not to sell you on inner circle, my goal is not to tell you I know the secret, give me $25k and I’ll tell you. You missed the whole point. The goal, the point is that you have to have faith first. You have to….the mentors I have hired in my life, I didn’t know if they were going to be good. I looked at them, tried to do my research, saw other people they worked with and was just like, “Okay, I don’t know but I’m going to have faith and I’m going to take this step forward.” And then when you do it, you get rewarded for it.

Then I wrote back, “Sorry man, the inner circle is closed for now anyway, but the answer is in that funnel.” So hopefully he finds it. It’s there for him and again I don’t want to be a jerk. But I get so many people hitting me up, I can’t. If I could help them for free, I would because it’s so much fun. But it’s just interesting how people don’t want to take that faith. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to understand that’s the game, the whole entire thing. You have to have faith first, faith in your idea, the product, the process, the coaches, the mentors, all these different things. And you’re not going to know ahead of time. If you did, it’s not entrepreneurship, if you did, it’s no fun.

If somebody came to you and said, “This is the exact product and sales message.” Everything like that, and you did it and it worked, it’s like gambling. It’s cheating. It doesn’t count. It’s not real. It comes from the excitement and thrill, fun, and satisfaction. Everything comes from the success of it.

I remember when I started wrestling, another friend that wrestled, we both started at the same time. It was interesting because after a year he quit, I didn’t. Within three years I won the state title. I remember after I won the state title, he told me, “Oh man, I could have won the state title too, but I just didn’t want to put in the effort.” And I was like, “Are you kidding me? You don’t know what I went through the last three years to get that, to earn that.” If I would have known up front, I was guaranteed to get the state title, it would not have been any fun. I would have been like, “Oh, what’s the point then? If I’m guaranteed to get a state title if I do it, then why would I even do it?” You know what I mean?

The not knowing is what makes it great. The fear of failure is what makes the success so great. If you don’t have that, can you imagine what life would be like? Can you imagine how boring it would be? Every single day you wake and know there’s no chance of failure, so you just….I can’t even imagine. I would……

So my message for you guys today, as entrepreneurs, is that you have to understand that it takes the faith first. You have the faith to take the step and then you’re rewarded. Sometimes we put our faith in the wrong things, which is understandable, and we fall off something and it doesn’t work, or we hire someone and they don’t work out. But you shouldn’t lose faith in all things. You may have got the wrong mentor, the wrong person. But keep putting faith in, people, ideas, products because one of them will work. They don’t all work, and that’s okay. But they will if you do that first.

Anyway, you gotta have faith, as George Michael would say. That’s all I got you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and we’ll see you guys tomorrow. Bye everybody.

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A cool underground way to overcome your competitors.

On today's episode Russell talks about planting seeds of doubt about his competitors in the minds of potential customers.He explains how he does it, and why it makes it not a matter of if they become Clickfunnels customers, but when. Here are some interesting things in this episode:

Why it's okay to attack your competitors as long as they are number one and you are number two,but not okay once you become number one.
How you can plant seeds of doubt so that eventually you will get the customer.
And how all of that is similar to how people compete in sports.

So listen below to learn how to plant seeds of doubt about your competitors so you can eventually win over the customer.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell, welcome to Marketing Secrets. Today, I got a really cool episode for you guys, I think, hopefully. It’s something that, there’s a lot of things that we’re doing that people can see and they’re aware of. And there’s things happening that people aren’t aware of. So I just to lift the curtain a little bit, so you guys can see my ideas.

Part of the time you’re selling to try to sell your products and services. You’re selling why it’s good and why it’s amazing and stuff like that. It’s funny, on Facebook I saw an interesting thread the other day of someone being like, “Should I attack my competitors, or should I not talk about them at all?” And it’s one of those things that it’s interesting watching the whole conversation because some people are like, “Don’t address your customers. If you’ve got the best product don’t talk about them.” And all these different things and strategies and obviously you guys know that I talk about my competitors and we tease and poke at them and have fun with it.

In fact, earlier today Steven may or may not have launched a new video game where you can actually compete against, you have to defeat Confusion Soft to be able to fight against Low Key Pages and the Drip Armies. It’s pretty awesome. Why would we do something like that?

It’s interesting, first off it’s funny and that helps me get through the day because there’s a lot of stuff we’ve got to do, so you might as well make the day fun. Second off, if you look at marketing as a whole, marketing strategy, because this is a big deal. But if you think about it, and there’s been a bunch of books written on this, so if you want to study deeper, you should because it’s interesting. But I think Differentiate or Die is one of the books that talked about this, I believe. But what they talk about is in your marketplace, that number two always needs to attack number one.

So Pepsi always attacks Coke. But number one cannot acknowledge number two or else it jacks up the whole thing. So Coke never talks about how to beat Pepsi. Have you ever noticed that? But Pepsi is always talking about Coke. Mac versus PC, when they first came out. Mac was number two and they were attacking PC, all the funny commercials we all remember. As soon as they surpassed, notice those commercials disappeared and they stopped talking about it.

So there’s something about that, and maybe it’s the athlete in me, I’m a big believer in if I’m going to beat somebody I need to find that person, identify them, and let the world know this is who we’re going after and this is who we’re going to beat. And then after we pass them and then we stop talking about it. That’s why we don’t talk about Low Key pages very often anymore, because we passed them, as you guys know. But Infusion Soft is obviously the next target that we’re trying to get bigger than.

We have more customers right now, but I think their revenue is higher right now. Because they charge more for their confusing software. But that’s another story so that’s the thing. So for me, I don’t mind acknowledging number one, because we are gaining on them, that’s the plan, that’s how it works. So I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t think its…..it’s just how business is done, it’s how sports are done, it’s how athletics are done. In fact, if you guys want something fun, scroll down the feed, back before we changed the name of this to Marketing Secrets. When it was Marketing In Your Car, I did a whole episode on athletes and competition. It was pretty funny, I thought. So you guys should go listen to that.

But I talk about the fact that in this business world, who are you competing against? People that you’re competing against? I talk about, I was a wrestler growing up, so my whole life was competition. Who’s the person ahead of me. Literally, my junior year, my first match I lost to a kid that was returning state champ. So I knew that’s who he is, so I studied everything he did for the entire season. We practiced against him, we got better and better and I actually made it to state finals and I beat him.

And that’s the athletic mentality. We’re all about competition. And then in the business world, half the people getting into business don’t have athletic background. They were in Band or choir, things like that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you’re in the choir there’s no competition. You’re just hanging out and singing with each other. Maybe there’s competition like first seat or second seat, a little bit but it’s different. A lot of times, we get in this playground and we’re now competing in business and you’ve got people that were in band and choir and all sorts of things and then you’ve got someone like me who’s entire life was about finding your competitor and destroying him publically in front of everybody so you can get your hand raised and everybody cheers for you. You have to be aware, that’s who you’re competing against. So you can’t be mad, “Oh they’re calling me out by name. They’re competing with me.”

It’s like, “Dude, you’re competing against a wrestler who’s whole entire life, that’s all he cared about. Of course that’s going to be my goal, that’s how I’m going to go.

Anyway, there’s a whole podcast about it. There’s some background about what we’re talking about. But what I wanted to talk to you guys about, is this concept that we call seeds of doubt. What are seeds of doubt? These are things that if you watch what I do you’ll see me placing all the time, these little seeds of doubt in the competitors. Because I know a lot of times I’m going to talk about something and I know that somebody is using confusion soft, or their using Lead pages or whatever the thing is and they’re using something else and I’m coming in and they’re looking at me like, “We have all our stuff over here, I can’t shift over.”

So I understand that, so instead of me just trying to convince them, hard sell them, I’m just going to place a whole bunch of seeds of doubt. From that moment forward for the rest of their waking hours, and hopefully their sleeping hours too, if I did it right. They’re going to be thinking about that thing, that seed of doubt, about the thing that they’re using. And it’s always kind of running in their head like, “What if, what if, what if.”

If you were at Funnel Hacking Live, I did a whole presentation. In fact, if you go to followupfunnels.com you can see that presentation. But I talked about Actionetics and where we’re going, and stuff like that. And throughout that presentation, I’m placing a whole bunch of seeds of doubt of our competitors. I talk about if you’re using email marketing, I talk about how many times I got shut down by Awebber, Icontent, Mailchimp, InfusionSoft, all those things. And even if you love those systems, all the sudden now you’re like, “Wow, Russell has been shut down 9 times by Awebber.” All these things I got shut down by. All those seeds of doubt, like, “Everything is good, but what if they did shut me down.” Now that seed of doubt is there and now you’re paranoid. Now the whole time you’re using your thing, You’re wondering, “What if I get shut down? What if I get shut down?” Most of you guys probably will at some point, it’s not like I’m doing this maliciously, it’s the truth.

It happened to me over and over again, but I’m placing that seed of doubt so people are aware of it. I just purchased a product from somebody who was using an Infusion Soft order form, and I filled out my whole credit card information and it took me 7 steps. 7 steps after the credit card was in, 7 clicks, sorry, 7 clicks to give them the money. I wanted them to take my money, but it took 7 more clicks to actually give them money. I was annoyed by that, but instead of being annoyed by it, I talked about it. I’m talking about it right now, by the way. I’m talking about it in different platforms I’m on. I’ve just mentioned, “I tried to buy this thing from somebody who used an Infusion Soft order form. 7 clicks, most people would have left. If I didn’t want the product so bad, I would have left.”

Every click in your sales process, you lose a percentage of people. So my whole mindset is how do we shorten the distance. I want to make sure there’s as few clicks as possible to get someone from where they’re starting to where I want them to end. Because every click you lose somebody. Just after, between me getting the credit card, typing it in and submitting, there were 7 clicks. So that’s what you’re getting when you’re using Infusion Soft.

So I just placed a seed of doubt because you’re like, “How many clicks are in my order form? Crap. Well, that’s the standard. You have to when I’m using that system.” And then you start wondering, “This whole time, what if I’m losing sales and money?” and that thought will keep pecking away at your mind. Keep thinking and keep sitting there and the seed of doubt, eventually will sprout to the point where you’re like, “I’m losing a lot of money. It’s time to make the shift, to do the right thing.”

That’s my whole goal. Because I know not everyone’s going to sign up today, but they’re going to sign up eventually. I always tell everybody, it’s not a matter of if you’re going to become a member of Clickfunnels, it’s when. My goal is like, it’s not right now, I need to place the seeds of doubt so that throughout your system, you’re always thinking about me coming and doing that thing, and when is it going to happen and how is it going to happen and things like that?

That’s kind of the concept of seeds of doubt. So as you’re doing your marketing, again it’s not just like, I know some of you guys will be like, “Russell, where do I pace my seed of doubt.” No, it’s not like…..it’s like you’re sprinkling that in as you’re doing stuff, Snap Chat, Instagram, your podcast or videos. Whatever it is, wherever you’re at, you’re just sprinkling your seeds of doubt against your competitors and making those things known. So people aware, like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that was a thing.” I want to make sure those things are out there and people are aware of them.

So that’s the concept and it’s a really good thing. In fact, in wrestling we would do the same kind of things with our opponents. We’d go to a tournament and during weigh ins you’d see who were in your weight class and stuff and it’s always kind of a mental game because you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, that guy looks bigger than me.” All those kind of things, so it’s like, how do you place seeds of doubt? A lot of times it has to do with your confidence, like how you shake the person’s hand. All those kind of things because in sports, and business and most things, honestly, it’s a lot less of the physical, and a lot more of the mental.

It’s funny, when I started doing Jui Jitsu, I’m not a Jui Jitsu guy, I’m a wrestler, and I started doing Jui Jitsu. And it’s funny because I think it was my 2nd or 3rd tournament I went to, I went out and I’m up a weight class, because I was kind of overweight at the time, so I’m up at almost heavy weights, so these are big dudes that I’m going against. Most of them did Jui Jitsu for a couple of years and their blue belts and I think it’s brown after that, whatever. I’m just, I just came in, didn’t have any belt at all, no gi, you don’t actually have to have a belt.

So I came out there, so when I went out there I was like, these guys are going to kill me. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I was like, because of that, I have to place seeds of doubt in their mind that they’re going to be able to beat me fast, otherwise I’m going to be choked out and tapped out really quick. So what I did, is my very first match, because everyone’s, your weight class, everyone is sitting close to each other on the mat. So I came out and I’m like, I’m a jui Jitsu guy, but I’m a wrestler, I gotta scare this first guys.

So I came out, and instead of coming out and doing the Jui Jitsu thing, I came out like a wrestler and started running and pounding on his head, boom, boom. Pushing and pushing and knocked the dude over and he falls out of bounds and he gets up and you see, I placed the seed the doubt and his eyes were just like “Oh crap” and he walks back in the circle. And from that point, it was like everything shifted. His whole countenance, he was nervous and awkward and after that he was easy. It was wrestling a little soft puppy. It was so easy after that.

What was cool is that all the other guys sitting on the mat, they saw that as well and they were looking in and they were like, “Oh my gosh.” I rolled him, that’s what they call it in Jui Jitsu, I rolled the other guys. I came out there, and it was funny because as soon as I came out there I could see it in their eyes. All of them started backing up because they didn’t want me to rush, they didn’t want that pressure that I was bringing and you could see it in their eyes and that just spurred me more. But that seed of doubt was set. All these guys who were bigger, stronger, faster and better at Jui Jitsu and probably should have beat me if they would have had the mental belief that they could, they didn’t because they had the seed of doubt and they were like, “I don’t know what to do.” And that’s all it takes.

I hope that helps you guys. It’s kind of fun. Think about how you can do that in communication with your audience. I hope that helps and that’s all I got for you guys today. Thanks so much for everything you guys. Tonight we’re actually launching Funnel Hacker TV the tv show. So if you go to funnelhacker.tv you can see behind the scenes show, I think I got 8 episodes of that right now, and tonight we’re having the first full, I’m not sure what we’re going to call it yet, full documentary or whatever. And then some other cool things when you go to that. Go to funnelhacker.tv and check that out. You’ll notice at the top there’s some cool tabs. One takes you to Marketing Secrets, which is this podcast. One takes you to the blog. I’ll share with you guys the strategy behind that in the near future, but I think it’s pretty cool.

That’s all I got you guys, thanks so much for everything and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

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The secret from going from zero to a million dollars is all about identifying what it is you’re selling and how you’re selling it.

On this episode Russell talks about being able to have the “What” you’re selling and “How” you’re selling it, to be able to go from $0 to $1 million. Here are some of the awesome things Russell talks about in today’s episode:

Why you need to be doing a webinar weekly that you can tweak and change to be able to figure out what you should be selling and how you should be selling it.
How to use your creativity as an entrepreneur to change things to what your customers want.
And why once you have figured out the “what” and “how”, making a million dollars will be fast and easy.

So listen below to find out why figuring out the “what” to sell and “how” to sell it can take you from 1 to 7 figures a year.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you guys to Marketing Secrets. I hope you guys are having an amazing day today. It’s beautiful out here. I came out this morning and I hear the birds chirping, I was chasing ducks around and having a good time. I think I’m getting a little bit of a cold too, so I apologize. My nose sounds a little funny.

Today’s an exciting day because we have a FHAT event, which means I think we have 40 people coming to this event. So probably 2/3rds are my Inner Circle members, which is always fun for me. And 1/3rd of them are people who are coming, who decided at the Funnel Hacking Event…..all of our events are called the same thing, Funnel Hacking Live. Anyway, so Funnel Hacking Live.

It’ s going to be a fun 3 days. The first FHAT event, I did the whole thing myself, this time we’ll be transitioning. I’ll be doing about a third of it, a little more than a third of it. Steven is going to be doing the rest, it’s going to be fun to start seeing him take over the reins on this thing and start running with it as I’m working on some other cool things. I’m excited for this week, it’s going to be a fun one.

Also we’re making, a couple of other things, Funnel Hacker TV is going live this week. We’ve been doing a behind the scenes show for 6 episodes, so today 7 will come out. Wednesday episode number 8 will come out. Thursday we’re going to do a grand big opening for the big show, which is kind of cool.

Kevin who has been doing the behind the scenes show is actually going to be in Boise today, he’s coming to the FHAT event, so I had a chance to meet him which is really cool. Then Brandon Fischer, who’s done Funnel Hacker TV, he’s finishing up a bunch of episodes, so we’re going to start to launch that this week. Which will be cool because we just got done with book launch which means the pro’s and the cons, it’s been fun because we’re selling a lot of books and doing stuff, but it’s also kind of annoying because you’re always selling stuff. So the next few months I’m just going to give back and just be giving cool content.

We also figured out last week, this really cool way to put together the Dotcom, or the Russell Brunson Blog, plus the Marketing Secrets podcast that you’re hanging out with me right now. As well as what’s the 3rd piece of this, oh Funnel Hacker TV. So probably in a day or so, if you go to any of those domains, russellbrunson.com, funnelhacker.tv or marketingsecrets.com, you’ll get to see all 3 blogs can hook together, all in their own different journeys. It’s going to be cool that way, it’ll be faster. After you discover me and find stuff to come back be able to start diving deep into all the different things we’re publishing, so really excited for that.

I don’t even know what the best thing to share with you guys is this morning. So many cool things that we could talk about. This last week has been so cool. We’re getting pulled into some really cool things and I’m grateful for it, and I’m sure I’ll be sharing and documenting a lot of the process with you guys here, over the next few weeks, which is pretty cool.

I think the coolest thing to talk about today is, I talked about this last week during, there’s a big product launch. We spent the first 3, or 4 weeks launching the book, sold I think we’re at 56,000 copies of the book now. 54,000, something like that, which is insanely cool. And at the end of it we did this cool 7 day launch, where I basically got up on stage and I taught for 3 hours a day for 3 days, so 9 hours and it was kind of cool. Because it was….as soon as you finish a book and send it to the publisher, it’s done and out of your hands. You can jack with it or mess with it anymore. And there’s other things I wanted to add to it, looking back now.

I’m like, “Dangit, I wish I would have done this…” You know how it is. But I wasn’t allowed or able to. So it was kind of cool because those three days I got a chance to teach stuff that I wish was….that was in the book but I wanted to go deeper on. You know, stuff like that. The master Class was cool but we kind of modeled Brendon Burchard’s 7 day launch. So basically each day we show it, it would be up for 24 hours then pull it down. Show the next one and then pull it down. Show the next one and pull it down. And in the middle we made an offer, so we launched our 2 comma club coaching, which is really cool. We sold a lot of those, and then we closed it down last night at midnight. Actually I passed out, so I woke up this morning and shut it down.

I’m kind of glad I passed out because we made an extra…a lot, from the time I passed out until, we were supposed to shut it down to the time I shut it down early this morning. It was pretty cool. I hope you guys watched that process.

One of the things I talked about in there, and I’ve shared with a lot of the Inner Circle members as well. What’s the process, what are the phases in business? It’s interesting, I read books before that talk about this, but more from a business standpoint. So how to go from 1 to a million, a million to ten, ten to fifty, and fifty to a hundred. They always talk about management teams and who do you hire and all that kind of stuff, which is all good. But I’m more interested from a marketing standpoint because it changes as well. What are those different phases, how do they go?

It was kind of cool, I taught that. So I showed to go from 1 to 7 figures a year is all about figuring out what it is you’re selling and how you’re selling it. Which is funny because most businesses never make it past a million bucks a year. It’s because they don’t know what they’re selling or how to sell it. They know what they’re selling, but they don’t know what customers want. So I call this the what and how phase. What is it you’re selling and how are you selling it?

During this time for you, as an entrepreneur, is essentially being creative. Making different things, ideas, products, businesses, offers. You’re doing a lot of stuff until you figure it out. Until you figure it out, I’m honestly like, one the things, the products, business or offer, one of them will hit and you’ll be like, “ah, this is what people want. Sweet. I got the what now. I know exactly what they want, I know how to sell it.” And then from there, that’s what I always tell our people. Focus on, create a webinar, just sell your product and then you just keep doing it week in and week out and in that time, you’re shifting the product, shifting the services, making changes. Whatever it is.

As soon as you figure that out, then boom you can start scaling it. You transition to phase number two which is going from a million to ten million. And during this time, it’s funny because I was always, I think I always fought this phase, because my fear of, I had so much fun in the creative part, of creating businesses and offers and things like that. I was afraid I was going to lose that if I started focusing on one business. It’s funny. Which I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. They fear subconsciously or consciously.. I know I feared that, and as soon as I realized it’s a creativity switch, I’m switching my creativity from launching new businesses and offers to this is my business now. I figured out the what and how, now I’m going to be focusing on how I’m going to use my creativity to make new offers and bring people in. Or how can I sell people on the back. If you’re really focused on the 3 phases to grow a business. Acquisition funnels, ascension funnels and monetization funnels. And that’s kind of the next phase.

And the 3rd phase, after you get that figured out, is you switch your creativity from new offers to….actually switch your creativity to traffic. It’s been fun because that’s kind of where I’m at. In fact, last week we had a meeting with our traffic team and I told them all, “This is now my focus, here.” We had enough offers, all the pieces are in place now for our company and we’re racing to 7, 8, 9….9 figures a year. The sprinklers are coming on. I hope I don’t get soaked. I’m outside. For those who are listening, I’m outside in my backyard, that’s why you can hear all the birds chirping.

Anyway, so I’m transitioning my focus to the traffic side. And the coolest thing about the traffic side, it doesn’t take you the entrepreneur as much. The creativity in businesses and offers is entrepreneur driven. The creativity in front end offers and back end offers is usually entrepreneur driven. The creativity in traffic a lot of times can be driven by other people, which is kind of cool. So for me, just because I’m excited I’m transitioning this phase where hopefully I’ll be able to take the foot off the creative gas and focus on the traffic stuff.

Anyway, I guess what I really wanted to share with you guys today is because I went through this again last week. We launched the 2 comma club coaching which we shut down this morning. And we shut it down, just the coaching piece of it, did just shy of 1 million, but with the rebuild we’ll pass a million. It’s cool because I figured out the what and how but I did it over a 4 day period of time. A lot of people will spend years, 2 years, 3 years.

So we started doing it and part of it, you feel. So I do the 7 day launch and I’m doing the training and it’s working, I could feel it. Okay, it’s good. Number two I did the training, but I actually did a webinar and as I did a webinar, because it’s kind of a cool thing, a teach webinar, so I showed the webinar. And the webinar happened to be pitching the thing that I was going to be selling at the end of this thing. So people had to watch me pitching them. As I was doing it, instantly I could feel, I don’t know about you, but you can feel like, “Ahhh, I did this wrong. There’s parts I did wrong.”

So I’m super aware of that so the next day I came back and I had this cool opportunity to kind of re-teach, or to show what I did in the webinar and because I was aware of it, I was like, “These are the parts that I messed up on. This is what I should have done different. When I do it in the future this is how I’ll tweak things.” And I kind of walked the audience through that, and then I was able to go back through my close again as I’m showing, teaching how to do closes and kind of re-close people.

And that day, sales started going crazy so I was like, “Cool, I figured out the how.” I’ve been kind of figuring out the what and then the how. And then that day, after we got done I was like, “Wait a minute, I think my pricing is wrong on this.” There was something weird in my gut. I just….it was the weirdest thing because I got done with the presentation and I wasn’t tired, but I felt bummed out because I didn’t quite do it right. So the third day after the whole thing was done, we sat there for like an hour talking about pricing and things like that. All the sudden I shifted and I was like, “Yes, this is the right pricing strategy.”

So we shifted it and it doesn’t really matter for you, because going through the details of the pricing strategy because that’s less important…..as much as important as, as I was doing this offer live in front of everybody for 4 or 5 or 6…when we add urgency and scarcity, it’s about 6 days from beginning to end. The whole time on the fly I was shifting things. I shifted the presentation. I shifted the offer, the price point, shift, shift, shift and all the sudden we found the sweet spot. “Yes, this is it.” And it started just going crazy.

So I’m telling everybody, what I’m telling you guys, do a webinar a week, every single week. And every single week you’re making shifts and changes. Just because, it’s not saying do the exact same webinar every single week without changing it. No, do it and then you’re like, “Okay, what was wrong? My pricing?” and you’re shifting over and over and over again and what will happen, typically for most people, the first time it’s taking them 3 or 4 weeks, maybe a month or two months of shifting and changing, shifting and changing until boom, you hit it. You figure out, this is the what and how. As soon as you figure out the what and how, boom it blows up.

But we’re able to do that live in a 6 to 8 period of time because we’re getting traffic, we’re doing stuff’s happening. We’re able to shift things fast. The better you get, the faster you get at identifying and figuring out the what and how. What you’re selling and how you’re selling it.

Because I honestly think as soon as you figure out those two things, what you are selling and how you are selling it, the what and how, I think a million dollars is fast and easy and simple. But most people never get past that. So it comes out into you throwing an offer out there, trying it and it fails. Trying it and it fails. Trying it and it fails. It’s a little better and you do it and do it and do it until all the sudden, boom, boom it hits. And you hit the right what and how and when you got that, then it just takes off.

Anyway, I hope that helps you guys, because it happened to me this weekend and we did it and shifted things in the middle of creation and that’s we’re able to close out the week so strong. Anyway, there you go you guys. The what and the how, figure that out. What are you selling and how are you selling it. You focus on that.

You know when you hit it because you’ll be able to almost instantly scale to a million bucks. Honestly. That’s how you know when you hit. Then as soon as you figure that, you hit a million, then you transition to the next phase. But for a lot of you guys, that’s the phase you’re in right now, so think about that. What are you selling, how are you selling it? Because let’s say you figure out the right product, but you don’t have the right selling mechanism, then you’re screwed right. It comes down to really identifying what are you selling. Sometimes you have really good selling mechanisms, I have a webinar, it converts, but my product sucks and it’s not growing.

You’re confused, you’re like, “It’s not growing. Why can’t I scale this thing?” It’s because you got the wrong product. You got the right selling system but the wrong product, so you gotta fix those things.

Anyway, that’s all I got you guys. With that said, I’m going to go in and get ready for the day, FHAT event’s starting. I’m going to wake up my kids, I’m excited. Appreciate you all and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

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I had a huge shift in my thinking about email marketing this weekend… let me show you how it works.

On today's episode Russell talks about how he plans to use email as an amplifier in the future for Facebook Live videos in order to get more clicks. Here are some of the awesome things he talks about in this episode:

What he has learned from watching Gary Vaynerchuk and how he's implementing it into his own stuff.
Why it's important to master all the social media platforms available.
And how he plans to use email and Facebook Messenger as an amplifier to be able to get more views and clicks per video he puts up on Facebook.

So listen below to find out what Russell thinks is in the future for email, that will make having a large list even better. ---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing Secrets, episode number 2. It’s going to take me a while to get used to saying Marketing Secrets as opposed to Marketing In Your Car. But I’m glad you’re here, glad we’re hanging out. I hope you guys enjoyed episode number 1 yesterday.

A lot of crazy stuff has been happening over here. As you know we finished, well we’re still in the last week of our book launch, but I’ve kind of moved on to the next funnel in the process, which is fun. But we just passed 50,000 books officially sold or 51,000 actually this morning, which is cool. Or this evening, it’s night time here, I’m actually in the office and not in the car like normal.

It has been really cool. This week we’re doing what we call a 7 day launch. It’s a new process I learned from Brendon Burchard. I’m trying it out, it’s the first time we’ve done it and it’s fun. I’ve been funnel hacking him, he did this 3 or 4 times. Funnel hacked him and got the swipe files and a whole bunch of things and we’re testing it out. So day number one happened today, some of you guys saw that. We basically sent out promotions for it and basically I sat in the conference room and taught and trained for 3 hours live. And for 3 hours for the next 2 more days, so 3 days in a row. And then tomorrow, I’m actually going to be doing a presentation where I’m going to be selling our Two Comma Club coaching. If I execute right hopefully this whole thing will go well and people will….good stuff will happen. We’ll see what all the details all pan out. But it’s a really cool way.

It’s a cool way to sell something but also give it insane amounts of value along the way, build tons of reciprocity and people will love you more, which is what marketing is all about. So it’s fun, I’m excited for it and if you guys are not watching it, go to expertsecretsmasterclass.com, you can see the process in action.

Anyway, what I want to talk to you right now is, I’ve been totally geeking out on Gary Vaynerchuk the last few days. A couple reasons why, I think the biggest reason why is I’m noticing that, especially as we did, when we launched the book we did a virtual book tour and I started doing Facebook Live’s to all the different people’s audiences. It’s interesting because some people’s audiences were really bad. A lot more than I thought. And some audiences were insanely good. And I started watching who are the people that are doing this game right.

And I started looking at that and just trying to get a really clear picture, and it’s interesting because I’ve seen, there’s people that are good at different channels. Some people are good at Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, just different channels. And the only person I see who’s good at all of them consistently across the board is Gary Vaynerchuk, so I’ve been watching him. And not just from a learning, but from a watching standpoint, what he’s doing on every single platform. Gall, he’s the only person I know that I can see, find that’s just really dialed in on all of them.

I know it’s happening in other markets, I just don’t follow the other markets, where he’s got it working in all cylinders in all these different spaces. Again, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Podcasts. Anyway, across the core channels, he’s there. I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago about this. About how he kind of mentioned one of the things I listened to, your phone right here is the equivalent of the TV in the 1950’s. There were only 3 or 4 channels back then and the people who were on those channels dominated. And today it’s kind of the same thing, right now your phone has got 3 or 4 apps that people use to get all their social communication.

That’s the majority, 90% of everything happening on their cell phone, outside of games, is happening there. It’s interesting, as I’ve been learning about it, I’ve been watching him as he’s been dominating each of these channels. How can I do that. It’s funny, I’ve had a lot of people like, “Russell, I cannot keep up with your content. I don’t know how you’re doing it. You’re doing podcasts and YouTube, and Facebook Live’s and this and that. All these different things.” And it’s because I’m trying to do the same thing, I want to be so in every single channel that wherever you go you’re seeing it. I want to be relevant because it’s been interesting, the last year and a half, 2 years or so, so many of my friends who focused on the market we’ve been doing for the last 10 years have become irrelevant.

As I tried to do Facebook Lives with their audience I was like, “Dang, they’re not relevant.” And it’s interesting. If you asked me my opinion before this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and this is a big mind shift, and I hope that this gives you a mind shift. It totally gave me one. I don’t want, as I tell you this, I don’t want anyone to discount and be like, “Oh Marketing is dead.” Because that’s not what I’m saying by any stretch of the imagination. Email is still hyper important and will continue to be important because it’s…..a lot of reasons.

When I got started my first mentor Mark Joyner was like, “Build a list, build a list, build a list.” And it saved me. I built a list of over a million entrepreneurs and it’s been the good times and bad times. During the good times, it helps amplify things. In the bad times it helps save your butt. It saved me from bankruptcy twice that I can remember, there’s probably more. But it’s like, that was the key, giving you your own distribution channel where you can get messages out to people.

And I would say for the last, I don’t know when email was invented, but from then until probably the last year or so it was king. It was the most important thing. And again, I’m nervous to get into this podcast, because I want no one to be like, “cool, I don’t have to write emails anymore.” No, you have to focus on email. If you read the, I don’t have any here in front of me, the Dotcom Secrets book, I had it in the conference room today. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book I talked about three types of traffic. Traffic that you control, traffic you don’t control, and traffic that you own.

So traffic you control, Zuckerberg owns Facebook, he owns Facebook traffic. He owns it, but I can go and buy an ad, I can control and send it somewhere. Same thing with YouTube, it’s owned by someone. People own these channels, so I don’t own that traffic, but I can control it, I can buy it and push it somewhere. When I push an ad somewhere I want to push it somewhere where the traffic transitions from traffic that I’m controlling into traffic that I own.

So for me, for the last 10 years it was 100% like, send all that traffic to an email list because then they join your email list and they’re on your list now and you’ve got them. I still believe that. Again, don’t think I’m taking away email, I’m not. It’s still the key, it’s still the best way I think, to transition from traffic you own from traffic you don’t own. Then there’s traffic you don’t control. That’s like SEO,PR and all this stuff is happening. We had a blog, or an article today actually posted, if you guys are reading Forbes. I wonder if I can find the headline really quick. It made me feel really good, in fact I sent it to my parents and they are all excited, which made me even more happy. So the title of the headline was, “This entrepreneur built a $360 million SAAS business that was entirely self funded.” There you go, there’s the headline for those who are watching the video feed over on YouTube.

So it was awesome. But the article happened and I can’t control that stuff. Traffic is coming in from different places and I can’t control. So I need to somehow catch it. Hopefully I’m capturing it and putting it in places where I can get their email and control that traffic and I can send it places.

So there’s my beliefs. The core foundation has not changed. It’s still traffic you control, traffic you don’t control, all siphoning into some type of traffic you do control. Control doesn’t only mean an email list though. I still think email is one of the best, and the reason is because if you have email, I can send an email and it directly goes to people. But here’s the negative side to email. You send an email, it goes to somebody and then it dies. Send the email, it goes to someone, it dies.

So the channel is powerful, but that’s the downside. Then you’ve got all these filters and promotion tabs, all this crap that you’re just always fighting against as well. So it becomes less and less effective. But I still, let’s say I send an email out to my list, I have over a million entrepreneurs that come through our list, I don’t know the exact number as of today, how many are active. It’s not a million, but it’s close to that. If you look at when I send the email out, I might get I don’t know, 30-40,000 people to open the email and from that I might get 10,000 clicks, which is a good email.

In fact, I should probably look at exact numbers, it’s been a while. But something like that. If I get 10,000 clicks in an email, that’s awesome. I remember back in the day my goal, if I could get between 3-5,000 clicks per email I was celebrating, which is awesome. Now I want to put some things in perspective, because that’s still good. But understanding the power of emails. I click a button and it goes to someone’s inbox and I can get clicks fast. The downside is it’s there and it disappears. And the life span of that is very, very short. It’s finite, it will last a few hours and then it’s buried and gone.

Now I want to put this into perspective, if you go back and look at the book launch for Expert Secrets that we just finished. I did a whole bunch of Facebook Lives and from that, I wonder if I have the stats here in front of me, for those who are not watching, I’m at the office. I don’t have my….let’s see if I can find…..alright it says here on Skype, so I will pull this up. This is as of a week and a half ago, so it’s even more now. But it’s kind of cool.

So from the Facebook Lives that we did, our reach was 5,679,718 people. So that’s the equivalent of an open rate in email. So that means that they saw me and they opened up the email and saw me. It’s not as good as an email open, for a grand I’ll take that, but 5.6 million people saw my face in the newsfeed being interviewed by someone about the book. Crazy. I don’t know how much, I’d have to be on CNN 5or 6 times is my guess, to get that many people to see it as they’re flipping channels.

From that 3.15 million people actually clicked play or sat there and watched some of the video. Over 3 million people watched it. From that we got 40,000 reactions, people clicking on a like or dislike, or a thumb or whatever. And 3,696 shared it. It’s interesting, I was looking at that and the cool thing is all those assets we created are there forever. We’re running ads to all of them that are so profitable consistently and they’re running and running and the lifespan of these is a long time. 6 months, a year, they can go on forever.

I’m putting videos on YouTube now, if you’ve been watching funnelhacker.tv I’m posting these videos and what’s cool is the video gets put there and it has this long tail. Episode one of Funnel Hacker TV is up to like 14 or 15,000 views. Number two is at 13,000. And it’s like they’re all getting the things like, they’re there and they keep growing and growing. Episode one of Funnel Hacker TV, my guess in the next year or two years that thing is going to have a million, a million and a half, two million views on it.

I’ve done videos on Facebook that have multiple millions of views. For me to get a million clicks on email, that’s going to take me an entire year to get a million clicks. So I started thinking, and then again, they’re all different. Every channel is different. You got email, Facebook Live, YouTube, Instagram, I’m learning all these platforms and trying to really understand them. What I’m seeing is if I use my email a little differently than I have been using it. I’ve been using my email in the past to sell. And I still think you should use it to sell, but differently. I’m not sure exactly, I can’t even give you some of my brainstorms off the top of my head, I don’t know how it’s going to all pan out.

But I feel like, in the past what we would do is have long email sessions pushing people through a funnel and all sorts of things, but I feel like I want to shorten that. And we were talking about here internally in the office calling it 48 hour funnels. Someone comes in and we have urgency and scarcity quick. There’s 48 hours from the time they opt in til the time that offer expires. We can use deadline funnels with Clickfunnels at the beginning and done. And then it’s over and from there you push them back into our, and if you read the Dotcom Secrets book, I have my soap opera sequences and my Seinfeld.

So my soap operas in the past were long sequences pushing them throughout a funnel, now I’m just going to compress that to a weekend marathon, a 48 hour marathon, instead of a soap opera sequence. Still kind of two or three emails really quick when they opt in, specific to that thing. Then we dump them back to my Sienfeld list, and my Seinfeld list, the goal of that in my mind right now, and I havne’t quite perfected this or figured it out, but what’s going on is the goal of email now for me, outside of the 48 hours to convert and cause urgency and scarcity and open and close an offer, is to promote content.

It’s interesting, If I post a video on YouTube, and I post there nothing, it kind of sits there. I can buy some ads, it’s slow. But if I start it, and I start it with a big momentum it’ll grow quickly. Like today when we did the three hour training, we were on Facebook and we were on YouTube, so I promoted it on Facebook messenger, I promoted people to the live Facebook. Email I promoted people to the Google version and we had over 3,000 people watching live for the entire 3 hours.

That was people that actually watched it the full time and there were all these people, up and down. But I would say, when all was said and from that we had 5 or 600 shares, thousands and thousands of clicks. And I’m looking, if I use my email as a tool to amplify video and when the video is done, when the video comes and there’s 3,000, 4,000 views and there’s 200 comments then Google or YouTube, or whoever is like, “holy crap, this video is awesome.” Or Facebook says, “This video is awesome.” And they’re going to rank it higher and then more views happen. And the thing, if I were to send an email, it would hit there and then it would disappear within 2 or 3 hours, it’s gone.

The clicks and stuff are gone from that email. But if I push it to content to boost it to my most hyper active people on my list, who love me, we push them there, and then they start watching, viewing and sharing and then it boosts everything else and I can get all this organic traffic. It changes that 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 clicks, max to hundreds of thousands to millions of views. And it’s like, now I’m looking at email as an amplification thing. It’s like amplifying these presale ads.

If you look at, I keep going back to the Dotcom Secrets book, if yu haven’t read it yet, go read it. But in the Dotcom Secrets book I talk all about the phases of the funnel. The pre-frame before they hit the funnel is the most important part. All these videos are a pre-frame. I’m taking the pre-frame and amplifying it, ramping it up and then its going viral, or semi-viral or we call it paid viral or forced viral, it makes it so we can pay for ads. We put ads behind it and it can grow that way.

But it’s taking that email that would have been 3 or 4,000 clicks and turning it into 300,000 clicks and it’s really fascinating. Same thing with Medichat, which is the new Facebook Messenger. When we first got it, I struggled with how do I use it and push people to different offers and it’s kind of confusing, and what I found out is working so good. It’s like I’m building this little stuff, I think we have 15 or 16,000 people on our Medichat list, it’s like an email list but it’s through Facebook Messenger, and what we’re doing is every time we do a Facebook Live we push it. And then that fast we get 500 – 1000 people to show up to every Facebook Live it’s insane.

I log into the box and say start Facebook Live, go, they all come and within, like I said, within minutes we have 500 or 1000 people who are live, and then people see a Facebook Live with 500 or 1000 people on it, they start watching and it starts growing and it snowballs into everything. So I’m looking at this whole thing differently now where it’s like email and messenger are tools to amplify the content where I’m going to take this asset, this pre-frame video that I’m creating and I’m putting out there and changing it from 3 or 400 views I would have gotten, or 3 or 4000 clicks I would have gotten, into 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 or more. And it’s getting me excited.

Again, I’m experimenting with this, but I think….it’s funny because this is the first time I think in my entire career now of 14+ years that I’ve had a directional shift. I view email different. And I think it’s better. It’s interesting. Anyway, I just encourage, I just wanted to open this thought process for you guys as well to think about. Because I’m thinking about it and I think we should all be thinking about it because I think there’s something interesting there that’s going to be big.

So watch what I’m doing, again, I always say this. Listen to what I’m saying because I’m never going to hold anything back from you guys, because I wouldn’t do that. But watch what I’m doing because I’m doing it consistently and I’m trying it and if I keep doing it, it means it’s working. If I stop it’s like I guess it didn’t work. But I think that’s the key.

So understand, start studying each of the different platforms and understanding it. Instagram is the same way, I’m looking at Instagram and I still haven’t quite figured it out. In fact, I got my account canceled yesterday and I got it back last night. So I’m a little paranoid about it. But at the same time, there’s a really cool thing on Instagram, you have the ability to build the relationship and build rapport with the attractive character. It’s kind of like Snapchat only easier to build. I can post videos and now they have this really cool thing coming out called Swipe Up, and I don’t have it yet in my account, but I’ve seen a lot of people having it and we’re trying to get it in our Instagram account.

What happens, I could be doing these things, I still call them snap chats, because I’ve been doing Snapchat for a year, but whatever they call them in Instagram where I can go and make these videos. In the videos I’m telling a story throughout the day. “Okay, I’m here, I’m doing this.” Kind of like a mini version of what we do on Funnel Hacker TV. I’m telling the story, and as I’m telling the story I’ll be like, “Hey I just recorded a podcast, if you want to hear it swipe up.” And they swipe up and it immediately takes them to whatever URL you want. That is magic.

So I think Instagram is similar in my mind to Facebook Messenger and email. And I don’t have a name for it yet, I haven’t figured out a system, but the goal of those platforms are to build rapport with the attractive character and amplify the content. The content are pre-frame bridges that push people into funnels. And if you start looking at it that way, I think there’s something new and exciting. So there you go guys.

We’re what, almost 17 minutes. They get longer now that I’m not in my car. Sorry about that, I hope you don’t mind. Hopefully it gets the wheels in your head spinning. Because that’s the direction I’m thinking and focusing on and I think it’s going to be where things are starting to transition to.

Hope that helps. Thanks so much you guys, for hanging out. If you’re not subscribed yet, go to marketingsecrets.com and subscribe on iTunes and leave your feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if you are new to this and you want to catch up on the last 5 years of this podcast, it used to be called Marketing In Your Car. Go to marketinginyourcar.com and the first 250 episodes you can get on a free MP3 player, just to get you caught up on all the cool stuff we’ve been talking about behind your back. Now you’re part of this and I can let you in on the big secrets. With that said, thanks you guys, appreciate you and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye.

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Marketing Secret #1 will explain the concept of “whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins” and how you can do it quickly without raising money.

On the first episode of Marketing Secrets Podcast, Russell talks about the first secret of marketing, which is Don't Cheat! Here are some of the awesome things you will get to hear in today's episode:

When it comes to building your business, taking money from venture capitalists is like cheating.
How you can build your business without accepting money from VC's by reading Russell's books.
And find out what kinds of things you can expect in future episodes of Marketing Secrets podcast.

So listen below to find out why taking money from VC's is cheating, and how you can still be successful without it. ---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, I want to welcome you to today, the very first day of the official Marketing Secrets podcast. I am so insanely excited. This is something I’ve honestly wanted to change this for a long time. So for those who are just tuning in for the first time ever, for the last I don’t even know now, 4 or 5 years, my podcast has been called Marketing In Your Car which I record while I’m in my car. And it’s been really, really nice and I’ve always kind of liked it. I had the idea almost 15 years ago probably, when I bought the domain. Maybe less, maybe 12 I don’t know.

And then that’s when podcasts first came out, and then I didn’t launch the podcast and then a few years later, I finally did launch the podcast and I was like alright. Oh, and I had a friend Paul Callagan, who’s like one of the podcast dudes. He had this guy write a jingle for me, it was kind of a cheesy jingle, if you listen to episodes one through a hundred or so, you heard it over and over again.

But I was launching it so I was like, I’m just going to do it and we’re going to use that because, why not. I got nothing else. So that’s how the whole thing began and the first hundred episodes had that cheesy song. And it was while I was in my car driving to the office every single day. And then in that time, a lot of stuff happened. We had this idea for Clickfunnels, we launched it, and I documented a lot of that story behind the scenes, which is kind of fun. How we basically went from zero to ten million to 30 million to, I don’t even know what we’re up to now, but it’s a lot. I think this year we’ll pass 100 million dollars collected through Clickfunnels, since it began 2 ½ years ago. Which is pretty exciting for me and for everybody.

And you guys have been, had a chance to kind of see that whole progression and documentation of that, which is cool. And then, again after that episode 100 everyone kept telling me how much they hated the theme song. But I didn’t have another one, so I really quickly changed it, just by myself, which was kind of annoying. I changed it just to make it better, but it was still kind of, I didn’t really love it. So episode 100 to maybe 250 was another one. And then, by that time we were launching Funnel Hacker TV, which is our online reality, which if you’re not listening go to funnelhacker.tv and you can watch all the episodes. It’s something I’m really proud of.

Anyway, so I tried to match the theme song to that one, and it kind of was okay, but wasn’t as good. Anyway, I’ve had a long time desire to change it. Even though, right now we’re in the top ten podcast in business all the time, and it’s called Marketing In Your Car, I still have people that are like, “oh You’re that marketing in your car thing.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s bigger than that. It’s awesome.”

So anyway, a little while ago, John Reese, I saw on Facebook he was selling Marketingsecrets.com, and I was like, oh that is it. That is the name of the podcast. I can’t rebrand it to something stupid. If I’m going to rebrand it it’s got to be something amazing and when I saw that I was like that’s it. We were able to get the domain name, and now we’re branding it.

Last week I wrote a pitch for the intro and then I loved and then Steven, and then we recorded it in our sound booth, and Steven went and did all this audio editing. And I had Brandon make some video trailers and bumpers for it. And now it’s all done and they turned out really, really cool. In fact, you guys probably heard it today, if you’re listening. If you’re on YouTube, we’re also posting these on YouTube, and in fact, I’m videotaping this right. I’ve actually on my rear view mirror, I’ve hooked my camera. It’s kind of Jimmy rigged, hooked on there. So now I’m going to have a video and audio version of each one, just because I thought it would be kind of cool. So that’s what we’re doing.

Anyway, it’s turned out really good and I’m proud of it. Now a couple of things as you listen to the intro, you’ll notice one thing, I kind of made fun of, as I often do, people that take on money in their business. That’s what I actually wanted to talk about on today’s secret number one.

So I’ve been listening to a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk lately and it’s interesting because he’s always talking about all these businesses and entrepreneurs and taking capital. What to do and what not to do. And then last night it was funny because he actually even said himself, “I never took on money in my businesses, I made money.” And it’s funny. I’ve had other people who tried to convince me to take on money and then as I talked to them later they are like, “Well I would never do it for my own company.” I’m like, “Exactly.”

The interesting thing is that I feel like people that take on money are cheating. I potentially am going to be doing a keynote at a big famous university later on this year. I’m not sure yet, it hasn’t been finalized. I’m going to kind of hold off the details until it is. But I already started writing the presentation because I got so excited. In fact, if I write a book number 4, which I think I might, this will be the topic of the book, probably. Unless I change it, I don’t know. Some of you guys might be thinking, “Book number 4 Russell? You only have two books right now.” So we’ve got Dotcom Secrets, book number one. Expert Secrets, which the launch ended last night, we are almost 50,000 books sold, we’ll probably pass that today, which is insane.

Especially when you put it in perspective, like New York Times, most people sell about 10,000 copies to get on the New York Times Bestsellers list. We’ve sold about 50,000 but we’re not on the New York Times list, why? Because they’re punks, to be completely honest. Their reporting stuff is all jacked up. I tried to get on the list with Dotcom Secrets, and we sold 3 more times than we needed to and we still couldn’t get on the list. So they’re against people like me, people who like to sell books. Weird. New York Times Bestsellers. Whatever.

In fact, if you go to russellbrunson.com, the first post I’m kind of documenting my journey from zero to a million books there. And I tell the story about New York Times there. I digress, so book number three, if I decide to write a third book, which I will. I think this will be a trilogy and then the series will be done. But we have obviously, Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and then I recently bought traffic secrets.com from John Reese, and that will probably be the third book in the trilogy and then it will be done.

And then from a separate standpoint, I want to write a book about this. Again, this will be the keynote speech I give at this famous university if I am able to. The title is going to be Stop Cheating. Stop Cheating! And it’s going to be like how we went from zero to 100 million dollars in 2….again, I don’t know exactly what the date is going to be because we haven’t crossed it yet. 2 years, 200 days and 9 hours, whatever it is. To 100 million dollars without taking on venture capitalist, or venture cash.

Because I think that taking on cash is cheating. Think about this, if you were in a body building competition and everyone was competing, working their butts off, and you came in and shot up steroids into your arms and veins and everything and went out there, they would disqualify you for cheating. If you were in the Olympics and everyone is competing as athletes, they’re all working hard, lifting weights, training, and you come in and you’re built up on steroids and you’re doing blood doping and all these other things, guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to kick you out for cheating.

So that is the equivalent of what I feel taking venture capitalists. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re out there trying to build a company and if you go and you just get a bunch of cash, then guess what you didn’t do, you didn’t freaking build a company. You cheated. Somebody gave you steroids. That’s not real, it’s not legitimate, it’s all fake. And I want you guys to understand that. It’s a big deal. It’s like, I have friends who play the lotto, for some reason here in Idaho they have the lottery, and I have friends who play the lottery. They think it’s the cool thing. They’re like, “Someday I’ll win the lotto and then I’ll be rich and famous like you.” I’m like, “You will never be rich and famous. Do you want to know why? Because if you win the lottery, you cheated. No one cares, that story’s not interesting. You didn’t earn it, you didn’t deserve it. Just because you got it, does not mean it’s actually yours. You cheated.”

So that’s like, that’s cheating. So the same way you don’t win the lotto, the same way you don’t do steroids, the same way you don’t do all these kind of things, is the same way you shouldn’t be taking on venture capital cash for your company. You should build a freaking company. You should bootstrap, do it the right way. There’s my rant for the day. And anyone who is trying to think otherwise is just stupid. A couple reasons why.

Number one, you’re taking on money, so that means you’re cheating. So anything you actually accomplish doesn’t really count. Number two, if you decide to take on money, it’s not real. I look at some of my competitors, one of them took on 43 million bucks in funding, the other took on 100 million in funding or something like that. If you look at both of them right now. The people who took on 43 million, the venture capitalists, what do they want? They’re not just giving you money because they think it’s a cool thing to do, they want their money back and a bunch more. We had a bunch of VC’s try to give us money and they all want like a 10x turn if 5 to 8 years. So if they gave you 43 million, they want 430 million dollars back. That’s insane. That is insane.

I don’t even know what to do. So as soon as they write you that check, it’s sitting in your pocket and you have to stress about that, knowing you owe someone 430 million dollars, until you pay that back. Anyway, it’s ridiculous. It’s the stupidest way I’ve ever heard to grow a business. The reaper always comes. Just like in, someday it’s going to catch up to you, it always does, it’s karma.

So if you’re trying to cheat to grow a company, that’s it. That’s why I talk about it in the intro of this podcast. I want people understanding, we build companies smart, intelligently. That’s the whole reason we have funnels. The first venture capitalists, who tried to give us money, they must not listen to the podcast because I tease them a lot. But anyway, we have I think 5 or 6 now that have come and tried to give money for Clickfunnels, that are, all of them say the same things, “You guys are like a unicorn. We don’t understand it. We just want to give you guys, and be a piece of that.” And I keep trying to get, I keep trying to understand. “If you give me 50 million bucks, what do I have to give back?” and they’re like, “Oh well, you know. We’re going to do this…” and I’m like, “I know what you’re going to give me, what do I have to give back. This is a debt. You’re not giving me 50 million bucks to be nice.” And they’re like, “Well, we expect 10x on our money on the next 8 to 10 years, whatever that is.” I’m like, “Okay, so I now owe you 500 million dollars. The second I cash that check, every night I’m stressing and thinking about how much money I owe you. I don’t know about you ,but that’s not a game I want to play.”

So anyway, I’m sitting at lunch with these guys, trying to figure things out and one of the questions was, “How much money does it cost for you to acquire a customer?” which is a very good question. That’s what they all want to know, it’s a good question for all of us. If you watch Shark Tank they always ask what’s your cost to acquire a customer. So I kind of smile as I’m explaining because they’re not going to get it. In fact, I did an episode on marketing in your car a while ago called how to confuse the VC’s and that’s what the episode is all about. I was like, “Okay, well. We’re spending about 120 dollars to get a free trial in Clickfunnels.” And they’re like, “That’s a number we can work with. It falls in the acceptable whatever. If we give you 50 million dollars, then you can acquire blah customers.” Whatever it is. I was like, “Okay, well, that’s cool and all, but we actually turned off those ads.” And they’re like, “Why did you turn it off?” and I was like, “Let me explain how funnels work.” Which is our world. We understand, they don’t.

I showed them. I said, “Look, right now we create front end funnels, things that get somebody into our world. It indoctrinates them into the things they need to understand to be able to actually use our tool and then we offer them the tool. And we’re actually profitable acquiring that customer upfront.” For example, the Expert Secrets book launch. We just sold almost 50,000 copies of the book in the last 30 days. From those 50,000 copies, we ended up…I don’t know the exact numbers, but it was 1.4 almost 1.05 million dollars collected, cash into our pocket. You get 50,000 new buyers and like 120,000 opt ins.

I got all those leads, we got cash into our pocket, and now this week we’re doing training and stuff to introduce them into Clickfunnels, so these 50,000 new buyers, we’ll be like, “Here’s this new thing called Clickfunnels.” But I already got 1.5 million dollars in cash to collect those customers. I didn’t pay 1.5 million to get them. If I was going to spend, or if I was going to try to acquire 50,000 customers at let’s just say $10 a piece, is that right? Yeah, it costs me half a million dollars, but instead we got paid 1.5 million dollars to collect those customers. Now we have them, and that’s just the customers, that’s not counting the opt ins, 120,000 new opt ins came in. Those are people that we can also sell them Clickfunnels. Just because they didn’t buy the book doesn’t mean they’re not going to buy Clickfunnels or other products and services.

So we got paid up front, and I tried to explain, “The way it works in our business is we have these front end offers, somebody comes through and they buy the thing and we’re profitable. So it costs us 10-12 dollars to acquire a book customer, but on average we make, I think the average cart value, before affiliates went crazy and jacked up our average cart value, but when it was stable, we averaged about $34 per book. So $12 in, $34 out. So we were making $22 cash on every single customer that we brought into our world. That cash went into our pocket and we’ve got a customer to introduce to Clickfunnels.”

And I explained that to them 4 or 5 times and the guys like, “I don’t get it.” And after 4 or 5 times, I think the light bulb went off in his head and he said, “If that’s true, if that really happens, that would change business today as we know it.” I kind of smiled, I said, “I know, that’s what we’re doing. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s why we’re a unicorn. Not because I’m smarter than anyone else, but because I understand front end funnels.” If you read the first Dotcom Secrets book, that’s all I talked about. The person who can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. Done, that’s it.

I can spend more money than Lead Pages to acquire a customer. I can spend more money than Infusion Soft, I can spend more money than all my competitors. Any money you make, look at as a competitor, I can out spend every single one of them. Every one of them. There’s not one person in my market that can outspend me. That’s why we’re destroying everybody else right now. Do you understand that? That is the key.

So understanding front end funnels is the key to mastering this. So read the Dotcom Secrets book, it will help you to understand this whole concept of whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. If you know that, then you gotta know a couple of things. How does a funnel work? How does a value ladder work? How do all these pieces tie in together? After you understand those pieces you’re like, “Okay, cool. So I have a front end funnel that brings in customers profitably. Then I’ve got a value ladder that sends them u p through the different things I’m trying to do, ultimately to whatever my main goal is. After I have ascended people up to my main goal, then the second book, which is almost a prequel, but the Expert Secrets book is how you communicate with that audience?

How do you tell stories? How do you sell? How do you convert? How do you do all those pieces? How do you make it so all of these pages in the funnel actually work? Because there’s a whole bunch of people with crappy funnels out there that aren’t profitable. There are so many people who are like, kind of understanding our world a little bit. I’m seeing some of these companies trying things out, putting up opt in funnels and things and some of them are so painful.

I just saw one from one of our confusing competitors and it was like “Download our free white paper about blah, blah.” And then the opt in form had like 30 fields. I’m just like, you guys are so stupid. Nobody wants a white paper. That’s not sexy. Guess what’s sexy? Free book, free script. You’ve got to find something and crank up the sexy on it if you want people to give you money for it. It’s not……

That’s what Expert Secrets is about. How do you position yourself in the right way? How do you make things desirable? How do you create desire and belief in somebody’s mind? Those are all the pieces you have to understand. So it’s funny, while they call Clickfunnels a unicorn, it’s nothing magic you guys. It’s the stuff we talk about in the book. You have the books, they’re there. Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, that’s the stuff. If you’ve been listening to this podcast over the last couple of years, or if you got in just today, that’s fine. Go back and listen. All these things are foundational principles we’re tying in there. But it’s all stuff you can do.

So if I can say anything else, it’s this. Don’t cheat. You don’t need to cheat. You can be successful without taking on venture capitalists, without taking on money, without taking on funding, without needing any of that crap. You don’t need to have a 100,000 dollars to start your company, all you have to have is a brain between your ears, the ability to read two books, read them both, and understand some core principles and create a good offer. That’s it.

It’s really not that hard. And I don’t know what else I can do. I’ve been trying for years to make this simpler and simpler and simpler. Between the Dotcom Secrets and the Expert Secrets books it’s simple. I want you guys to understand that. And hopefully this gives you guys some ideas and tools to be able to use.

Alright, with that said, I’m at the office now. This podcast is probably a little longer than normal, usually they are like 5 – 10 minutes long. I have no idea how long I’ve done this one. The plan moving forward with Marketing Secrets podcast is this, each day I’m going to give you guys a secret. One marketing secret that you can use and if you understand though, it all ways lays down on the same foundation of episode number one here. The foundation is simple. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.

That is how you beat your competitors. That is how you beat the venture capitalists. That’s how you can grow your company. That’s the foundation of everything. When you understand that, it becomes easy. And yeah, you can go out there and you can do social media and build a big following and all those things organically but it takes time, it takes effort, stamina, it takes a lot of those kind of things.

It’s funny, because I have been geeking out on Gary Vaynerchuk recently, I really enjoy him. I like him a lot. He’s got some really, really good things. I think that what he does in his business is probably than what he says. I think that right now he’s the best in the world at conversation domination. How you dominate all different platforms and be relevant in all of them. I love watching him and studying and doing that.

We’re modeling a lot of that from him, but he’s got this one, one of his books is Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook and it’s all about, you can be jabbing, jabbing, jabbing and eventually you’re going to do a big right hook. I kind of agree with that. I agree putting out content, I’m doing those things as well, but the same time for that to really work, you’ve got to be really, really good. It takes a long time and consistent effort, over and over again. For a lot of us, that’s hard to do.

Someone asked me about that, “Russell, you’re philosophy is so different from Gary’s. He’s talking about jab, jab, jab right hook.” And I said, “Well, the difference is that I’m a wrestler. Have you ever seen a wrestler and a boxer in a fight? I’ve never seen a boxer win, ever. The boxers always lose to the wrestlers and Jiu Jitsu guys. In wrestling and jiu jitsu what do we do different? We look at the guy and instead of jabbing, jabbing, jabbing and waiting for the hook and right hooking. We look at him and look for vulnerability boom, we power double, take them down and choke them out.” I’d much rather have power double, take him down and choke him out than jab, jab, jab, right hook. There’s times to jab and things like that, those things are good, but I want you to understand this concept of winning and scaling and growth quickly.

It is about the concept I mentioned ten times. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. How do you do that? You don’t do that by jabbing forever. For a lot of you guys who are going to try to build an Instagram following of 100,000 people, that’s going to take time and energy and money. In fact, my Instagram kind of got shut down this morning, so even after you do all the work, it can disappear anyway, which is insane.

So it comes down to focusing on creating a really good funnel you can drive paid money into, acquire a customer for free or profitably, or at least break even and then send them up the value ladder. That’s the game, you guys. That’s the game we’re playing. With that said, I’m at the office, I’m going to go get to work. I hope you guys enjoyed Marketing Secrets number one. If you liked this podcast, please go rate it in iTunes, please tell your friends, family members, everyone you know. Share it. Appreciate you guys and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Bye everybody.

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Yes… this is the last one ever :( BUT… don’t worry, something even COOLER is about to start!

On this final episode of Marketing In Your Car, Russell announces that there will be no more episodes, but that the podcast is re-branding as Marketing Secrets podcast.

Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:

Why Russell decided to re-brand the podcast and how he obtained the new name.
Where you can find the new podcast, Marketing Secrets, and what to expect.

So listen below and don’t forget to subscribe to the new podcast at marketingsecrets.com

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, I want to welcome you guys to the last, this is kind of a bittersweet moment. But this is the last, officially, last ever Marketing In Your Car. Oh, that makes me kind of sad. But with every death comes a new rebirth, at least I think that’s what they say. If not, they should say it, I’ll probably start saying it. It’s kind of cool actually.

So the end of Marketing In Your Car, it is the end. I’ve been doing this now for 3 or 4 years, and I love it and I’ve got a lot of you guys listening on, but I’ve wanted to kind of do a re-branding of it for a long time, but I didn’t have the right name, the right thing, the right hook, the right something that was amazing. And if you can’t do something amazing, then why do it? That’s kind of my thought. And then the other day, my friend John Reese, he posted something, that he was selling one of his domains. It was a domain back from when I got started, I remember it was a blog he had and it was called Marketingsecrets.com. I was like, “Oh my gosh, Marketing Secrets is so cool.” I know that every product either is something secrets, or hacker. But for whatever reason, those two words I love and I wanted this one.

I did a deal with him and now I own marketingsecrets.com and this podcast is now being re-branded as Marketingsecrets.com. Isn’t that cool. So the real reason is Marketing In Your Car, I know for all you guys that hang out with me, this is a cool thing, but when you see it in iTunes store, it seems kind of childish. Maybe not childish, because I’m a cool childish, but it doesn’t seem like, non of that mass appeal that I really wanted, and marketingsecrets.com does. It’s so cool and exciting.

So a couple of cool things we’re going to do. First off, I have a new iTunes cover we’ll be posting on Monday, so next time you look at your phone you’ll see this new thing and be like, “Wait, what is that.” It’s got my face on it because I wanted you guys to know what I look like, so there you. It says Marketing Secrets on it, if you go to marketingsecrets.com it has places to subscribe, all those kind of things like that. Plus all the posted episodes, plus the other cool thing we’re going to do, instead of just doing the audio like this right now. I’m going to start doing it as a video and post the videos on marketingsecrets.com as well. So some of you guys that like video can check it out there too. So that’s kind of what’s happening.

Anyway, I have a Facebook Live starting in two minutes, but I wanted to jump on real quick and give you guys a heads up of what’s happening, what the changes are, so you’re not freaking out next week when you see the new stuff, but you’re more excited. So Marketing Secrets Podcast is the new name that this show will be known for. We’ve got a new intro that’s so cool. I’ve never been proud of my Marketing In Your Car intros, I’m not going to lie. This one, Steven Larsen spent like 2 days working on the audio to make it awesome. The script is like a very big us versus them, sticking it to the man. So all of us marketers who don’t cheat, can all be part of that, which is exciting.

I’m at the office, because my Facebook Live starts in one minute. So I’m running while I finish this one. But it’s exciting, so look Monday for Marketing Secrets podcast, same feed, same everything, nothing has changed. But you’ll see new icons, new things. I think I’m going to start doing each episode as “Secret number one” boom, “Secret number two” so it’ll be kind of cool that way too. All the old back archives will stay and remain forever, because I don’t know, maybe someone wants to listen to me someday, that’s kind of cool. So they will be there forever.

And that’s about it. Okay I’m about to run into the office, but one last thing for you guys to know, is if you haven’t started…….yeah, I’m super late huh. Alright, I’m running, so the last thing that I would make sure, if you haven’t seen the new show, if you go to funnelhacker.tv, we’ve got two episodes that have been live so far and we’re doing three episodes a week of that show, and it’s been amazing. So go check out funnelhacker.tv and I’ll to you on Monday, bye everybody.

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He may be evil, but one of the best marketers ever…

On this episode Russell talks about teaching kids at church about Satan’s marketing plan and how he is taking some marketing pointers from Satan.

Here are some of the odd things you will hear in today’s episode:

How being able to teach a lesson at church about whatever he wanted got Russell thinking about Satan as a marketer.
And what kind of things we can learn from Satan that will help with our ability to sell the negatives as positives.

So listen below to find out what Russell has learned from Satan himself.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I hope you guys are pumped for today. It’s Monday, we get to build funnels today. Steven Larsen’s little daughter just sent me the cutest message ever about building funnels. Every Monday or so, not every Monday, but most Monday, all the good Mondays, Steven messages me in the morning and says, “It’s Monday baby, we get to build funnels.” And he did it today and he had his cute little daughter messaging saying the same thing. It was so cute.

Steven: Whoo! Yeah baby, it’s Monday!

Steven’s Daughter: Oh yeah baby, it’s Monday!

Steven: We get to build funnels! Whoo!

Steven’s Daughter: Build funnels, whoo!

Russell: Anyway, I’m excited. I’m heading in. Dylan and Wynter Jones, Dylan is my co-founder in Clickfunnels, Wynter is his twin brother who is also a ninja. They are going to be here this next two weeks building out updating the editor, making sure that everything is even more amazing than it already is, if that’s even possible.

Jaime Smith is in the house, he’s going to be working with us to take over the world. And then Todd’s coming next week, Ryan might be coming after that. Anyway, it’s just fun when we have a bunch of people coming out to plan world domination and to better serve all of you guys. So I’m excited for that.

So during my short commute today, I want to share with you guys something kind of fun. Yesterday I taught a class at church and it’s kind of cool because it’s, usually there’s a lesson or curriculum, but once a month they let people kind of pick what they wanted to teach, so I got one of those lessons, which was really cool. I got to pick whatever I wanted to teach. So I was like, “What do I want to teach today?” So what I decided to do was to basically look at the marketing plans of Satan and how he is getting people.

I think my group probably thinks I’m weird because I was like, “Look, everyone here is talking about church and religion and all that kind of stuff, but I’m really impressed with how good Satan is at marketing. He’s getting people to do all sorts of crazy stuff that they shouldn’t normally be doing.” And I talked about, those that know me know that I was a Mormon missionary when I was 19 years old, for two years. I talked about it, “That was a hard sales pitch, we were going door to door trying to convince people to give up alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea, all premarital, post marital, or not post marital. Premarital, extra marital sex, ten percent of your income for the rest of your life. And if you don’t screw it up, you may get salvation.”

That’s our sales pitch, which is a pretty tough sales pitch. But I was like, “Satan’s sales pitch is even harder. He’s selling eternal damnation. That’s what he’s got to sale. How in the world is he getting so many people? Because that’s what he’s got to sell. As a marketer, I’m fascinated. I want to study this.” So my lesson was breaking it down about what he’s doing and why he’s doing and all sorts of stuff. But what’s interesting, not that we should learn from Satan, this podcast is going really bad.

But if we were to learn from Satan, because he’s really good at marketing, it’s interesting there’s a scripture in Isaiah that basically says that in the last days, wo unto them that call evil good and good evil. And that was kind of the premise. If you look at what Satan’s done, instead of him just going directly and trying to market the thing, because the thing is really hard to market, eternal damnation, who really wants to buy that, right? So instead what he does is he takes things that are evil and makes them good and things that are good, it makes them appear evil. I’m not going to mention those, because I’m sure I’ll get in rants and fights with people, so I’ll let you interpret that how you want, but that’s what he’s doing now days. He’s looking at those kind of things and he’s figuring out how to position them differently so that people think that they’re good. So that bad is good and good is bad.

I think he’s doing a fantastic job, if you look at the world that we live in today. I try not to post things on Facebook, but sometimes I do. It’s insane that some things that are so good, I’ll share and I’ll get comments from people that are the opposite side and I’m like, “Wow, how in the world did you interpret it that way?” But that’s what he’s done, he’s done a really good job.

So how can we use this lesson from Satan in our marketing? I don’t know if I should, maybe I should stop right here. But again, a master marketer, obviously. So think about that, in your business. A lot of times there are things that aren’t as good, so how do you not spin those things, but how do you position them in a way where the negatives are actually positive, and the positive are also positive. You don’t want to do it the other way.

But think about that. This is kind of a, I don’t know if this is a good podcast for me to have. Maybe I should delete this. I don’t want people to think I’m studying Satan for Marketing, I’m not. I’m just saying it’s interesting. Always looking at the positive. When we launched Clickfunnels it was interesting, we were doing, we launched a webinar selling funnel hacks and it was about 4 weeks before we launched the Funnel Hacks course. So the negative was if you signed up you have to wait 4 weeks before you get in. But I was able to sell towards that. “look, this is the deal. You get in, you get the software, you get all this time to study it and get prepared. Then in 4 weeks we’re going to start live training. That gives you plenty of time to get you ready and prepared.” so I’m selling it as a benefit.

Then the next week, because I keep selling it. I’m like, “Hey guys,” to new people coming in, “Hey in 3 weeks we’re starting. You got 3 weeks to get ready.” Then the next was 2 weeks and then 1 week, and then “hey the live training is starting tomorrow. That’s why you gotta get in.” Selling that big positive benefit. Then the week after, so we started the training, so I’m still selling, obviously selling it. And I was like, “Hey look, this is the deal. For everyone, the live training started last week, that means you guys are at a huge benefit. If you sign up right now, you can go watch last week’s training today and get caught up and by week two you will be ready.” And for week 2 I was like, “Hey this is the deal. Live training started 2 weeks ago. So excited for you guys, you get to start ready.”

So no matter where I was in the sequence I was always selling the benefits of the fact that they had 4 weeks before it started was a huge benefit. The fact that it started 2 weeks ago was a huge benefit. No matter where it was in the mix, I had to sell that as a big benefit. Same thing with when the live training was actually over. It was no longer live, I couldn’t sell the fact, when I’m selling live it’s like, “You get to come on and ask q and a, it’s going to be awesome.” Whereas after, there’s no live training, so I can’t sell that as a benefit. So I’m like, “The huge benefit about this is you don’t have, everyone else had to wait six weeks to get this stuff, you can go watch it all this weekend if you want.” Then that becomes the big benefit.

So it’s just finding those things that may not be as good at making them, or finding things that someone might look at as a negative and turning it into a positive. So there’s Satan marketing lesson 101. Oh man, I’m going to post this and I’m sure some of you guys will hate me afterwards. Hopefully the rest of you guys will just laugh and move on with the rest of your day. That’s all I got.

Alright you guys, appreciate you all. I’m at the office, I’m going to go repent and get back to focusing on helping you guys out. Alright talk to you soon.

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A cool think I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk that radically shifted my social strategies.

On this episode Russell talks about what cell phones have in common with 1950’s TV. He also quickly gives some stats from the book launch.

Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

How searching for a pitch that he remembers from 2015 Russell came across some awesome words of wisdom from Gary Vaynerchuk.
How you cell phone is similar to 1950’s TV.
And how Russell plans to dominate every available channel the way he has dominated Facebook.

So listen below to find out how you can benefit from looking at cell phones as if they were TV in the 50’s.

---Transcript---

Hey what’s up everybody? This is a sneaky late night, I’m sneaking out of my house to go grab something at the office, Marketing In Your Car. So this is cool, I don’t think I’ve talked about this with you guys before. If I have, humor me and pretend like you haven’t because I think it’s important.

The other day, it was funny I was, an event I was at in 2015 and this guy did a pitch that was awesome from stage. So I tried to find that presentation so I could see, because I wanted to model part of the presentation for something I was doing. So yes, I’m always funnel hacking and I had these weird things in my memory where I can remember things from, I see a good pitch and it was in 2015, and I remember it. In fact, I remember a pitch from 2004, 2005 from John Childers that’s amazing too, that I went and found so I could listen to and hear him do his pitch again.

Anyway, what I was doing, is basically I was trying to find this pitch. It was an event I was at in 2015. I remember the speaker, I remember the day, everything. I was trying to find it and I was searching everywhere. I had actually purchased the recordings of that event, but the link where the recordings I’d purchased had now expired. I contacted the company, they wouldn’t give it back to me or they didn’t have it anymore or whatever. So then I was trying to buy them on EBay, I couldn’t buy them on EBay. I tried everywhere. I spent way too long trying to search for this presentation, because it was literally like a 2 minute pitch that I wanted to find. It was probably like 8 hours, the time I wasted on this thing.

But I knew that if I found that one little piece, I would know how to pitch this thing I’m trying to sell. I didn’t find it, but I did find some notes that somebody was there and there was a single sentence that gave me kind of, that reminded of what the hook was. So I am kind of re-building that pitch based on my memory and one sentence that I found after 8 hours of digging. In fact, I ended up finding the entire event, I had to pay some dude insane amounts of money to go and black market find it for me. I don’t feel guilty because I bought it before, but normally I wouldn’t do that.

So he gets it to me, sends me the whole thing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” All the videos of everyone in the presentation is there except for the one I am looking for. I’m like, “Dude, where is this?” and he’s like, “How do you know it’s missing.” And I’m like, “I have the notes from somebody who was at the event. The same event that I was at. These are the notes, it says the name of the presentation. This is where between this one and this. You gave me the two other ones, but not the one I needed.” Anyway, I never got the video. So there’s the sad ending of that story. But there’s a happy ending.

But while I was doing that, one of the videos I found during the thing was actually on YouTube, it was the keynote speaker at the event, it was Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk is obviously the keynote to almost every event ever, I think. I love the dude, but he’s probably not going to keynote ours, because he just keynotes too many places, so it’s not that special I think. But he’s awesome, I think he’s awesome. Anyway, I was listening to, sorry I’m at the office now. I was listening to, on YouTube while I was searching for it, I found his recording from that same event and I had missed his presentation because I was out in the hall doing whatever I was doing.

So I was like, I’m going to watch this while I’m searching. So while I’m searching I was watching this presentation. What is cool, sorry my alarm’s going off here. Good, I gotta disarm the alarm, now we’re good to go. So I’m in there and I’m watching this presentation while I’m searching for this other video and I’m listening to it and Gary said something that was like, boom. And maybe that was the journey I got sent on to try and find this one ten minute video clip that I didn’t find. But in the journey is where I found this piece and it was this gold nugget that is so good.

So Gary was talking and what he said that was profound, he said, “Our phones, the thing that’s in your hand right now probably, is the equivalent of the TV in the 1950’s.” And then I was like, what’s he talking about? And he went on to kind of explain it and he said, “In 1950’s if you turned on the TV, what was there? three channels. ABC, CBS, and NBC and that was it. So people turned on the TV and had to watch one of three channels.” In fact, that’s what Tony Robbins said to me. When I first met him he’s said, “You know when I got started there were three channels and I just advertized on those three channels and I was everywhere and we made insane amounts of money. And when media split, that’s when it became hard.” But he had a 20 year run. Every channel you turned on Tony was there, and everyone knew who he was all the time.

And then, I’ve done a whole podcast before on how media splits and turns into more channels and cable and soon it gets really, really hard because it’s all fragmented. What’s interesting is that, he said, “Our phones are like TV in the 1950’s because that was the thing in 1950’s, three channels. Right now on your phone, there’s 3 or 4 channels that actually matter. There’s 2 or 4 channels that everybody goes to get all their entertainment and their information and those kind of things.”

If you think about it, think about the typical app, there’s the app store or whatever you want to call it, it’s insane, there’s millions of apps. So you think it’s this huge flooded thing, but the reality is, think about your phone right now and your habits. How many apps do you go to every single day consistently? And probably like 5 or 6 times a day. I was thinking about that and thinking about myself and there’s definitely a pattern. When I’m bored I open up the social tab and I go to Facebook, Instagram, messenger, Snapchat, anyway there’s 4 or 5 things I go to. When I’m done, I close it down and get back to my work.

When I get bored and get stuck or whatever, I come back and open up those 3 or 4 channels to see if anything interesting is happening on any of them and then I come back and I leave. And that’s what TV was, right. When he started saying that, he’s like, “If you understand that, everyone’s got these phones and there’s only 3, 4 or 5 stations everybody’s listening to.” So what are those channels. Facebook is a channel, Instagram is a channel, Snap chat is a Channel, YouTube is a channel. What are the channels that are there? There’s not that many, there really isn’t. There’s only a handful of them. And when he said that I was like, “Oh my gosh.”

And I’m really good on one channel. We’re good on Zuckerberg. We dominate Facebook, but we haven’t been good at the other ones. So we started, if you’ve been watching, I’ve been really working hard at Instagram lately, it’s been growing and actually doing really well for us. If you’re not following my Instagram, please follow my Instagram. I think you just go to Instagram.com/russellbrunson, I think. But I’m not sure.

So we’re starting to do stuff on Instagram and on YouTube we’re actually on Monday launching our big YouTube channel. On each channel we have a different strategy. For me, the ones we’re trying to dominate are Facebook, Instagram, I kind of gave up on Snapchat, if I’m completely honest. Instagram is just easier and better, I think. So we’re doing Instagram hard, Twitter, we ignored Twitter for our entire lives and then it turned out we’re getting insane amounts of traffic from Twitter. People are talking about us and we didn’t even know. So now we’re like, crap we should do something in Twitter. I’m going to go learn how to tweet. So I’m starting to get into that again. And then YouTube.

So there’s the four or five channels. We’re not trying to be the biggest dude on YouTube, but I’m trying to get, so my audience when they pull out their phone and are searching the four or five channels, they’re going to see me on everyone of those channels. I started looking at that and I was like, holy crap. I always thought the internet was so big. We’re trying to advertize everywhere. But if you flip it like that, all the sudden it shrinks it down. This is your mobile experience. This is your phone, there are four channels your people are on. How do you get in front of your people on those four channels? That’s it, and it’s really not that hard.

So that’s been, that’s my strategy and you’ll see that happening more and more over the next few weeks as we’re rolling out each channel more aggressively. And then we’re having a strategy and putting people in place to make it consistent and cool. And I’m not talking about, a lot of people go and make a video and then rip the audio and put it on 30 different places. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about understanding the intricacies of each channel and making unique, cool stuff for each one. Some of you guys are just beginners and you’re starting. And if you’re starting don’t do this yet. I’m in 14 years and I’m starting to do this kind of thing.

But after you’ve mastered one channel, I think that everyone needs to be good at one channel if you’re going to grow. I met a friend earlier this year who is really good at Instagram, but he’s not good at any of the other channels. But he’s awesome there, making tons of money. But again, I’m a big believer in first you have to spend, I’ve been smacked too many times by too many channels.

But I think starting at one and mastering it and then after that’s in place, then going and mastering the second one, third one. With that said, we’re at the point now we’re kind of mastering the other ones and plugging things in. That’s what my goal was, to really be dominate in the 4 or 5 channels on everybody’s phone in my marketplace. So whenever they get bored they pull it out and I’ve got something interesting and unique in each one.

Who’s doing this successfully right now? The only people I know who are really doing it successfully in all of the platforms…oh and speaking of, also podcasting. Podcasting is one of those ones as well. Gary Vaynerchuk is fantastic, he’s the best one I’m watching to model. He’s the one that kind of brought this idea up. He knows something and I’m impressed with that. I’m impressed with, he saw it, because I didn’t see that until he told me. Now I see it. He saw it, he gets it. So watch him close, watch what I’m doing closely.

Go to each of these channels and not many people are on all of them, but find the people you connect with, who are good in each one and model those people, funnel hack them. That’s what we’re doing, we’re looking at what kind of images are other people doing in Instagram? What kind should we be doing? What kind of posts here? What we’re modeling in funnel hacking all the time.

I hope you guys are funnel hacking and modeling me. You should be. I’m on a path trying to figure this stuff out. Not everything I do is right but if I do it consistently, it means it’s working. Know that, model it, funnel hack it.

Anyway, so those are the channels and one other twist. And this is something that I am excited for. On top of that, we’re going to try to create our own channel. And I’ve got a play that’s halfway in play right now, I’m excited for it. I’m not going to ruin it or divulge too much yet. If it works, it’s gonna, for my community, for my tribe, for you guys, it’s going to add one more layer of awesomeness. It’s going to be this really cool tribe app thing that brings us all together into our own distribution channel. Our own media network. Our own TV show. Whatever you want to call it. It’s going to be cool. You’ll see it. Stay tuned and pay attention. You’ll see the cool stuff that’s happening.

Anyway, that’s what I want to share with you guys today. That mindset, I heard it from Gary, took me about a week to internalize it. Now you’re hearing it from me, I hope you guys think about it and internalize, because I think it’s something really good. Alright I’m walking out of the office.

You guys want some updates on stats. I’ve got a big monitor in front of me showing me all the stats. So as of today, actually let me refresh this because it might be better than this. Unless it automatically refreshes on its own…as of right now, sorry this monitor is kind of weird, I’m trying to figure out how…there we go, reload.

Okay, book sales, we’ve been live a little over two weeks so far. So there’s a couple of cool metrics I’ll share with you guys here. If I can get it to work. Alright, so as of right now we have sold 30,503 copies of the book, which is amazingly exciting. I think so. If I break that down, 23,834 people have taken the Expert Secrets book. 6,692 have taken the Black Box. Also have, if you want to know, lets see. Okay, so the….sorry, the metrics, I can’t…we shifted some of the funnels so some metrics aren’t perfect. But that’s okay.

Upsell number one 7.84% of you guys are taking that, which is either the MP3 player or the audiobooks, of both the Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secret, which is cool. 3.22% are taking Expert Evolution upsell, which is new and we just rolled out last week, which is really, really cool. And then our average cart value right now, from the whole campaign, $32.40. Our total collected money is $989,095.30. So probably by tomorrow we’ll pass a million dollars collected on this funnel, which is cool and gets me excited. To have a new funnel inducted into the two comma club. I’m going to do one more thing. I’m going to reset the stats on here because I want to see……

Okay, so we’ve made some changes to the funnels, so I wanted to see a couple of other metrics, based on that. Sorry, you guys are geeking out with me in real time. Hopefully the suspense is killing you though and getting you excited and not annoying you. If it’s annoying you I’m sorry. You can skip to the next episode, but if you like suspense that’s good. So our actual cart value since we shifted the funnel over $33.29, which only seems like a small update, but it’s actually really big. Because when we first launched our average cart value was really high because all of you hyper active guys went and bought a ton of them. And it dropped dramatically afterwards. So it’s actually up 7 or 8 bucks from the normal traffic.

So the order form bump is at 13.65%, which isn’t bad but it’s not….I wanted it to be closer to 20, so it’s not bad. And this is interesting, so if you, look upsell number one is the MP3 player, there’s three options on the page. You can either buy the physical MP3 player or the digital audiobook files or you can get both. And both for the same price as one, so it’s kind of a funny thing. But 81.56% took just the digital audiobooks, 15.64% took the digital and the physical. And then 2.79% took just the physical, even though it’s the same price. That was the decoy offer, yet they still took it, which is kind of funny.

Anyway, those are the metrics, hopefully that’s kind of fun for you guys. Anyway, it’s been fun. I love this game, it’s a fun little game. So we are in the process right now of tonight actually at midnight, we switch over from our normal affiliate commissions to $20 CPA, so hopefully tomorrow everyone’s going to start promoting like crazy for the last 7 or 8 days of the launch, which is really fun and exciting. We’re going to sell some more books, our goal is to get that about double where we’re at right now and then we got one more fun thing that we’ll be executing at the end of the book launch which will make everybody, all the affiliates a lot of money. And it will serve all the people that bought books, help get them to where they want to be, so I’m excited for that.

Setting the alarm, back in here, I’m going to head back home. My parents are actually coming to town tonight. Howard Berg, the world’s fastest reader is coming in town tonight. And then tomorrow we’re filming a bunch of videos with him. So we’ve got a fun journey happening in the next day or two and I’ll be sharing it with you guys. With that said, have an amazing night you guys. And I’ll check back in with you soon. Bye everybody.

View Details

Behind the scenes of what happened over the last ten years to make that experience happen.

On this episode Russell talks about a Facebook Live interview that he did with Tony Robbins and how it was the first thing he had ever asked Tony to do in their 10 year relationship.

Here are some of the cool things you will learn in this episode:

How Russell was able to do a Facebook Live with Tony Robbins to promote his new book.
Why Russell has never looked at his relationship with Tony Robbins in terms of what Tony could do for him.
And why the ROI with relationships is the cultivating and building of that relationship.

So listen below to why Russell believes so strongly in building relationships without expecting something in return.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I have good news and bad news, you guys. You want the bad news or the good news? The good news is I got some cool stuff to share with you. The bad news is, maybe this is good news, I don’t know. I think, and I’m a little nervous about this, but I think I’m ready, you guys ready for this, to rebrand the podcast. What?

It’s been called Marketing In Your Car for the last, I don’t know how long I’ve done this for, but I bought the domain and concept initially ten years ago. It’s been cool and I like it, but I’m thinking about changing. I wanted to change it, I think we’ve talked about this a couple of times. You are my therapist sometimes on these things. I was going to change the name of it a couple of times, but I haven’t, and I haven’t and I haven’t’. Then yesterday something happened. I had to find something that wasn’t just better, but a billion times better and I think I may have got it. I’m not going to tell you what it is yet, but I’m excited because it’s like a billion times better. So there may be a new rebrand coming up here soon. So if you guys like it, you’ve got to let me. I’m excited for it, so excited.

So that’s something I’m going to give you. I gotta step back. Today was a good day, yesterday was a good day, yesterday was insane. We had our certified partners in town. We had a big group of 45 people here, and some of our inner circle members were the ones that were actually some of the business owners that the certified partners had a chance to interview them, figure them out and then go out and actually build the funnels all night for them. Then they come back and present their thing. It was really fun.

It was fun, to kind of capstone at the end of the certified partner program. I have a chance to speak to them at the very beginning, and then kind of sneak in and watch what they were doing and that kind of stuff, and it was really cool. Now most of them left today. And then, yesterday the other cool thing, as you know we’re in the book launch. We’re almost, a few books away from 30 thousand books, we’ll definitely pass it today. And not that this matters, but on the, if you look at how much money is made inside of the cart for every book. Probably tomorrow my guess is we will pass $1 million dollars collected through this funnel. Through the front end funnel, not counting the backend stuff, which is also really cool. Which means the Expert Secrets book will officially be inducted into the two comma club, and we’ll order my own big old record plaque. Yes, I’m just like you guys, I want one every single time I have a funnel that makes a million bucks. We will be ordering one of those.

Today or tomorrow we will be passing 40 thousand active Clickfunnel members as well. So many cool things happening. That is so exciting. And then to step back on another thing, as I’ve been doing this book launch, as you guys know, I’ve been doing all these Facebook Lives, these interviews and they’ve been going awesome. Kind of exhausting, not going to lie. Plus, we’re doing a juice fast this week, which is the second juice fast I’ve done this month, which basically means when I’m not juice fasting I’m overeating, because I keep having to come back to it.

What’s funny, Dave Woodward and his wife Carrie, were teasing me behind my back because I got all these guys to do the juice fast with me this time. Dave was like, “Why is this so hard? Why isn’t Russell complaining.” And they’re like, “Russell’s a professional dieter.” And we were laughing because I actually am, if you think about it. I spent 12 years of my life as a wrestler, wrestling. And what I did, every single Monday I would come in and be 30 pounds overweight and every Friday I would be 30 pounds down and I would weigh in and then start the vicious cycle over again. Over and over and over again for 12 years of my life.

I didn’t mind it in wrestling, but you don’t realize the pattern that sets. So I had this epiphany the other day when I’m hanging out with Dave and Carrie, I might have already talked about this, I don’t remember. But basically my pattern in life is that same way. Every Monday, from Monday to Friday, I’m at the office and I eat perfectly, I usually lose about 5 pounds a week.

Then Friday, Saturday, Sunday I just can’t stop myself. It’s insane. So I think it has to do with my wrestling patterns that I instilled over 12 years of dieting all week and then pigging out all weekend. That’s my pattern and why I can’t ever lose weight. Because I lose weight Monday through Friday and then the last three days, I had my weigh ins and then I can eat whatever I want, then Monday I start over again. So I’ve been professionally dieting now for 25 years, which is kind of cool, except for its lame.

Why would I tell you that story? Oh yeah, that’s why I’m on the juice fast again. Someday I’ll figure this out. It’s a psychological problem I know, I gotta fix that. I gotta fix my brain. Which I actually working on from multiple different angles, so that’s good. Now that I’m aware of it I can effect it, which is hopefully the key for some of you guys.

Alright, step back, it was really cool. We had my interview with Tony Robbins yesterday, he was interviewing me. I’ve interviewed him before, he interviewed me on New Money Masters Series. We’ve kind of done back and forth on some of these things. And it was crazy because in true Tony fashion, he tells you, “Hey, we’re going to start at this time.” And then they shift it 10 times throughout the day. So I felt bad because we had other poddcst interviews lined up and we had to keep bumping people and shipping things around. So if I bumped you yesterday because of Tony, I’m apologizing, but come on. It’s Tony, it was so cool.

I’ve known Tony now for almost 10 years, which is crazy. It’s been a decade since I’ve known him, which is insanely cool. And in that time, I’ve never asked him to do anything, I just love him and what he does so much that I was like, how can I help him? We helped, we created a book funnel for him. I paid my own costs, paid my own flights, paid my hotel. It all came out of my own pocket, I spent probably 20 grand building a book funnel for him and just gave it to him as a gift.

I’ve coached his people and I’ve helped consult him and other people on his team. Iv’e done a lot of things like that. I’ve spoken at his events, anything I can do, I’ve tried to do and just help him, and not with an ulterior motive like, “Someday, he’s going to get me.” I have a joke with one of my buddies who always jokes, “I’m your real friend, I’m not here because you’re successful, I’m your real friend.” I’m like, “Whatever, it’s a long con. You’re waiting ten years from now to cash out.” So it’s always this joke, “How’s the long con treating you?”

So why I say that, with Tony it was never a long con. “Okay, ten years from now he’s going to maybe promote me.” It was never like that, it was like, Tony’s freaking awesome, he’s helped me so much. How can I help and serve and give back. I don’t think I could ever give back what I got from him. So anything we’re doing is just cool. But think about, I helped him from giving what I’m best at and gave that to him for free. I paid him to come to my event. I’m a customer. I’ve done all those things, and just because I’m trying to give back to him in a little way. And obviously he gives, every time I help a little bit, he gives back so much more.

He came to our event, we paid a lot of money for him to come to the event as our keynote, but then he came back and went for 5 hours and just blew everyone’s minds and it was insane. Anyway, long story short. I have never asked Tony to promote anything ever. This came around, the book came out and it was the first time I was ever like, “hey, would you be willing to do this?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And what’s crazy about that is I think so many people go into relationships, looking at what’s ROI for me in this deal? Should I invest my time and I think that that’s the reason why most people don’t get deals to happen and they don’t have longer term things happen. You know what I mean?

If went to Tony like, “Alright what’s my angle, how am I going to get him to help me?” It never would have happened, I don’t think. But because I was like, okay Tony’s the man, how can I help him? To now 10 years later, a long time later, but 10 years later he comes back and does this really cool and it was amazing.

So some of the results. We did the Facebook Live interview. We actually did it first on Skype because he just wanted to not have it live, live. In case, something bad happens. So we did live and he’s like, “cool, you guys can run it.” So we took that and edited it real quick, chopped off the beginning and the end. Put it through an OBS, which is a streaming platform, and did a Facebook Live on Tony’s page. We had 1.8 to 1.9 thousand people watching it the entire time. 5 hours into it, we had 70 thousand views and 3 or 4 hundred thousand reach. This morning it was 100 thousand views and close to a million reach. I think 19 thousand clicks have come from it.

Which is crazy, if we were to buy a Facebook ad and get 19 thousand clicks, let’s say it…I mean that’s probably 20-30 grand in ad costs just to get that. And this is all coming organically from Tony’s page, his recommendation. We’re selling tons and tons of books. Then this virtual book tour, one of the cool things we’re doing is with everyone, we’re doing the Facebook Live on their page. So it lives on their fan page and then we’re going in, their making us admin on their account and we’re actually paying my money to boost their Facebook Live to their audience.

So now we had the opportunity where they’re allowing us to spend my money to promote to their audience, and now it’s going out to all 2.2 million of his followers it’s going to keep growing and growing. And my guess, next we’ll have a million views on that video. It’s just huge, it’s a huge winner for us. We were going crazy celebrating and we continue to, and I was just so grateful. First off that Tony was willing to do that because he’s so protective of his brand and everything. It means a lot to me that he was willing to do that. But second off, I just want you guys to realize that I can’t tell you how many people a day that I meet that come in that are all about, you can tell as they look at you……I just assume it’s what really good looking women struggle with, you meet a guy and you can tell that they don’t really care about you, they’re just interested in everything else.

I get that a lot. It’s hard. As soon as I meet people, even at the certified partner event, a couple of people I met, I was just like, I could tell I was a piece of meat. They were looking me up and trying to tell, this is how we’re going to get this thing from him. It’s just like, I hate that. Whereas, people I do deals with, similar to Ton or whatever, people who come in and genuinely care and serve and help and do stuff.

Last year, I think we only promoted one person last year, Stu McLaren, why? Stu’s awesome. For the last ten years of our life he’s never once asked me for anything. He’s always helped me and served me and given me cool opportunities to serve other people, just such a cool person. So when he came he was the only person we promoted for the last year. And this year we’re probably not promoting anyone. It’s just like, we don’t need to do that. We don’t have to do that. Tony didn’t have to do that. It didn’t help him at all. But the right people, it’s like you’re giving back to them from the relationship.

If I can say anything to you guys, I would say start focusing on relationships without trying to figure out, what’s the ROI in this relationship. I know that I’m very big on that. If you take the disc profile, I think it’s the disc, one of the traits of, one of my traits, everything for me is ROI. What’s the ROI of this conversation? What’s the ROI of doing anything? If there’s not an ROI I don’t like doing it. But with relationships I try to not have an ROI. Just go into it and look at the other person as a human being as opposed to an investment. And just be like, how can I help this person? What do I got that can serve them?

And if you do that from a real, not a fake standpoint where you’re actually in it for the long con, but you’re in it for, this dude’s awesome. I want to help him. Good things will come to you, and that’s how relationships are actually built. You don’t get into relationships with people, typically where the first date you’re trying to size them up and figure out what you get out of it. It’s the one’s where you’re coming in and serving and turn it into amazing relationships. Especially when both people are serving, that’s when the most magic happens.

Anyway, there’s a book called Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, I think it was Harvey Mckay? I don’t know, I never actually read it, but I read the title and that’s the gist I’m trying to share with you guys today. Dig your well before you’re thirsty, because someday you’ll be thirsty. Someday you’re going to have a book launch in ten years from now or whatever that is. Because I dug that well, and I’ve been digging it for ten years, now when it comes, now it’s actually happening.

Same thing in this, it’s interesting, this business for me was always, used to be all about reciprocation, people promote you if you promoted them. It’s like 3 years ago when we launched Clickfunnels we said, we can’t do that anymore. We just can’t. Otherwise our business won’t be able to grow. And it was scary for me, I was like how are we going to grow this company if I’m not reciprocating? Well how else can I reciprocate?

So for the market, for partners, for everyone I’m like, I’ve got to reciprocate by just giving everything all the time. And what’s crazy is people who are promoting this book launch, I look and there’s some of my mentors, people who I look up to more than almost anyone. I look at Mark Joyner, my very first mentor. I look at Alex Mandossian. All these people helping us promote and none of them are doing it like, “Russell you promote me and I’ll promote you back.” They’re all doing it like “man, Russell you have given so much to whatever.” To them, to the community, or whatever and now they’re promoting. It was insane.

So I almost feel like, I always thought the only way to get to do that was through reciprocation and it kind of is true, but it’s a different kind of reciprocation. Not just you promote me I’ll promote you. It’s like legitimately spend the next three years of your life seeing how you can serve your market and the people around you and people and just figure that out. And then when you do they’ll say yes. And that’s cool. That’s really, really cool.

So it was a big break through and hopefully it was good for you guys. So dig your well before you’re thirsty. Build relationships without trying to get anything in return. And then in the long term who knows what will happen. But something might happen, whereas if you go the other way, nothing is going to happen. There you go, you guys.

And the last thing I’ll say is when you cultivate and build those relationships, that is the gift in and of itself. That’s the ROI. I look at Mark Joyner, my first mentor, who we had come out for Funnel Hacker TV, we’ve worked with him. That relationship with him for me is huge. That was worth way more than any him promoting. You know what I mean? Just the benefits of that, getting to know him and being able to know him in a more personal level, was worth 10x more than him ever promoting for us. So I think that’s the result. Getting deep in the relationship is the result, that’s the ROI you’re looking for, any other ROI’s that come are just gravy.

So focus on that relationship and how you can help people and that’s the key. Anyway, I know that’s not like marketing tactile, like what’s the tactics? Here’s the tactic, become really good friends with people and try to help them. It’s not a sexy tactic, but it’s the most important one. So there you go. Alright, I’m out you guys. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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Two cool things you probably didn’t know, that should help you with whatever it is you’re trying to sell.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how being in a live interview made him realize things about his books. He also reveals some top secret information that you won’t want to miss.

Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode.

How being in a live interview caused Russell to think on his toes and helped him realize something about the art and science of business.
And what is the big secret about Expert Secrets that most people don’t realize.

So listen below to hear some cool insights Russell has had in the last few days while doing a bunch of live interviews.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, this is Russell, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I hope you guys are awake because today is certified partner day. We’ve got almost 40 certified partners in Boise at our new office, which is exciting. So I’m going to head out there and in 9 minutes I’m gonna…holy cow 9 minutes, I gotta speed. Always late for everything. The good news is they can’t start without me, I hope.

So I just had a quick message for you guys, because I thought it was interesting. It’s been fun as I’ve launched the book I get to do tons of interviews and podcasts and all this stuff. So people ask you questions, and some questions people ask are the same ones every single time. But other people ask questions that make you go hmmm..How does that song go? Things that make you go hmmm.

So a couple things got me thinking and I’ve got some cool ideas. So I want to share with you guys two things. Number one, it came out of one of the conversations. It was funny because it was someone, I can’t remember even who it was, they were drilling me about, “Why in the world would you write another book? I thought you hated writing books?” I’m like, “I do, it’s so hard.” And then I was like why, why, why and then finally, it’s weird how when you’re on the spot live and you can’t edit and all the sudden magic comes out. I started thinking, I always tell people that this business there’s an art and a science to this business and the problem is the people focus too much on the art, or too much on the science.

If you have the art, it looks good but doesn’t make any money. If the science structurally is right, but there’s no money. It’s gotta have both. We talk about increasing the sex appeal, making things exciting, that’s the art side of this business. But then there’s the science part, which is funnel structuring. I was thinking about it, Dotcom Secrets is the science part of this business and Expert Secrets is like the art. It’s what you’re putting on top of the pages and the structure that make it work, they make it convert, make people interested and engaged and keep coming back to you.

As I said it, I was like that’s so cool. Dotcom Secrets is the science and Expert Secrets is the art, and you gotta have both because this business is a business of art and science. That’s why a lot of people struggle with it. They’re either really good on the technical side or really good on the artsy side, it’s a blend of the two, which is why I think most people should have partners because it’s hard to have everything. No one’s got everything, well maybe a couple of people but not everyone.

So that’s number one cool thing I thought was cool. Number two, if you guys came to Funnel Hacking Live, Todd Brown got up and spoke and shared an example of two books. One was how to outsource your business for profit, or something like that, and one was called the 4 hour work week. And obviously, as you know the 4 hour work week made Tim Ferris famous, and rich and a whole bunch of other cool things. But it came because the hook was right, but both of them are teaching outsourcing. It was the same concept, just the way they packaged it was different.

I wanted to share with you guys something that some of you know, but most of you don’t. This is a little top secret just for you guys who are hanging out on the podcast. I’ve had a lot of friends who are copywriters. It seems like every copywriter wants to go and launch his own copywriting course, and guess what happens to almost all of them? They all bomb, and you know why? Nobody wants to buy copywriting. It’s not exciting or sexy or anything. It’s bleh.

I remember watching, I mean I love John Carlton, but I remember watching the first time he launched his Simple Writing System, I’m like this guy’s the best copywriter in the world, I went to the page and I was like, “Huh.” How do you sell copy? It is not sexy or exciting or anything. I always thought that was interesting. I’ve had so many copywriting buddies go and launch copywriting courses. I’m like, “ugh, Nobody wants to buy copywriting courses. There’s a few people, but not many.”

So what’s interesting, this is my little hint for those who are paying attention. Expert Secrets is my copywriting course. I didn’t call it copywriting, but what’s the book about? It’s about finding your hook, finding your angle, finding your offer, finding your market, creating an actual offer, telling stories, breaking belief patterns. It’s copywriting, but I didn’t call it copywriting.

That’s what I’m going to give to you guys. Think about that. Think about how you position your offers because it’s the difference between making a little bit of money and making a crap ton of money. It’s all in the actual positioning of the offer. Make sure you don’t call it something like How to outsource for fun and profit, because nobody wants that. There’s a few people, but not many. They want a 4 hour work week. That’s what they want. So understand that, understand that it all ties back to what you call your product.

In fact, we’re about to launch our new coaching program. We had two different names for it, both were cool names that people would not give us any money for. We sat there in a room on a whiteboard, actually it was a blackboard with white markers, but that’s beside the point, for like 4 or 5 hours. No not that long, 2 ½ hours, trying to figure out the right hook for it. All the sudden it came out and it was like the angels in heaven were singing. We’re like, “That’s what people will give us money for.” So we changed all t he branding and everything because of it.

Alright guys, I’m walking in, the certified partner meeting is literally happening in 4 minutes. So I gotta go. Talk to you all soon, bye everybody.

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Where you should start focusing your efforts…

On today’s episode Russell gives a quick recap of his week spent with the Harmon Brothers working on a script for a potentially viral video. He also talks about compounding numbers with business and how focusing on one thing will help you compound your customers.

Here are some of the interesting things you will hear in this episode:

Find out what Russell has learned about compounding his customers by focusing all his efforts on pushing people into Clickfunnels.
Learn what you need to do to follow in Russell’s footsteps.
And find out what 3 big things Russell is trying to do this year to get his business to reach the $100 million mark.

Listen below to find out what invention is actually greater than compounding interest.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I just dropped off Dallin, one of my twinners, actually the first born. My first born of my loins. Is that what they say? I don’t know, maybe not. Anyway, at dance class, and I’m heading into the office.

I’m exciting this week, I did this last month too, I did a juice fast week and I lost a bunch of weight and then I went crazy, so I’m doing juice fast week again this week, which will be good. And I just got back from last week, so crazy. Last week, I forgot to tell you guys, I was going to do some podcasts and stuff, but then I didn’t. Sorry about that. We went out, if you guys know who the Harmon Brothers are, if not go to harmonbrothers.com and check it out. They’re the guys that do all the funny viral videos. We did an exchange for them. They had this, one of their viral videos was called Fiberfix.com and it went really viral but their funnel wasn’t doing that well, so we helped them build the funnel in exchange for them writing a script for us.

So we went to a writing retreat this week with them, last week with them. It was cool, they rented a cabin in Sundance for two days, they had 3 writers write scripts for us. They brought them in and then we got to listen to all the writers scripts, which were insanely amazing. From the three scripts we picked the best one and then the writers went down to the basement for 3 hours. Took all the best jokes from the other two scripts and weaved them into the other script and then they came back. And we liked it and gave them feedback and it went back and forth, back and forth for two days until the end they came with this script that is legitimately the most amazing thing on earth.

And then the plan is we were going to go out and produce it, then on Friday I got an email from them saying, “Hey, Russell, it turns out we really love the script, and we really love you and your team and we want to work with you guys on this and actually produce the whole video.” which is exciting. I’m actually heading to the office right now because I have a call with them to figure out the deets.

And for those, who aren’t cool kids yet, deets means details. So figure out some details with these guys and if it works out they’re going to produce the video for us, which is insanely cool. And just by nature of the script, we went and created ten new things on the back end to create…. I can’t even tell you about it now because it’s so vague still in my head, but it’s amazing.

Anyway, I’m really, really, really excited for it and excited to share it with you guys here hopefully in the very near future. But yeah, it’s awesome. If this video hits like it can and it should, I think, at the beginning of the year I said there’s a couple goals I have. Our goal was to get to 100 million members, not 100 million, that would insane, 100 million dollars, which is also insane actually. So the goal is to get to 100 thousand members and I think we started the year at, I don’t remember what we started at, but we are at, I think wait, 39 thousand? Or maybe 40. We’re close to 39 or 40 thousand members. Somewhere in there.

I was like, well I got two big plays to try to, I think I have 3 or 4 big plays this year. For me, I’m always like, I’m going to try to hit a homerun, but I might not. If I hit three or four singles that will equal a homerun. I think, I’m not a baseball guy, but I think so. So I try to have 3 or 4 big things. So number one was book launch, which is going amazingly well by the way. We’re almost two weeks in, we’ve sold 28 thousand copies I think. So that’s going really, really well. Phase two of the launch is starting this week, which is cool. And then number two was this viral video, which now looks like it’s going to hit, which that could bring on an extra 20,30,40 thousand members, so that’s cool. Number three is an infomercial that we’re going to be filming later on this year.

Anyway, we’re just trying a bunch of Hail Mary passes. Getting all my sports analogies messed up. Hail Mary passes, home runs, grand slams, I don’t even know. Double leg to their back, choke them out. A bunch of different things. I told everyone on my team if one or two of these things hit, we’ll hit it. The book launch is hitting perfectly right now, which is awesome. And now the video looks like it’s going to hit. There’s our two and if we get the infomercial as well, it’s going to be amazing. So fun stuff happening over here. I’m just excited.

What I wanted to talk to you about today, I want to help shift your mindset a little bit. I talked a lot about this at my inner circle, at my last inner circle meeting. It’s about compounding interest, maybe not. So compounding interest, some dude who’s famous said that the greatest discovery in the world is compounding interest. So me, someone who doesn’t understand finance and doesn’t really care to that well. I was like, alright, I don’t know what that means, but it sounds awesome. And then I tried to invest because I heard that, and then I saw that I hate investing stuff, so I didn’t really like that.

I kind of left the whole compounding interest thing on the side even though they said it was the greatest invention of mankind. And I went on my way to keep trying to sell stuff. So now fast forward til today, what’s interesting, and again I have no idea if this actually relates to compounding interest, probably doesn’t, but in my mind the concept of compounding, creating something everything else you do compounds upon that core thing. That probably doesn’t make any sense yet, but I’ll put it in perspective.

So for me, for the last 14 years of my life, minus the last two, every time we would do something it was a lot of work and then we would launch something and make a bunch of money. And then that work would disappear. It would evaporate, right. That was the info product game and that was launch game. That was us launching businesses. So with a lot of my business was launching different businesses in different industries and the problem with that, you launch it and then with the customers you got it, if you lock in their business next week, those customers don’t compound.

So if you’re focusing on one business, which is my message to all of you all, and everyone in my inner circle all the time. Focusing on one business because then at least your customers are compounding. Everything you do brings more people to your list, more customers, things like that. It’s a compounding effect from there. So that’s a big, that’s compounding, which is good. That way when you’re focusing all your rollouts and launches and products and everything in one niche, at least the customers are compounding. So every time you do it, it gets better the next time.

When I launched my very first product, it was Zip Brander and I only had 5 customers. Then I launched my second one, which was Article Spider, I got like 30 customers. Then the next one, and over the last twelve years it kept compounding. Customers kept adding up and getting bigger and bigger until today. So it’s always compounding, which is cool from a customer compounding standpoint. But what’s even cooler, is until we had this thing called Clickfunnels, even within that, we still launched and made a bunch of money and get more customers, but then it was back to the drawing board every single day.

What I was telling everyone in our inner circle, and what I want you guys to think about too, figure out your one thing you’re selling, your core thing. For me, Clickfunnels is it. I know obviously, everyone can’t have a Clickfunnels, but everyone can have something like that. It might be a membership site, it might be software, something where it’s like, it doesn’t have to be recurring, but I think it should be. Something where you’re consistently pushing people into this thing that is compounding. By that, what I mean is it’s really cool, when we first launched Clickfunnels, I’d get a text every morning from Stripe telling us how much money we make. And we have 10 different stripe accounts, so we’d get 10 texts a morning. It’s kind of cool, we’ll see the launch we’re doing, we’ll see for the book funnel that’s been launched, it’s done with the 27, 28 thousand books, I can’t remember what we’ve sold right now. It’s almost a million dollars in cash collected.

I’ll see a big huge thing, “$250,000 deposited today from stripe.” Or 100,000 or whatever. Those are cool, I like those they get me excited. But what’s cooler is watching the Clickfunnels one, everything we do now always compounds upon Clickfunnels. They’re coming to buy the book, where do I push them. If you guys went to the book funnel you know. You come for the book, I push you to Clickfunnels. You come into anything and it’s always pushing back to that thing. And I’m watching the compounding of it.

I remember when we first launched Clickfunnels, I would get a text some days there was 0 dollars, some days it was like 10, some days like 100. You see different things. As we double down and really focused all of our efforts on that, that number grows. I remember it got to the point where it’s like, every day we were making $10 thousand dollars a day. And my texts from stripe would say 10 grand a day. 10, 10, 10. I’m like, cool. Then it got to 12, then to 15, then to 18, then to 20.

It wasn’t necessarily that I was promoting Clickfunnels, but I was promoting all these front end offers to push people into Clickfunnels. And that number kept compounding and compounding. From 20 thousand to 30 a day. From 30 a day to 50 a day. 50 a day to 80 a day. 80 a day to 100 a day. 100 a day to 120 a day. 120 a day to 130 a day. It keeps going up and up and up. And it was fun because now it’s like, that’s the goal. That number. Everything is compounding upon that number. Even though I’m not directly ever selling Clickfunnels, all these things I’m doing are continually pushing people into that.

And that becomes for me, the KPI, everyone’s got a KPI in your business. For me it’s that. What’s the daily number we get from Clickfunnels? And as long as you’re doing a lot of cool stuff, that number should go up every single day. For us it goes up every, it’s crazy. I’m so, I can’t believe this is every day, it keeps going up. It’s because there’s so many things compounding now upon the one thing.

For you guys, A couple of things. First off, if you’re doing more than one business, stop because you’re not compounding. Every one of your efforts is watered down in half. When you’re focusing on one core business, everything you do now gives you more customers which compound, which means you get better and better every single day. That’s number one. Number two is having a focal point of where you’re taking all these customers. Something hopefully continuity based, residual based and then knowing that’s the key. Whatever, 250 thousand, or 100 thousand, those big days from the different rollouts are exciting and cool, but I don’t care about them.

The only thing I care about is that compounding residual number. Because that’s the thing that actually matters in the business. That’s the life blood of the business. So it’s continual focus and energy on that. So again, step number one, compounding. As soon as you’re focusing on one business and one customer base that’s how you compound. Then number two is pushing all those people into one core continuity and compounding there. And I don’t know about compounding interest, it’s the greatest invention in the world, but I tell you what, focusing on one business and on one continuity and pushing everyone into that, I think that’s the greatest invention of all business.

Anyway, that’s what I got today you guys. I’m at the office. I’m going to go prep my call to Harmon Brothers. We’re going to build this video out. We’re going to change the world. It’s going to get everyone in the world to become entrepreneurs, start using our software, which is so cool. And I’m excited for it. Appreciate you guys. If you haven’t got your book yet, go to expertsecrets.com. Get your copy of the book. We re-tweaked the whole funnel. So you may wanna go see the new version of it. There’s a whole bunch of new upsell, downsell process, now it’s a lot better. It’s increased our cart value by a lot, which is kind of fun.

I’ll have to tell you that story another day. There’s a really cool story, when we were at the cabin that happened, so remind me and maybe I’ll tell you that another day. If I forget, let me know. It was really, really cool though and it created a new OTO upsell offer that’s converting really, really well. And it’s pretty exciting. That’s all I got you guys. I appreciate you all, have an amazing day. Talk to you guys soon.

View Details

This is when, what we do, becomes a really fun game.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how many copies of the book have sold in the first 6 days and what his goal is. He also talks about how making tweaks to your funnel after it’s up and running can help you beat the control.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

Find out how many sales Expert Secrets got in the first 6 days and how it compares to Dotcom Secrets.
Find out how Russell cleared his head in order to come up with new ideas of how to tweak the funnel and increase sales.
And hear what Russell recommends to beat your control.

So listen below to find out how you can make a good funnel even better after it’s been up and running for a few days.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to a rainy, very rainy Marketing In Your Car. I just dropped off Dallin, my oldest twin who is my son who loves extracurricular activities, at dance class, early morning. So heading back into the office now and excited.

So the book launch has been live for I think, almost 6 days now. And in 6 days we sold a little over 20 thousand books. What? Crazy. Last year it took us the entire month to sell 20 thousand. I don’t even think we got to 20 thousand, we were close to 20 thousand. I can’t remember exact numbers back then.

It was pretty exciting for us and we haven’t even pulled out the big guns yet. Those who are watching, some crazy stuff’s happening. At 20 thousand and I think we should hit at least 50 or 60 thousand books sold, which is really cool. So I’m really proud and excited for that.

So I’m heading into the office right now because a bunch of things are happening. In fact, the number one thing, well it’s interesting, I don’t know about you but when you’re in the middle of a book launch, launching a million things at once, which we’ve obviously been doing. So my stress levels are a little higher than typical, not stress levels but you know what I mean. Just a lot of stuff happening. It’s been interesting, I think it’s almost like you’re so close to something that you can’t, you don’t know what to do.

So the book launch has been going really well, in fact, our average cart value right now is about $34. So for everyone who buys the book, on average we make about $34 in the funnel, which is great. We keep thinking, how do we make it better, how do we make it better? There’s got to be a way to make it better. I’ve been blank. I don’t even know what to do. I look at it like, ahhh I got nothing.

So anyway, I bought a thing called a float tank a while ago, it’s in my house and I hardly ever use it. I feel bad. In fact, I clean it more often than I use it, it’s kind of a pain to keep. Looking back now, I definitely would not get a float tank in my house. But they are cool. I promise you, somewhere in your hometown, there’s probably a float tank place. If you Google float tank and your city I bet you’ll find one. But basically it’s a huge salt sensory deprivation tank. It’s like a thousand pounds of salt, so you lay and float on the top and sit there. Typically I do my float tank, I go in there and listen to music or listen to CD’s or talks or whatever. But this time for some reason the music thing wasn’t playing, and this is Saturday night, yes Saturday night. Went in there and music thing wasn’t going to work. I was like, ahhh whatever, I’ll just try to focus and do my whole meditation thing. And I’m not a very good meditate-er at all, by any stretch.

But I sat there and laid there and tried to focus on my breathing, and tried to think about the major things. And it was cool because the first time, I think I had time to reset and not be in the motion of everything. I just sat there for like an hour. I sat there for 45 minutes, and I passed out and woke up when my alarm went off. But I didn’t get any great ideas while I was sitting in there, but I feel like it was a flush. Like a cleanse or something because then when I went back inside, it was probably like 11 o’clock at this time, maybe almost 12 o’clock.

A float tank when you, an hour in the float tank feels like you slept for 5 or 6 hours, so I felt really good. I got up and was like huh. So I ended up staying up til like 2 or 3 in the morning. The next day I had church, which was yesterday, I’m at church and all the sudden the ideas started flowing. I was like, what? Where are these coming from. And it was almost like there was a blockage and that flushed it and then all the sudden it was like, it just started flowing and I’m sitting there and I’m like, oh my gosh I can’t even keep up with these. So in church I tried to pay attention and listen and be good, while I’m taking notes, I can’t forget this stuff. This is really good crap, I gotta make sure I won’t forget it.

So I’m like typing in my notepad and try to go back out and focus and then all the sudden it’s like, keep flooding in the ideas. It was like, gall, this is so cool. So I got this huge flood of inspiration. So this morning I woke up early, at 5:00, which I’m already hurting really bad. It’s 8:30 and I can barely keep my eyes open. I don’t know, this is going to be a long week I think. But I got up and started re-tweaking our funnels. Our average cart value right now, I think, what did I just say? 34 or 36, I can’t remember exactly what it was as of this morning. My goal is to get to 40, and I think I can and I have some ideas.

So I’m going to be plugging in all these split tests and different things. I’m actually going to record two different upsell videos right now. Because I think I figured out what I messed up on, which is so cool. It’s the part I love about funnels. So for anyone that’s got funnels that don’t work, you need funnels that do work. I want to stress this process. I talked about it at Funnel Hacking Live, and I’m going to talk more and more about it. In fact, if I ever happen to do book three, hopefully I never do. But if I happen to do it, this will be the premise of it. Not the premise, but the beginning of it, understanding this piece of it.

So basically, we drive traffic, we spend time, and we look at the numbers. Based on the numbers we try to figure out, now we know what it is, how do we make it better? It’s interesting, if you look at the copywriting world, what will happen is that, big companies like Agora and Boardroom and things like that, where they’re very copy intensive and they hire the best copywriters in the world. The copywriter, whoever writes the copy is called the control. They get a royalty on that control as long as it wins. But as soon as the control is written, all these other writers come in and try to beat it, beat the control.

So they’re all trying to write different headlines, intros, hooks, angles, different things to beat your control. They’re not rewriting the whole letter, they’re just taking what you already had and trying to figure out what can increase it. And if they win, then they get the royalties. So that’s everyone’s job, just try to beat the control. It’s almost like for us, after you get the funnel launched and live and everything, it’s coming back and saying how do I beat the control? And then trying to figure that out.

So it’s cool, you can step back and look at all the pieces. So I look at over the last 6 days, and I sold a lot of books, but we got a lot of data. What’s our opt in percentage, and how many people are actually putting in their credit card? How many people are buying the Black Box versus the book? How many people are buying the order form bump? How about the upsells? The downsells? Then looking at comments on Facebook and other things and trying to see where are the sticking points.

After you identify those, then it’s not that hard to come back and tweak it and shift it. So I’m excited today, to try to retweak those. Amongst the fact that we also are doing another 20 Facebook lives today to promote the book. So it’s going to be kind of crazy. But that’s kind of the game plan. So that’s what I’m doing today. I hope you guys are doing it as well.

Look at your funnels and try to beat your control because it’s a fun game. And if you’re too close, like I was, go rent a float tank for an hour, go float in it, who knows? Maybe like me all day, start flushing out. Or find someone else on your team and have them try to beat the control. Or hire someone and say, “If you beat my control, I’ll pay 100 bucks a try, or I’ll pay you a thousand if you beat it.” Or whatever, and just have people start making it a game, because that’s when it starts getting really, really fun.

Anyway, this week I’m going to take you guys on some fun journeys. We’re actually going to, if you know who the Harmon Brothers are, if you’ve ever seen the Squatty potty commercial, or Fiber Fix, or Snap Books, or any of the awesome viral videos, we’re working with them to write a script for Clickfunnels, so I’m heading down to Utah tomorrow, I think. So I’ll take you on the journey and tell you all the cool stuff I learn along the way as well, hanging out with those guys. Anyway, I’m at the office, going to get some work done, create some videos, make some funnels, try to beat my control and that’s going to be fun. So we’ll talk to you guys soon.

View Details

The method behind my new blog, podcast, and YouTube channel.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how many book sales he has so far. He also talks about the new blog he is doing and how he plans to have time to do it, and how he’ll keep it consistent.

Here are some of the coolest things you will hear in this episode.

Find out if Russell was able to reach his first week goal in book sales within the first 24 hours.
Hear what Russell’s new blog will be about and find out the cool way he has come up with to get it done consistently despite his hatred for Word Press.
And finally find out how to get a hint about a top secret item Russell recently purchased that he thinks is super awesome.

So listen below to find out if Russell will beat or match his goal number of books sold in the first week.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. Guess what? Guess what? First off, it’s raining outside, which is cool. Second off, I’m heading to the office which is cool. And third off, it’s been a little over 24hours since we launched the book and guess what? We sold over 10 thousand copies! What?

Honestly, my goal when we first got started was 10 thousand copies the first week. Because last time it took us almost a month to sell 10 thousand copies, like, “If we did it in a week that would be amazing.” We did it yesterday. It wasn’t quite 24 hours, it was 27, technically it was a little longer than a day, but I’m counting it. I’m calling it 10 thousand in a day, because that’s what we did.

Anyway, so insane. Everyone who first off, bought, thank you everyone who promoted, thank you to everyone who’s continuing to promote, that’s awesome. This morning I woke up, we were at 12,500 books and it just keeps on rolling. So I’m just going to keep on rolling and see what with the Dotcom Secrets book either we’re almost or we just hit 100,000 copies or somewhere in there, total for the last 2 ½ years. So I think with this momentum we’re going to hit 100,000 copies this month. That was our initial goal, which I thought was kind of farfetched but now I’m like, “Dang, I wonder if we actually could.” Which is crazy and exciting all wrapped up into one amazing thing. Anyway, that’s kind of what’s happening over here on this side of the world. It’s just insanely cool.

Alright, so today I want to talk about, I think I’ve talked about this before, mentioned it, but I’m trying to get it live today. It’s technically it’s kind of live, I didn’t mean to get it live, but I forgot I made a new footer graphic, and everyone in the footer started clicking in, so now technically it’s live because there’s comments and things happening.

First off, the nice thing with Clickfunnels now is you can save sections. So I created a cool footers section, that I’m putting on all of my pages. Actually there’s two footers. There’s a footer for my main pages, and then there’s a mini footer for sales and upsell pages. So anyway, there’s two footers, but I designed them perfectly and now I just, every page I make, I just go to add it, boom, boom, boom and then they’re on all the pages.

So the one above it, it links to my new blog, which is a journey of how I went from zero to a million copies of the book, which is kind of cool. I’m calling this a journey blog, which someone may have already called that, but I’m copying it. I initially saw Groove HQ do it with their software. They told this journey of how they went from zero to 100,000 MRR. And then I saw Neil Patel do it. Zero to 100,000 visitors a month on his blog. So I’m doing it, going from zero to a million copies of the book sold.

So I think I got the first 8 posts up there. For the last two months I’ve been doing these posts, one a week, kind of going through all the prelaunch stuff with the book. So it’s kind of cool, it’s this journey blog that takes you through this journey because I figure, I think blogging is boring because it’s just these random blog posts about whatever. But with a journey blog, it’s kind of like these podcasts. People tell me they listen to two or three episodes of the podcast, they get hooked and they go back to the very beginning and binge listen to every episode, which is kind of cool and hard to do when you have a two hour long show. That’s why I like doing these short ones.

You can go and you can binge listen and it’s the same with this blog. I want people coming in on week 22, reading something cool we did and be like, wait, there are 80 thousand books sold, how did they start this journey? They can start on page one and going through and boom, going through this whole timeline journey of zero to a million and binge read up the entire blog. So that’s kind of the goal with the blog, which I think is kind of cool. So you guys can see it, it’s at russellbrunson.com. I haven’t really started promoted it yet. So if you want to see it, I’m trying to get it all done today. Because I’m also adding links to all of our courses, our products, everything else I do on that blog. Just because right now, I don’t really have anywhere that has that.

People always ask me, “Where can I buy your stuff Russell?” I’m like, you have to randomly find a place. Soon it’ll be like, go to russellbrunson.com, my blog is there and you can find links to all of our products, events, training programs, software. So that’s kind of what’s happening over there. But it’s kind of fun.

So the journey blog is happening. We have a YouTube show that’s going to be happening. And obviously we have this podcast, and it’s kind of cool. I’m starting to get a way to publish in all these different platforms.

I’ve struggled for the last 14 years figuring that out. How do you blog? How do you video? How do you do all these different things? And it’s really figuring out for you if it’s something you can be consistent at. When I launched this podcast it was like something that, I call it Marketing In Your Car because, as you know, it’s the drive from my house to my office and I do that every day. And usually I don’t have time to do anything else. I’m driving. So it’s the perfect time for me to do. I know I consistently can do it. Which is why it’s been 350 or 400 episodes or whatever. Because it’s an easy thing for me to do.

The blog was hard for a long time, because I didn’t know how to blog or why to blog, and now I have a thing. It’s like, once a week I document what we did this week to sell a million copies of the book. It’s just like, “Oh I can do that.” I don’t actually write the blog. I hate Word Press. In fact, every time I log into Word Press, I don’t swear but if I were a swearing person I would be cursing. I hate it. So I figured it out. I got two guys on my team, Levi, who’s a really good writer. So I vox him my blog post. He logs in and writes the whole thing. And then Jake is a great designer comes in and designs it all up. Now I got a blog post. I’m a blogger.

All I do is I do one vox a week on Friday before I leave. Recapping what we did in the last week to sell a million copies of the book, which is super cool. Something I can actually consistently do. YouTube thing is the same thing. We’ve been trying to figure out a nice YouTube strategy and we’re about to launch a TV show called Funnel Hacker TV, which is insane. The only problem with it, it’s an hour long episode, and we’ve recorded 10 episodes the last year and then all this effort to get them all done and live. So they’re going to be going live in a little bit.

But I was like, my YouTube strategy can’t just be big hits, I need something in between so what I did is I bought this little Sony camera, this little handi-cam thing. And we’re calling Funnel Hacker TV behind the scenes show. So as I do everything throughout the day, I’m just carrying this little thing around recording and telling the story. “Okay, this is what’s happening. This is where we’re going.” Telling the story. Then there’s a dude I met, named Kevin who’s awesome. I just drop all the videos from the camera each night into drop box and he’s turns them into these cool shows. It’s like, I just gotta carry this camera with me and record stuff, and if I don’t feel like recording in the day, then I don’t. But if I try to 3 or 4 days a week to have actually cool stuff happening, drop it in the dropbox for him, he makes a video and now we’re….anyway, that’s going to be the YouTube channel that we’re launching soon.

So it’s kinda cool. I’ve got a couple different channels happening. I always tell people that you shouldn’t try to publish at 12 places right at the get go, but eventually you should be moving towards that. But mastering one channel first and then slowly adding things in as you can. But now that I’m getting into my daily routine, into my routine, it’s not super difficult or super hard. It’s just taking a little bit of time. It takes 6 minutes a day to do my podcast, it takes 10 minutes a week to do my blog and it takes an extra minute throughout the day each time I’m doing something, just kind of explain what I’m doing, instead of just doing it.

Anyway, it’s kind of cool. That’s what’s happening here. So there’s the timeline blogs, because that’s the next thing. YouTube channel will be next after that. Oh and then there’s other cool stuff. But I don’t want to get you guys overwhelmed. People are like, “You do too much stuff Russell.” I’m like, “No, I spend a year or 5 or 10 years figuring out how to plug it into my daily routine and then it’s not doing a lot of extra work. It’s just like oh.” “Russell, you’re a blogger now.” No, it literally takes me 10 minutes a week, so it’s not that hard.

Alright, with that said, hopefully you guys are thinking about your content plan and schedule and things. And figuring out a way to do it that you can be consistent with. I got one last hint for you guys, I’m not going to tell you the answer, but I’m going to give you a hint.

If you go to 2commaclub.com and I think it’s just the number 2commaclub.com, you’ll see our two comma club and all our members. And in the video I tell a story about somebody who for me, broke the four minute mile. Okay, I want you to go and watch that video because there’s a hint, something….I just purchased something related to that video and I can’t tell you what it is yet. But it’s insanely cool. I’ve only told one person ever and it’s Stu McLaren and I told him right before he did an interview yesterday, because I couldn’t hold it in anymore. No one else knows yet, it’s kind of top secret. People will find out two weeks from now. Anyway, watch that video, I purchased something insanely cool based on something I talk about in that video. That’s all you get, that’s the hint. Stay tuned for future episodes to find out the answer. But it’s super cool, and I can’t even wait to share with you guys. That’s all I got. Appreciate you all, have a fun day and I’m going to go work on my blog. Bye everybody.

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A behind the scenes glimpse of what’s been happening the first twelve hours of our book launch.

In this episode Russell gives a quick recap of the first twelve hours of the book launch. He shares how he felt when it looked like the average cart value didn’t look how expected, and what happened next.

Here are the important things you will hear on today’s episode:

Why you should always schedule launches for the afternoon rather than the morning.
Why the average cart value was so low, and how that made Russell feel.
And finally find out what the final numbers of the first twelve hours are and how it compares to the goal for the first week.

So listen below to find out how the big book launch turned out yesterday.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome….oh crap. I almost just, backing out of my driveway I literally just almost backed into a wall. And you guys would have caught it live here on Marketing In Your Car.

I hope you guys are all doing awesome today. Today, well yesterday was book launch day. And today is the day after book launch day and I bet you’re wondering how it’s going. So I wanted to tell you.

As you probably know, actually I can’t remember exactly how much I told you guys. Leading to the book launch, as with any launch, there’s a lot of stress and time and energy and stuff that goes into it. So Monday night we basically were at the office super, super late. And then at 3 o’clock got done, went home and came back Tuesday. Luckily we set up the launch time for 4 eastern, which we had 2 o’clock our time. So we had til 2 o’clock to get everything done, which I highly recommend on launch day.

We used to launch days at 9am in the mornings. It was always a nightmare, so we push them out late in the day, that way you’ve got time in the morning. We had about 5 hours. Everyone got back out here at 9, so we had 9 til 2, so 5 hours to get everything done. And we start moving and scrambling and going and going. It’s crazy, no matter how much stuff you have, that’s why it’s good to pick a launch date, because otherwise you’ll never actually get done. Because we never would have gotten it done ever. Even staying up all night and all morning, everything, it still was I think 9 minutes late before the funnel went live.

It’s funny, because you have wish list stuff you want to do to make it smaller and smaller and smaller, til the point where you’re like, “Alright, this is what we HAVE to do.” And then it’s like, “Oh crap, it’s got to go live, what are the stuff we have to cut out?” and it’s just kind of crazy.

So you launch it and sit back and you wait. And this is honestly for me, the worst time. It’s weird because you feel like it’s going to be this huge climatic boom, but it’s like the opposite, you get this huge climatic thing and then it stops. And then you’re just like, “What’s happening?” and then we start sending emails, but because us and 8 million other affiliates are all emailing the same day from Actionetics, Actionetics gets backed up and our emails aren’t going out and all sorts of other stuff starts happening. But luckily a lot of people were waiting, anxiously waiting to buy. So book sales started coming in, boom, boom, boom.

So we’re watching the sales come in at first and then we’re watching the stats and numbers to see where things are at and obviously it’s hard because the first group of people to come through are your hyperactive buyers, it’s you guys and you guys jack up our stats. I don’t trust our stats that early. But it’s still you’re watching to see and be curious. So we’re watching all the stats and the stats looked good but there’s this new stat dashboard in Clickfunnels, I didn’t even know it was there. I remember we talked about it at Funnel Hacking Live, but I hadn’t seen it. So I clicked on it and it was amazing because you can see the sales from everything. Front end products, upsells, order form bumps. Everything. So you get a glimpse of here’s what everything is.

So I’m looking at it all, based on numbers it looked good. Then there’s this number up here that said, “average cart value.” And the average cart value number was horrible. And I was like, “huh?” I keep watching it and as one hour turned into two, and the average cart value number kept getting worse and worse. I was almost to the point of depression and honestly I was coming back to my team like, “Okay, what do we do? Do we go and add in a whole other upsell?” because the cart value wasn’t as high as we needed it to be and all these millions of things start going through your head, so I’m like, “ I don’t want to add another upsell.” because I wanted…. this funnel is, as we talked about in the last podcast, is a short funnel. There’s offers in there, but it’s a short funnel because I was trying to shorten it. But then there’s longer on the value size.

So over the next 21 days, where it monetizes amazing, but I don’t know if affiliates are short sighted typically. They’re not looking at 21 days, looking at what happed today. So it’s like, I need to be high enough to make sure affiliates were happy and all that kind of stuff. Totally stressing out, freaking out and trying to figure things out. And then I think Steven or someone was like, “I forgot to reset the stat data before it went live.” Which means all our test purchases were in there and everything. So it’s like huh, so I had John go and actually pull all the data. Delete all of the other purchases and he’s drawing a map and everything, looking at everything.

He came back and like, “Here’s our numbers.” Boom, boom, boom. “Based on our numbers our average cart value right now is $39.” And I was like, “What? No, the stats here say it was at $19.” And he’s like, “no, based on the actual numbers we’re at $39.” And I’m like, “Are you kidding me.” $39 is perfectly aligned with what we need to make this whole thing work. And all the sudden, it was funny, I went from wanting to cry and rebuild the whole funnel to, wait a minute this is exactly how we needed it to be. So there’s this huge sigh of relief. Then I’m like, “wait, make sure you’re right. Do the numbers again because I don’t want to be celebrating and then find out in an hour from now that I shouldn’t have been celebrating. So do the numbers again.”

“Yes, this is exactly what it is.” We looked at the numbers and it was like, oh thank heavens. There was one stat in our stat dashboard that wasn’t correct and then also a bunch of other data. But when all was said and done it was awesome. Then I was like, “This is awesome. Let’s put some fuel on the fire.” So I did a Facebook Live and started doing more stuff. Then finally all my emails started going out at like 6 or 7 at night. and now it’s been 12 hours and as of today we have sold, this morning it was 6300 copies of the book. What? My initial goal was 10,000 week one. And now Dave told me this morning our goal is 10,000 for the first 24 hours. So that’s about to happen.

So I’m going to go in there right now. I’m about to virtual book tour, which basically means I’ve got 15 people lined up today. We’re going to be doing Facebook Lives’ onto their audiences, they’re going to interview me about the book and when the interview is done, we’re going to logging onto their account, we’re going to be playing ads to promote that Facebook Live to their audience. Which is I think, the future of JV, but we’re the first to kind of really test it. So I’ll let you guys know how it works. But it’s basically going on a book tour, like real authors.

Real authors? I shouldn’t say that. If you look at traditional people, when the book comes out, what do they do? They go on Jay, I guess it’s not Jay Leno anymore. I haven’t watched TV for so long. They go on Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, they do the media network that way. So we’re doing that, but we’re kind of doing it through Facebook. So we’re doing Facebook Lives’ to people’s audiences.

Then affiliates typically don’t, I don’t know they’re short, I mean they’re amazing people and I’m the same way, but as affiliates, I make fun of myself, we’re kind of short sighted. We want to see cash immediately, and we don’t want to do anything for that cash. Because we don’t have to, we’re affiliates. We’re just good at making money. So we have to do that. So basically it’s like, “Okay you get on, you have ten minutes to interview Russell and it’s done. And then Russell will spend his money to promote that post to your people. And that’s the goal and the game plan.”

So that’s going to be fun, we’re trying that today. In fact, it’s starting in 14 minutes. I got to go. I’ll let you guys know how it goes. But that’s the recap so far of the first 12 hours of the book launch. It’s been amazing. Average Cart Value is sticking at about $38-$39 dollars. If you do the math on that, 63….we’re at about a quarter of a million dollars in cash collected the first 12 hours on the free book offer, which is awesome. So funnels work you guys. Once again, proving it, practicing what I preach. If you haven’t bought the book yet, go to Expertsecrets.com. Buy the book, slowly the funnel is working. It’s exciting. Anyway, appreciate you guys, have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye everybody.

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Hours before we launch our new book, these are my thoughts.

On today’s episode Russell talks about his book launch and how the funnel works and why he thinks it will increase cart value.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

Why Russell thinks shrinking the size of the funnel will help increase cart value for his book launch.
And why building a relationship on the back end is so important and has the potential to make much more money.

So listen below to hear how the funnel works for the book launch today.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, guess what today is? Today is book launch day and I’m so excited with this really weird underlying feeling of being so tired. We totally were up last night at the office until 3 and now it’s 9. So that’s 6 hours since we were…..that’s 4 ½ hours of sleep. That’s pretty good. So a little tired, but feel good and excited and nervous all wrapped up into one huge thing.

The book launch goes live in 5 hours from right now. So we’re going in I have to finish the initial sales page, sales page for selling only a free book, it’s pretty intense and amazing and exciting and I cannot wait for you all to see it. In fact, by the time you hear this, it’ll probably be live. So that’s what’s happening today. We’re going live. This is 18 months worth of work and effort and stress all coming down to today.

It’s funny because it’s interesting at our events we do a hack a thon and make people stay up late and work and get a project done. At our certified partner event we make people do a hack a thon where they stay late. At our FHAT event we do that. There’s something about having a deadline that makes things get done. Because we’ve had a long time to work on this funnel but until it was like, k this is happening tomorrow. There’s just something about deadlines that make things actually get done. It’s kind of like how urgency and scarcity makes people buy, urgency and scarcity makes you get stuff done.

So we’ve got 5 or 6 of us hanging out at the office last night, we ordered sushi, working on the funnels and the pages and the videos and all the stuff. It’s turning out cool. So I know they’re all doing testing now and making sure all the order flow works and nothing breaks and all these kind of things. But that’s kind of what’s happening. I’m excited.

This is going to be a short one because I’m almost to the office already and I got a lot of work to do to get this thing live. But my one thing I wanted to share with you guys that I thought was cool, I talked to the inner circle group about this, back in the day I used to think that the goal of funnel was to sell people a thousand different ways. So we used to have these funnels that were really long. Not a good long either. It was like, upsell, downsell, upsell, downsell, just kept going until people hated me. And I thought that was the power of funnels and it’s not.

You can make a lot of money off somebody once through a funnel, but if you do it right, you make a lot of money off them forever. It should leave them having a better experience than without buying. Or it should make the buying experience better and not a worse experience; otherwise the funnel was a bad thing. And I don’t want these to be bad things for me or for anyone.

So I’ve been and you’ve all been into funnels where you get caught in this trap of upsells and downsells and it’s horrible. So my whole mindset this launch is how do we shorten the funnel? Which seems counterintuitive, but I want to shorten the funnel and then extend the value on the back. So what that means is basically when you go to book funnel you notice a couple of things. Page one you put in your shipping address, then page two basically you go from the book, to we upgrade you to the funnel hacker black box and also put in the fast product creation training.

So even though it’s a free book, during the check out process people will spend almost $70. So we increased our average cart, potential average cart value that much even though it’s a free offer. And then we just only have one real upsell. So the upsells there. If you say no to those there’s a downsell, but other than that it’s over. And then the transaction ends and on the thank you page, this is where we start the extending of the relationship building side of it.

So you come in the thank you page, there’s a 90 minute video of me training, which is one of my best, I’m proud of it, one of the best videos. So they get that, they get 90 minutes of education and training and it’s amazing. And the call to action at the end of the training is an opt in to this web class. They opt in to the web class and there’s 2 hours and 20 minutes of training that happens over the next few days.

Anyway, when you look at it, it’s like I’m extending, I’m shrinking the cart while still increasing the average cart value, then extending the value on the back side of it. But anyway, that five day class pushes them into a $997 Clickfunnels thing and then from there it transitions to the next thing. But it’s just interesting.

So my thought for today, first off make your funnels cool so people have a good experience and they enjoy the process. Shrink the size of the funnel while increasing the average cart value in a cool way that people enjoy. Then extend the back end follow up funnels through the training and education to build the relationship moving forward with people. Anyway, that’s my thoughts. I might be completely wrong, but I think I’m right. So we’ll find out soon, like 5 hours from now. Anyway, appreciate you guys for listening. I hope you have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

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My new secret formula to sell everything I sell, for free.

In this episode Russell talks about his new book funnel that is launching this week and how he shifted the way he is selling it to hopefully make the offer irresistible.

Here are some of the interesting things you can look forward to in today’s episode:

How shifting an offer by making it free, makes the offer irresistible.
How Russell can still make money when everything is free.
And How Russell is using things he recently learned from Brendon Burchard in his book funnel.

So listen below to find out how you can still make money when everything is free.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome back, I’m glad to have you guys here. I just got done with my daughter’s soccer practice, or not practice, it was a game and they did good. Now I’m heading home to go grab sandwiches for everybody. My wife and I took different cars because I had to film an upsell video real quick. Anyway, I got the upsell video done and then flew out here to the soccer game and now I’m heading back home.

I’m grabbing some Jimmy Johns on the way for the kiddos, some sandwiches for the adults, which will be kind of fun. So that’s what’s happening in my personal life. But I got something, I don’t normally do this, this time of day, but I’ve got something exciting I want to share with you guys that I think is going to be huge, huge, huge for value.

One of the things on my mind right now is offers. How do you create an offer that’s so irresistible that people have to give you money? There’s no logical way. One of the biggest, sorry, I didn’t finish my sentence. There’s no logical way for someone to no to you. Alex Mendosian from the Inner Circle, as we were talking, he’s one of the kings of creating offers that are so good you have to be an idiot…..he figures out a way to first off, to build gyms by giving people exactly what they want for free. But then, he’s getting paid 500 dollars to do that, don’t ask me how he does it, because it’s a little complicated to explain.

Then he got gym owners to basically let him come in and build their gyms for them, for free and in exchange they give him 50 thousand dollars. Once again, how does he do that? I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s pretty cool. And it’s awesome, so he’s really, really good at that. There’s other people who are really good at. I watch as other people struggle. They’re like, ‘Man, I created this course and no one’s buying it.” And it’s like, “The problem is you’re selling the course. That’s not sexy, nobody just wants to buy a course.” You have to understand that. To create, if you look at when we launched Clickfunnels, you look at the webinar that’s taken us to where we are today, if you notice this one little intricacy, I didn’t sell Clickfunnels on the webinar.

“What Russell? I thought you sold Clickfunnels, that’s how you built it up so big.” No, I didn’t. If you look at the offer, what the offer was when you buy Funnel Hacks for $997, you buy this course that’s amazing for $997, when you do that you get Clickfunnels for free for the next 6 months. That’s the offer. You look at that and you’re like, huh. Yes I want Clickfunnels for free, so I will buy the course.

So I created an offer that’s, because what they really want is Clickfunnels. I’m like, I’m going to give you Clickfunnels for free, who wants it for free? “I want it for free.” Sweet. When you invest in this training course, you get it for free. That little shift was huge for us. Before I was selling Clickfunnels, and you get this Funnel Hacks thing for free, what they really wanted was Clickfunnels, so I give them that for free when they buy the course. Shifting the offer. Same products, same deliverables, different way you structure the offer.

As I was telling you about Brendon Burchard, Brendon was showing me some of their offers and this one, I’ll kind of walk you guys through it, but he showed me this really cool process he does called the seven day launches, and I showed the inner circle meetings. I walked everybody through it in our groups. People are all going nuts, we’re about to launch our first, which I’m excited for. But what’s interesting is as I was looking at his offer, it’s brilliant because….How do I explain it?

Basically he creates a course for people live, so you get to watch for 12 hours as he creates an actual course, and you see the whole thing live. So then the average mind would say, “Okay, the product I’m going to sell now is that course.” The context of this is kind of hard, because you guys don’t have the back story, but just pretend like you understand. He creates a course, let’s people watch it live and at the end he offers a product. So the logical thing would be to sell the course, they just saw it, they want it. But he doesn’t sell the course, instead he sells a different course, gives a huge 50% discount on that course. When they buy that they get the thing that they just watched him create for free.

So it’s shifting the offer, which is the magic. So as I’ve been kind of thinking through this, I was launching, we’re launching the Expert Secrets book in a few days, and today I came in the office and the funnel I had was good, they were all good offers, but a good offer doesn’t make you tens of millions of dollars, like an insane, irresistible offer does. So I kind of took our existing funnel, scratched all that and said, ‘we’re starting over.” And I shifted the whole thing and we changed the funnel and the offers and now it’s insanely good.

Should I walk you guys through the whole funnel? I have a little time, okay we’ll do that. So this is what’s going to happen in the funnel. Somebody will come to the page and you’ll notice all the ads about free book, free book, free book. Why would I do that? Irresistible offer. Free book, you cover shipping. The message is always like, I’ll pay for the book, you pay for the shipping. That’s the message, irresistible offer, “Okay I want the book.”

They go to buy the book, they put in step number one, shipping address. Step number two says, “cool, here’s the book for free like we said. Or you can upgrade right now and get the Funnel Hacker Black Box, which gives you both of my books, plus these other four books, plus these other cool things and it’s just $37.” So they can upgrade, which is again another irresistible offer. You’re going from this to this other thing and it’s still irresistible. So there’s the irresistible offer.

Then there’s an order form bump, which again is another irresistible offer. “hey you’re going to get blah for free when you buy this training course at a huge discount.” Or something like that, I haven’t figured that one out exactly yet. But there will be a training course there, which is awesome. Then the upsell.

The upsell was going to be, I recorded both Dotcom Secrets, and Expert secrets audiobooks, I was going to sell that. My hard cost is kind of expensive. It’s about $40 for me to have these MP3’s that are shipped. They’re not Chinese ones, they’re actually American ones and they’re more expensive, but they’re really, really cool. You can do double speed on the MP3 player and a bunch of other cool things. So it’s a really cool offer product. I was going to sell that but I’m like, Okay, my hard costs are I think close to, I can’t remember exactly, I think close to $40. So I was like, what if I sell this for $100? But I’m like, I have to pay affiliates 40% commission, it gets really expensive really fast. So there’s not very much margin there, but I need the margin in there to be able to do what I need to do. I need the margin to be able to buy ads and all those kind of things.

So I’m like, what would I do? So I said, what if we do this, what if we increase the price to $150 for the MP3 player. And then its expensive MP3 player. I was like, wait. What if we shift the offer. So we shifted the offer. So what I’m doing now instead is like, “Look, if you guys want I will give you this MP3 player for free. You get it completely free. But to get it for free you have to invest in this course right here which is A Perfect Webinar Secrets training course. The training course sells for $297 but what you’re going to do is you’re going to get, because you’re on this page, you get a 50% discount. So you get the entire course for $147, you get half off, if you buy right now and you get the MP4 player for free.” Boom.

Boom, did you guys hear the bomb drop? Boom, irresistible offer. Because who doesn’t want the MP3 player for free? You want it and you’re like, you only get it when you buy this course, but you get a 50% discount on that course and all the sudden it’s an irresistible offer.

I look at my other courses I’ve done in the past, usually like $197 to $297 offer, I’m getting 5-7% that take that. I’m excited to find out what the percentage is on this. My guess is I’ll be in double digits. We’ll be hopefully at least in high double digits. That’s kind of cool. We’ll find out, time will tell.

I remember a long time ago, Anik Singal and Mike Filsaime put out a product called Launch Tree, and I remember one of the things they said in there was, “You want to say the word free a million times on the upsell page.” For example let’s say you sell ten CD’s on the upsell page, you want to be like, “You get these 9 CD’s for free when you invest in this one right here. You buy this one here you get the other 9 for free.” Try to figure out how you make your offer free. It’s all about how you make it free, free, free.

Now I’m giving away a free MP3 player, when you get 50% discount on this course you need anyway. So that’s the irresistible offer. And then if they say no to that, the down sell is like, “okay, how about this, if you don’t want the MP3 player, it costs me $50 to ship it to you anyway. How about this, it’ll save us both money. I won’t ship it to you, you get the digital copy, it’s only $97 dollars.” So we drop sell that and then I’m going to do one other cool thing on the down sell. You get the digital whatever or it’s like, “How about this, or if you decide to actually get the MP3 player, I’ll throw in these other cool bonuses as well.” To push you over the edge.

That’s going to be kind of cool. Then the next page I’m going to thank them and then I’m going to say basically, “It’s time to start your education and this first three chapters of the book are about building a massive movement. This is a 90 minute presentation I did at Funnel Hacking Live about building a mass movement and I want you to watch it now.” And then they watch the video, which it helps understand building a mass movement, building a culture, attractive character, all that kind of stuff that builds out the first three sections of the book. They watch that and then they bought after the video, tells them to go register for the Funnel Hacks webinar, register for that. It’s an auto webinar and it puts them through to sell them the thousand dollar product of Clickfunnels.

So that’s the first part of the funnel, the first point of sale. So they go free book, or they can get the black box, then they get the order form bump, then they get the MP3 player for free, basically everything so far has been free for the most part. And then they get the get the training video for free, they get the webinar for free. And if they buy funnel hacks they get Clickfunnels for free. Everything I’ve sold so far is free, yet my average cart value, my potential average cart value is like, 15, not quite that, 1300 bucks so far, which is awesome.

Then after the webinar funnel ends seven days later, so this whole funnel, point of sale is 7 day follow up on the webinar, and then what’s exciting is….what was I going to say? What’s exciting is then, after day seven then I transition them to I don’t know if I told you guys this when I was hanging out with Brendon, I might have told you on the plane. But he did a big product launch for, it was a $2 thousand course and he sold like 2200 copies and then the week later he sold the swipe files to that launch where it was like the sales videos, the transcripts, emails all that kind of stuff. For $97 he sold 6500 of those, something crazy like that.

So what I’m going to do is at the end of the funnel, like a week later be like, “Hey you just went through this cool funnel. It was a book funnel, plus webinars, a whole funnel stacking thing. What I’ll do is if you want, I’ll give you all the swipe files, the emails, the everything for free, once again it’s free if you join Funnel University.” Boom, get them into Funnel University. And when you join Funnel University you get my Funnel Stacking book and a bunch of other things for free.” So it’s free but they pay me $97.

So it’s coming back to how you make things free, even when they’re paying. So they get that whole cool thing for free when they join Funnel University. And then for 2 days I’ll be pushing that offer then we’ll down sell, if they don’t want to pay $97 a month, which is what we’re raising the price to, they can get a trial, but they don’t get the free things shipped out to them. Boom, the next three days and from there we transition into the seven day launch, Brendon Burchard, I’m messing up his name….his style funnel, which is basically training for free for three days. And then giving that thing that they just watched you record for free. They get it for free when they invest in your next thing and then the next thing is going to be our Secrets Master Class or the FHAT event. And that’s kind of the funnel. That’s the first 14 days.

That’s kind of what’s happening. I know it’s hard to see that visually as I explain it, but hopefully you’re getting the concept, you’re understanding how you make everything for free. That’s the key I wanted to share with you guys today. Making offers so irresistible that people have to say yes.

I hope that helps, I hope it helps to start thinking through your offers. If you’re selling a course for a thousand bucks, that’s just a course, it’s going to be hard to sell. But if you sell your sales scripts for $997 and they get the whole created course for free, then it becomes, you know something like that, then it becomes an irresistible offer. They’re like, “I need the sales scripts. I’ll pay $1000 for that because I want the other stuff for free.” How do you structure that. What do you have and how do make that offer as sexy as possible?

I think I did a podcast a couple of months back about turning up the sexy on your offers. It’s kind of something similar. But just thinking about that. How do you add free into everything? Hopefully it gives you enough case studies and ideas and examples. Worst case scenario, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about then on April 18th or beyond, probably by the time most of you guys hear this, it’ll be live. Go to expertsecrets.com, get your book and watch the process in motion. Buy slowly so you don’t miss any of it. I hope you guys enjoy it. Appreciate you all for listening, subscribing and hanging out with me all the time in the car, or wherever you may be right now. With that said, I’m at Jimmy John’s right now, I’m grabbing some sandwiches, go feed the kids. Then I gotta get back to finishing out this funnel so it’ll be ready for you guys to see. Alright we’ll talk soon. Bye everybody.

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This week has been insane! Let me tell you a little about what’s going on.

On this episode Russell talks about being stressed out about his upcoming book launch while attending Inner Circle with his last two groups this week. He shares some of the things he was able to do for the book launch, while still be present at the Inner Circle meetings.

Here are the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

Why everyone pays special attention to Russell’s funnels and why that forces him to have to make his book launch funnel especially awesome.
And what new plan Russell has now given to all 4 Inner Circle groups to help everyone ascend their businesses to 100 million dollars at the same time.

So listen below to find out what hiccups Russell has run into with his book launch, and what new rule will now be implemented on Inner Circle members.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you guys to Marketing In Your Car. It’s been a little bit, I haven’t talked to you guys since the airplane trip, which I think got posted today. For you guys it’s right now, but for me it’s been a little bit. This week has been insane.

Starting with Inner Circle, we had, as you probably know at this point, we have 100 people in my Inner Circle, and basically we have 4 groups of 25. So last month we had the first 2 groups of 25, so that’s 50 people, and then the last two Monday, Tuesday here, and then Wednesday, Thursday. So I just finished up the last group. I wish I could share what happens in there because it’s amazing.

So many cool entrepreneurs and people and it’s insane that I get paid to help facilitate and hang out with these guys. So it’s been good but the one thing that’s been tough, my book launch starts on Tuesday. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little stressed out. A lot of stuff has been happening to get that all done and ready and I totally didn’t plan it well with Inner Circle the week before. So it’s been a long one. I’ve been up all night and then trying to be super present all day and it’s just been a lot. I’m tired, I’m worn out. I wish I could take a long 3 day weekend, but tomorrow I gotta get a bunch of stuff done and then Monday, and then launch Tuesday.

It’s all good, fun problems to have but I’m just not a very good scheduler, I don’t think. And what’s crazy, Tuesday night I was going to bed and I got one of the, what I thought was going to be the sales video for the new book funnel and the video was insanely good, but it wasn’t the right video for the sales page. And I was like, “Oh crap. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have time to make a new video for Tuesday’s launch.” So I started stressing out and started looking at the book funnel.

I had this really cool idea, insanely cool but it just wasn’t working and I didn’t know why. Anyway, I just hated the way the page look so that night I was insanely stressed. I was like, “Oh my gosh. I have no video, my funnel doesn’t look good.” My funnel has to be cool because I’m kind of the funnel guy who everyone’s looking at. If my funnel is ugly or doesn’t work, that’s embarrassing, especially since this is probably my biggest front end I will ever have. The focal point of my traffic and stuff for the next two or three years of our business and I need to make this perfect.

So I was, first off stressing out about both those two things. So this is, what night is this, they’re all blurring together, this is Monday night. So I just got home from the Inner Circle meeting, Monday night. This was probably like 11 o’clock at night when I had this epiphany of “I’m screwed. I don’t know what to do.” So I started going crazy and I’m trying to think of all these options. How do I make this page, first off work the right way? And all the sudden I remembered this page on our old Neurocel funnel, and that was the very first funnel we ever did, and so it was one of the free plus shipping ones we did before we turned it into the one that took off.

But there’s this part of the funnel that was so cool and I remember it and I was like, I needed to find that. But I can’t remember what the page was, it wasn’t archived or on the way back machine, so I couldn’t find it there. I was going through all my old emails, trying to remember which designer it was. It took me about an hour and a half and then I found it in some of my old email addresses in a random email from a designer that I forgot was the guy who actually designed it. I found it and I was like, “That’s it. That’s the…if I get that, it fixes the funnel.” But I was like, I don’t know how to do that in Clickfunnels. Then I was like, wait a minute, the designer who did that, he lives overseas, the guy’s awesome. I haven’t talked to him in probably a year.

So I messaged him that night. I was like, “Do you happen to be awake right now, because I need something super important, super urgent.” The guys’ name is Okey, he was my main designer forever, but when Clickfunnels came out I started doing all my own stuff. I was like, “Okey, if you’re around I need your help.” And he messaged back, “Yeah, hey. What can I do for you?” and I gave him this huge thing, “Basically I’m designing all these pages….” It was, I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty big order, what I asked him to do. And he’s like, “Yep, I’m on it.”

So he started running with that, thank heavens, I sent him tons of assets and he was running with that. And the video thing I was stressing out about and then I kind of had an idea, there was another video that the guy that did the first video, he sent another video that was, I watched it, it was legitimately amazing, but it wasn’t mine, so I couldn’t use it. But I was like, “oh my gosh, this is perfect.” But he gave me this process and a script, so I was like, “Okay, I gotta go to bed.” It was 1 in the morning at this point. I had to be up in like 5 hours for Inner Circle, so I was like I gotta get to bed.

So I went to bed, woke up in the morning and Okey had already designed the pages to send to me and I cannot wait for you guys to see them. They were amazing. And then during Inner Circle lunch, I had a 30 minute lunch, rewrote the script, got it ready, talked to Brandon who does all of our video stuff. I was like, “Hey Brandon, I need to film this, but it’s gotta happen, I don’t know when.” So last night actually, he came to my house at like 9 o’clock at night. He set up the curtains and everything to film the section of the video, we started filming, and it was a 3 ½ minute video but it took us 2 ½ hours to film it. Partially because my brain is fried, partially because I was changing it on the fly. We were rewriting the script while we were going. Got it done at about 12:30 last night.

And then Brandon, on top of that. The new sales page for the free book, there’s literally 20 documentary video testimonials of different people in different industries and markets, and he’s pulling 16-18 hour days trying to get all those videos done. All these things that are happening while I’m at Inner Circle meeting freaking out. Trying to serve these entrepreneurs at my highest level, being as present as possible. Then we have a lunch break, running into the other room and coordinating all these crazy, insane things and then running back and being present.

We just got done with the last day of Inner Circle, my son had a choir thing, had to tell everyone bye and take off, jump in my car, run to go see the choir and that’s where I’m at now. We just got done with the choir and I’m heading over to take the kids out to eat somewhere. So my wife’s in a different car than I am, so I have a minute to talk to you guys. So that’s kind of what’s happening over here, and it’s crazy and I’m so excited because the book launch is happening.

What I want to share with you guys is just one tip that I think is cool that we’re implementing and I’m really excited about it. And I think it’s cool. It came from, I think I’ve probably talked about this. But I geek out on old marketing courses. There’s something about the old ones, I like them more than new things. So I listen to a lot of Gary Halvert, a lot of Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, Frank Kern is still one of my favorites, I listen to Frank’s stuff all the time. And Matt Furey, who is a legend. He hasn’t published anything in ten years, but I still have all his old stuff.

I was listening to one of his old things, back when we had one of our huge snow storms, I was shoveling our walks with our snow plow thing that I bought that I ended up running into both my Corvette and Lexus and into our house. I destroyed so much property. Anyway, that’s a story for another day.

But anyway, I’m listening to Matt Furey and he’s talking about, at the time, this was ten years ago, there was a membership site and he had a rule with the membership site, he said people would leave and say I’m going to come back 3 or 4 months later, and they never did. Anyway, so I thought, that’s pretty cool. So I was like, I want to implement that, but I was really scared. So at Inner Circle, we have 100 people and for the most part people stay all the time, but there’s always some people that are like, “I’m going to put it on pause for 5 or 6 months, and I’m going to come back.” And it just bugged me because I didn’t think it was fair to them, honestly, or me, or the rest of the group.

And my goal with Inner Circle was take a group of 100 entrepreneurs and move them from a million dollars, to ten, to a hundred and I walked through really cool presentation twice this week, showing them that that’s the plan and the path. This is where we’re going and how we’re getting there.

I was like, “I don’t want to keep bringing new people into Inner Circle because I can’t, I don’t want to restart over at ground zero, every single time I want to take everyone as a group together and ascend everyone and get to the point where we’re at 10 million, and then a hundred million as companies. How many people’s lives are we impacting? That’s my goal with Inner Circle. There’s a lot of people, big mastermind groups that try to scale them, and that’s their business model. For me, Inner Circle is not my business model, it’s a by-product, and it’s something that I love because it keeps me sharp and relevant, and keeps me with my hand in literally, a hundred different businesses in tons of different markets. It gives me the ability to see some unique things. And that’s the value that I get out of it, plus the money’s not bad. But it’s not my business. Clickfunnels is my business, this is a by-product of it.

So didn’t want to burn and churn and bring in people, I want to keep 100 people and I want to send these people and their businesses and their lives together as a group. So because of that, I decided we’re going to create this thing. I think I talked about it with you guys a little while ago, but we’re going to call it Inner Circle for life, it’s going to be something where if you’re in the Inner Circle, you’re in. And if you leave, we’ll still love you but you just can’t come back in. If you’re not getting at least your 25k worth, then it’s not, you shouldn’t be here.

So we made that rule and it was scary to kind of present it, all four times. But it’s cool because there were a couple of people who were upset, and there were people who honestly hadn’t gotten a return on their money, and if you didn’t get a return on your money after going through this process for the last twelve months, it’s probably not the right fit. For those that did, it’s the cheapest 25 thousand dollars you will ever spend, on earth, ever.

So with that, we launched that and today was the last day I presented that, basically showing the Inner Circle for life and that’s the game plan. It’s cool because everyone is rallying behind that and it’s becoming a thing and now it gives me the ability to work with the group at a different intimate level. And I think for a lot of your high end programs, you guys should look at that, making it something where it’s Inner Circle for life, or whatever your program is, and keep people in so you can keep ascending and working with them.

In fact, the only way of getting in the Inner Circle now, as of today, you have to go to the FHAT event and there has to be room to get in the Inner Circle, and if there is we hand pick people from the FHAT event. So that’s the only way to get into the Inner Circle now, which is kind of cool. So with that said, I am here with my kids and my wife. I’m going to bounce. Appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you guys again, probably tomorrow. See you guys.

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A bunch of the cool stuff I got from my day with Brendon Burchard.

On today’s special Marketing From An Airplane, Russell talks about a meeting he had with Brendon Burchard and why he is taking a private jet back home to Boise.

Here are some of the cool things you will get to hear in this episode:

What cool ninja tricks Russell learned from Brendon and what ninja tricks Russell was able to give to him.
How Brendon is able to take 17 weeks of vacation a year and why Russell wants to be able to do something similar.
And the different approaches Russell and Brendon have when it comes to people recognizing them in public.

So listen below to hear about the awesome things Russell learned from Brendon and find out why you should never use the bathroom on a private jet.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you guys to, actually Marketing in Your Airplane. Hopefully you guys can hear me, it’s kind of loud in here. I’m literally in my own private airplane right now.

Let me tell you the back story. So earlier yesterday, actually it goes back a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks ago I went to a Mastermind meeting at Dean Graziosi’s office and a bunch of cool people were there. And one of the cool people was Brendon Burchard. Brendon and I met probably ten years ago. I always respected him, and we kind of talked a few times, but we never really got to know each other. That was the first mastermind we sat together for the whole day. Towards the end I was just like, man, if you look at our industry and then the personal development industry, we’re on the outside obviously because there’s no other options but in our world, me and him are definitely have the biggest companies.

We never hung out, we never shared notes or talked about what worked or what didn’t work, things like that. So I messaged him a couple days later, “Hey, we should get together and just hang out, and share notes on what we’re both doing and hopefully get some ideas.” And he was like, he gave me three days, “I got this day and this day and this day.” In different parts of the country, and I was like, “Vegas sounds perfect.” because it’s an easy flight out of Boise. So I booked the thing and then yesterday morning I woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning, flew out to hang out with him. We hung out all day and then I’ll talk about what we talked about here in a minute.

But then at the end of the day I get a message from Melanie, my assistant, actually voxed me and said, “Your flight got delayed, and it was a connecting flight, so that one you’re going to miss. I’m trying to find another flight, everything direct is sold out.” And all sorts of stuff. She couldn’t get me out that day. And then Brendon is like, “Oh don’t worry man. I’ll take care of you.” I’m like, “What’s that mean?” He’s like, “Hold on.” And he called a couple of numbers and he’s like, “Okay, there’s a jet picking you up in the morning and they’ll fly you back to Boise.” I’m like, “are you kidding me?”

Dang, look at that. Oh you guys can’t see it. I’m looking out the window and there’s a jet flying past this jet. There’s jet streams. What? That was cool.

Anyway, he’s got an account with JetSuite. He just called them up and then they flew to Vegas, and they picked me up this morning and now we’re flying back to Boise. And I’m literally the only person on this plane. There’s 4 seats, 2 pilots. And it’s the coolest thing in the world.

Also, by the way, we’re starting a vlog, so I’m recording this, so if you guys in the future can see our vlog, it’ll be episode three and we’ll show the whole story. Behind the scenes, show you the flight, if you guys want to see the visuals. You should probably see what I just saw, that’s where you go to check it out. Anyway, so that’s what’s happening right now. I’m flying back home and again, I was trying to fly in the morning and out at night, so I could get back home for Ellie’s soccer game tomorrow, but I missed it unfortunately. Instead I’m flying in a private plane home, which is insane.

So I’m doing that right now. So while I’m flying home I’ve been kind of taking notes on the cool stuff that Brendon and I talked about. And I obviously can’t share with you, something I just can’t share because they were things he shared with me in confidence. But there are some things I definitely can share.

The number one cool thing, is this cool thing called JetSuite, which is the thing I’m on right now, literally. They pick you up, they fly you, they….I don’t know if it’s possible to get in Boise, but it’s definitely, at first gotta figure out. Honestly I walked right up, jumped in a plane. There’s no waiting and it’s funny because I bill my time, if someone wants to hire me for an hour, I don’t even know what it would be right now. Last time I did, it was 5 grand an hour. Since then I’ve had like five people try to do it, and I turned it down because I didn’t have time for it. Let’s just say it’s 5 grand an hour.

So I saved an hour being in airports. Probably two if you look at landing and coming. So that’s two hours. That’s 10 grand right there I just saved. And then on the flight, there’s wifi, there’s nobody here coughing on me, or sneezing on me. If I had business partners, and my wife and kids, I could get some cool connection time on the plane as opposed to sitting in a normal plane cramped and miserable. So that right there is awesome. So I’m going to be looking for that.

Let’s see, another thing, what’s interesting is Brendon and I were talking, we have different super powers that are different. I think what I’m really good at is building out amazing front end funnels that are profitable from day one. I look at every one of the funnels that we built, especially free plus shipping funnels, all those ones are optimally designed so that when we put a dollar into advertizing, it puts $50 back out immediately into sales. You guys have seen us talk about that, all our break even funnels and stuff like that. I’m really good at that.

And then I look at Brendon, and Brendon’s not quite as good at the front end funnels, but what he’s really good at, when someone comes into his funnels, for the next 400 days there’s a sequence he goes through and takes them through the 16 or whatever different courses he sells, he pushes people to different events, everything. He does 9 events a year and never promotes any of them outside of the follow up sequence that happens. He brings someone in the funnel and then the sequence goes for 400+ days, fills 9 events a year. So with all the info products, all the courses, I’m not really looking to share his revenue, but you know, well over 8 figures, multiple 8 figures in this process.

So for him, he’s got these front end funnels that aren’t profitable up front. He drives insane amounts of traffic, and by day 60 he breaks even. It takes 60 days to break even and he knows that. So because of that he goes and spends tons of money of Facebook ads, YouTube ads and radio, those are his three big traffic sources right now, which is cool. I’m going to try radio with my book, which I cannot even wait to do.

And then I look at my business, I’m really good at break even, being profitable right out of the gate, but my long term funnels aren’t that long. I think it’s because, and I talked about this with the inner circle members. I think I had a podcast that talked about this too. But my creativity in our business for a long time was creating new offers, new businesses. That made 3 or 4 million dollars a year, and then we transitioned into having one focus, Clickfunnels, and created offers to get people into Clickfunnels. We went from 3 million to 30 million.

Then my goal to go from 30 to 100 is focusing on new traffic sources. And I look at Brendon, that’s what he’s done. He has these funnels and he’s focusing on traffic sources that he can bring in and then they break even after, hopefully within 60 days of bringing people in. So that’s been kind of my biggest takeaway, is that. He does typically someone comes in his funnel and there’ll be two or three weeks promoting one of his courses, and then he’ll have a two week buffer time. Which is two weeks of him sending amazing videos that tell stories, build relationships and doesn’t sell anything.

Then after two weeks of buffer, he sends people back into another two or three week period where he’s selling the next course. Then he’s got a two week buffer. Back and forth for 400 and something days, which is insanely cool. And I think that my problem, why I haven’t done that in the past is because I’m so excited about the new offer I’m creating all the time, I don’t want people in the long sequences, and I don’t know how to promote the next offer. And he was like, “Why do you keep creating offers.” He’s like, “That’s my problem, I have 16 courses. Why don’t you stop creating courses, and just plug them into this sequence and then you can just focus on driving traffic. That becomes your focal point.”

And the interesting thing about traffic, traffic is the one part of my business that doesn’t require me, which is interesting. The funnel part requires me, because it’s all my creativity, my voice, my videos, but on traffic, it’s like I can step back, and it’s John on my team and his team underneath him who drive the ads, that becomes the focal point. And it’s interesting because I love and I get so good at creating lots of funnels over and over again that I spend insane amounts of time, way too much time.

Brendon told me, I think he takes, I think he said, 17 weeks off a year. I think that’s what he said. 17! 17 weeks. That’s like 4 months, that’s more than 4 months. Over 4 months a year he takes off. I can’t do that, I don’t do that. I’m always in hustle mode, and I think that’s because I’m always creating the next funnels, push all the ads into that funnel and sell it as opposed to all these amazing funnels we’ve created and just put them into a killer, long sequence and then focus on the traffic. Which even the traffic part does not take my whole time. That was the big takeaway for me, that was the huge aha.

So I just kind of look at Brendon, imagine if you took your funnels, you broke even, you 3x’d on day one like we do with all of our funnels. Then instead of break even on day 60 you tripled on day one, and then from there you kept doing what you’re doing. So he was excited about that. I was showing him all our ninja hacks to 3x on day one. And he was showing all the ninja hacks where he can basically not work, because he’s got all the courses lined up sequentially. And it’s interesting, the logical sequential order of things, I always thought that Experts Academy was his biggest business, but it’s not. In fact, High Performance Academy is his thing, his biggest, that’s his mission, that’s his “date with destiny”.

Tony Robbins has Date with Destiny, which is his pinnacle. For him High Performance Academy is his pinnacle event he’s trying to get people to. And so all of his funnels are focused on getting people, he has no sales people, no nothing. He also has a 30 thousand a year mastermind and a 60 thousand dollar a year mastermind, and a 250 thousand dollar a year, and all those masterminds he doesn’t have any sales people to sell them. They all just come through funnels, which is insane.

I’m like, “But with a sales person it’s really easy, it converts just as many people.” He’s like, “yeah, I don’t worry about that. I just put it out there and some people buy. I just jam enough traffic into it that if one out of every 10 thousand people buy, it all works.” I’m like, “Crazy.” It’s fun to see this whole business through a different lens than my own, which is really cool. So that was one of my biggest takeaways.

So for you guys, if you’re all like me and you work too hard, I think that’s the key. Quit creating tons of new funnels, which I know we all love, it’s so exciting. But focus on, it comes back to follow up funnels, action funnels, like we talked about at Funnel Hacking Live. It’s interesting, I think I did a presentation in December that showed how every dollar made in our break even funnels made $60.73 in our follow up funnels. That was with it in a short, 30 day follow up window, as opposed to what Brendon’s doing where it’s like 400 days.

So anyway, that’s something that I was literally sketching out in my notes from on my private plane. So crazy. On the plane, trying to figure out how I’m going to do that and what is the sequential order of my products. If someone comes in, my first thing I want to have is Expert Secrets, from there Dotcom Secrets, from there what is the sequential order? What’s the pieces they need and the order they need them? How can I do it the cool way where I spend a couple of weeks getting people into the program, a couple of weeks telling stories, building value to now they love us, and a couple of weeks transitioning back and forth, back and forth.

I think my biggest fear when I look at this is how am I going to create 400 days follow up sequence? And I look at Brendon and he didn’t do a 400 day follow up sequence. He would build one and then another one. I think what I’m going to do is, here’s my thought, and I may change it, but I’ll share with you guys and maybe it’ll give you guys some ideas on your own. I’m going to spend the next 30 days building out a 30 day follow up funnel. So if someone buys the book or anything, whatever they buy, what’s the first thing I want to introduce them to? They buy the book and the book is the initial sequence or whatever. Then all those people, from all my front end offers, so I’m looking at I think 10 or 11 front end offers to bring people into it, all my break even funnels that I love.

So I have a break even funnel, they go to the initial sequence there, after they do then we dump them from there into, and I’ll probably call to action funnel and call it the first 30 days, and then the first 30 days will be like, here’s the process for the first 30 days. Our number one goal for the first 30 days is to get them to buy Clickfunnels. So boom, I’ll take them through the sequence process and they’ll buy Clickfunnels, they’ll watch the webinar, we’ll indoctrinate and tell stories and all that kind of stuff. From there, we’ll share a bunch of content, maybe some Funnel Hacking Live videos to give value.

Then number two, now we got that. What’s the next thing we want to take? So then I’ll probably call it the second 30 days and then the third 30 days. I’ll probably create an action funnel for each one. And at the end of the first 30 days after I build that second 30 days, I’ll go back to the end of the first 30 days and I’ll add in a step in the action sequence that says, “When they finish day 30 move them to the second 30 day sequence.” Then everyone will be past that, then it will be automatically into the second sequence and that way I can just build out 30 days at a time and not stress out about how I’m going to build 400 days. No I’m just going to build 30 days at a time.

And then everyone that buys will be dumped in the first 30 days, here’s the sequence they go through. Everyone will go through the same sequence, same everything. Then at the end of that I’ll start building the next 30 days. Whenever I get it done, then I’ll dump all leads into the second 30 days and then I’ll hook it up so that everyone new coming in past day 30 si on the automatically shifted to the next action funnel. So it could be kind of cool. So maybe after I do this, this is actually a cool product.

That reminded me of something else. Okay, this might be a cool product I do. After I get the first 365, here’s the first 365 day follow up sequence, I may just want to buy that book. Here’s every email for the first 365 days when someone comes into our funnels. So maybe I’ll do that. Yeah, that’d be a cool product. So in a year, I’ll sell that to you guys if you want it. Yeah, that’d be kind of cool.

So this is a cool thing I got from Brendon, which is crazy. This is a couple of years ago, he did his, I can’t remember which course, Expert Academy, one of his products. He ended up selling 2500 of them at $2 grand a piece. A lot of money. Bu then afterwards he was like, “What do I do with all these people?” he was so proud of all the videos and email sequences and all the stuff he had built, so what he did was he took all of the prelaunch videos and burned them on a dvd and then got them all transcribed and then he took all the email swipe files, all that kind of stuff, got them all transcribed, put them in this big book and then he sold, I think for $97 you get the DVD, then the transcripts of the campaign. So anyway, so he sold for $97.

From that he sold over 60 thousand copies, 600 grand, 60 thousand copies at $97 a piece of the marketing material for people to see and model, which is crazy. Insanely crazy. In fact, oh my gosh I got an idea. I’ve got Funnel Hacker Swipe file.com, what if I did that with every campaign we did, start selling the swipe files? That’s interesting. Maybe I do it inside of funnel u? I don’t know, just gives me ideas. But it made an extra $600 grand after just selling the prelaunch materials to the same audience. 3 times bought the marketing material as people who bought the actual product. It’s crazy that people buy the product, the $97 thing he still sells at events everywhere else, people buy that and go through all his marketing material, and then they go back and buy his thousand dollar product now because they want it.

It’s kind of like what Frank Kern does. If you look at Frank Kern business funnel, he creates a product then launches it and after he sells him showing you what he did on that funnel and that’s it. Its like swipe files. Here’s the campaign plus the swipe files and it’s insanely cool. Anywho, so much cool stuff.

Alright, a couple of other cool things I learned from him. He’s obviously, he’s done two products with Oprah, so one of the interesting things he does with every one of his funnels, he has to make sure it’s Oprah proof. Oprah and her people literally go through all his funnels and it has to be clean enough that it’s Oprah proof. I started thinking about that, are my funnels Oprah proof? Where someone like Oprah came through would they be offended, would they not like it or whatever? Oprah’s obviously not someone I’m going after, but who is the person I’m going after? Who are the people that I want to make sure….thinking about that, is the copy and positioning and all the stuff in your funnel, who is the dream person you want to go after? Would it pass their inspection and be like, this is cool and not scammy or spammy.

In fact, I went to one of my funnels the other day and some weird email came out and I was like, “Ugh.” I remember I hired this guy to write emails and he wrote that email and I’m like, it’s not congruent with me or what I say. So it’s something to think about. The other cool thing he showed me how to do with YouTube ads. So the thing with YouTube ads, there’s a YouTube ad that will be a video of him sharing 3 tips from his book and it pushes people to the book. And the people who watch that will be targeted to watch video number two, which has 3 more tips, and then push the book and then he targets those people to go to video number 3 which is now a recap, “Here’s the 6 tips I talked about before” and pushes them back to the book. And then if they haven’t bought the book after the 3 videos, then he puts them on a “Do not solicit” list. If they haven’t bought from three videos, they will never buy and they have no hope. And you should never follow them or show them ads again. He puts them on a do not solicit list, which is kind of cool. Kind of a cool strategy as well.

What else, what else? So many cool things. I hope that gives you guys some cool stuff. It was legit amazing, and now I’m sitting in a jet. I have a new love and respect for Brendon. I always said he was cool, but I just didn’t know him or understand him and I think that I had kind of a misconception of him sometimes because, and it was interesting because I always thought he , in his mind he was kind of like me, he sees himself as a marketing dude, teaches marketing stuff. And as I talked to him, it’s completely opposite, he thinks of himself as first off an author, and then his goal, his whole dream in life is personal development and high performance, things like that.

In fact, his next book is called something about high performance as well. He spent two years with a whole research team creating insane stuff, building a test that measures high performance, that’s his huge passion. And he’s like, “I always teach the marketing stuff, you teach marketing better than me. Frank Kern teaches marketing better than me. I’m not the best marketing teacher but you’re all my people who come through all my high performance stuff that want to know how I build this company. So I do Expert Academy once a year just to be like, ‘here’s how I do it. I’m not the best but here’s what I do.’ And it’s become a big thing, but it’s not my focus or main thing. I don’t promote it, I don’t have any front end support. The only way people even know about Expert Academy is on day 200 of the funnel he introduces it to people.”

I was like, that’s really fascinating and interesting. Anyway, I thought that was really, really cool. That’s what I got. So that’s all I wanted to share with you guys I think today. So I’m going to be, I don’t know when I’m landing, but I’m going to keep taking notes and map this thing out. You guys will probably see the fruits of this. My goal, my big takeaways from this whole meeting is to be able to take my amazing funnels and build out an amazing sequence that extends for a long time and putting everything in sequential order and things like that. That’s my number one goal.

And my number two goal to that is from that be able to take more time off. He said he takes 17 weeks off in a year. I don’t know if I could do that, I think I would stress out. Plus, he doesn’t have kids and stuff like that. So he and his wife are able to be like, “Hey lets go to Bali this week.” Or “Hey, let’s go over here.” So they book out, they plan out each month where they’re going and its crazy. I can’t do that, because my kids have school and all these things. But maybe I could be like I’m going to take Friday off, or what if I came home every day at 3 when my kids got home, or what if I did stuff like once a quarter took a weekend with my wife, or whatever those things are.

So I’m going to start playing with that. That was really inspiring for me. Oh the other cool thing I got from it. I did a podcast the other day how twice in Boise that day I had people come up to me, “Hey Russell.” And ask me questions about me and caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to handle it. It was cool, we were sitting there eating lunch and some guy ran up, “Russell Brunson, I’m a funnel hacker.” And it was kind of awkward for me, and I didn’t really say anything and the guy laughed and an hour later Brendon and I were walking and some guy ran up to Brendon like, “Dude! You’re Brendon Burchard!” It was kind of cool, we both had it happen to us while we were hanging out.

He handled it so much better than I did. It was so cool to see. I was just like, dang. Now I……it wsa cool to see that because he didn’t do what I do. Act like an idiot. He turned around and was like, legitimately excited, “You know who I am? How do you know about my work?” and the guy was like, he wanted to tell him, it was cool Brendon told me he learned that from Paula Abdul. That’s what Paula Abdul did. First off act all excited like, “Whoa.” Then ask them “how do you know my work? How do you know what I do.” And then they’ll be excited to tell the story of how they know you.

He’s also good at, my biggest problem is I think I fear the conversation with people because I don’t know how to end it. I get stuck in these awkward situations and I run away. So what he does is really cool. He asks them that question and then he starts turning his body like I gotta keep going, “That’s really cool. Okay, well we’re in a rush, we have to go but thank you so much for being a follower and a fan. Just so grateful for that.” And something like that. And then we’re able to break away and leave. I even told him after, “Dude, that was so good for me to see. Because I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know how to take that kind of stuff. I’m not used to that. It just freaks me out and I look like an idiot. That way you handled it was super cool and it was fun to see that in a live version.” So that was pretty cool to see as well.

Anyway, that was the weekend, it was amazing. Now I’m sitting on a private jet and this is crazy. Only weird thing about it is if you look behind me, there’s a little toilet seat, and there’s a little curtain. Luckily I don’t have to go to the bathroom, but if I did that would be the only thing about private jets that’s not cool. There’s not a real bathroom. It’s like one of these seats you lift up the lid and there’s the potty, pooper, whatever you want to call it, the toilet, the crapper, whatever you want to call it. There’s the little curtain that you pull halfway over. And I guarantee it’d stink this place up and the pilots would kill me. I’m grateful I don’t have to go to the bathroom. Other than that, private planes are cool. Note to self, take one and make sure you go before you go.

There’s the practical advice. What’d you learn from Marketing In Your Car? I learned if you ever fly in a private plane, you go to the bathroom before you get on otherwise you stink out the pilots and they’ll hate you. Oh man.

Anyway, alright guys. Appreciate you, I can’t wait to get going with some of this stuff. Hopefully you guys got some cool lessons today like I did. Thank you Brendon, if you’re listening to this, for taking the day with me. That was the real cool thing, he was in the middle of editing his book, he still took the whole day and he was so present and relaxed and if it was me, I’d be stressed out the whole entire time. Just coming back to he has his life structured to be able to handle this type of stuff and it was really impressive and cool to see. Anyway, I got a ton from it, hopefully you got something as well from listening in. Appreciate you all and I’ll talk to again when we get back on solid ground. Bye.

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Do you remember the day that you became?

On this episode Russell talks about the moment he became a wrestler and how he felt and how that relates to the moment he became a marketer.

Here are some of the cool things to listen for in this episode:

Why Russell nearly became a basketball player instead of a wrestler and what changed his mind.
What the four or five things Russell believes he is down to core.
And why as humans, we are constantly in search of good feelings and how they shape our lives.

So listen below to hear about the moment Russell became a wrestler, and the moment he became an internet marketer.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, good morning. This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Sorry I’m stuttering, I’m actually on the freeway right now. Normally I do these things closer to my house so it’s a little less chaotic. But this morning I had to get up early. And I didn’t get to bed last night until almost 2 o’clock. Because we got Wynter Jones is in town and a couple of other people. So I have a good excuse to pull all nights, working on funnels. So we did last night and then I had to get up this morning because we had a film shoot at 6:30 at this amazing location we found down in Nampa, Idaho. It’s kind of out in the ghetto and then you walk through the door and it’s this amazing building with stone walls, Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, it’s amazing.

A bunch of people who work for Disney, a bunch of animators in there, so it’s a bunch of super creatives….whoa, crap. I’m on the freeway, some people stopping.

Anyway, all these amazing creative people in there that are building, I don’t know, movies and animations and stuff like that, a whole bunch of Macs, and smart people. It was really, really cool. So we filmed something in the basement there for Mark Joyner when we filmed his episode for Funnel Hacker TV, which is coming soon. We filmed in the basement because it was this really creepy, nasty basement. We filmed the sales video for Mind Control Marketing there and it turned out so cool.

But I remember I was like, “Oh that upstairs was so cool. Someday I want to film in there.” So we were filming the book promo video for Expert Secrets and that’s where we decided to film it at. So that’s what we were doing this morning. We got there super early and we were trying to film before anybody woke up. And the crazy thing, I went to bed almost 2 o’clock and my alarm went off at 5:15 and I had two alarms, just in case I slept through them both. Anyway, at 5:45 I sat up and I was like, “What?” both of my alarms had turned off. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So I had a freak out. I had to run and get ready and shower. I’m doing a juice fast this week, and luckily I didn’t have time to eat because I couldn’t eat.

But I jumped in the car and raced down here, and I was a couple of minutes late. Then the guy who I guess Brandon said that he forgot to RSVP until we were actually coming. So the dude didn’t show up. So Brandon’s calling him at 6 in the morning. Luckily one of the employees showed up early and got us in. So we got in there and started filming and…..sorry, I’m pulling off the freeway exit right now.

So we started filming and we only have like 30 minutes before their entire staff and team showed up for work. So we had to go fast. So we get everything set up, anyway, it turned out really cool. I’m excited to see what, how it all turns out. So you guys will see it soon on Expertsecrets.com, when the book is all done.

But that’s what’s happening. I’m heading back from there. I’m super tired, so I might go home and take a nap for a little bit. Because we have another long day today of amazing stuff we’re building out. Not only are we trying to get the Expert Secrets funnel done this week, we’re also trying to get Super Funnel, Exit Funnel and a whole bunch of other cool things that all tie together for the whole launch. That’s a story for another day. But that’s kind of what’s happening.

So I had a message I wanted to share with you guys today because I thought it was interesting. I recorded a video yesterday, and I don’t know about you but I, in Expert Secrets I talk about how everybody needs to build an index of stories you’re going to have. You never know when you’re going to use them and how you’re going to use them. So a lot of times this podcast is a testing ground for me to tell a story. Then I tell stories at the office and I tell stories when I speak and in a million different places. It’s funny, Brandon who has been filming me every day for the last two years, he was like, “dude that was a new story, I’ve never heard that one before.” I was like, “Really, I’ve never told that. It’s been in my inventory of stories forever.” But apparently I never told it.

So it was basically a story about the day that I became a wrestler. When I was growing up my dad was a wrestler, but I was going to be a basketball player, because that’s what short, white guys do is we become basketball players. So every day I practiced basketball, and I knew that’s what I was going to do and be. I don’t want anything else besides being a basketball player.

So that was kind of my, what I thought my future was going to be. And then my dad though, was a wrestler growing up and I guess I had wrestled for a year or two when I was, I don’t know, 5 or 6 years old. But apparently my parents said I hated it. So I dropped out of it and was never going to do it again. But then, lo and behold, in 8th grade as I’m pursuing my basketball career, it was bad because I remember Spud Webb back then, was a little short guy who was shorter than me, but he could dunk. I was like, “If Spud Webb can dunk, then I can dunk.” And I never, I got taller than Spud Webb, but I still couldn’t dunk. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, I thought I was going to be a basketball player, but one of my buddies two doors down from me, he went to wrestling practice and came home and started to tell my dad, “I went to wrestling practice today.” And my dad was like, “What? There’s wrestling practice here? I’m a wrestler and my son’s going to be a wrestler.” So that was kind of what happened. Sorry, I’m driving and doing three things and I keep dropping everything. So not what I should be doing. If you guys were watching, I’d probably be getting yelled at by someone.

Anyway, so my dad was like, “We need to go to wrestling practice.” And he tried to get me to. I was like, “No, dad. I’m a basketball player. I’m not going to wrestle. Come on now. There’s no wrestling in the NBA, how am I going to do this?” Finally my dad forced me to go to wrestling because he’s like, “Nope, we’re wrestlers in this family.” I was like, “What? I don’t want to wrestle.” But he kind of made me go. That was 8th grade.

So 8th grade I did wrestling and I kind of liked it but I was like, it’s not basketball, come on now. So I just told my dad, “I’ll wrestle right now but…” and the way school worked in Utah for me, 9th grade was basically junior high and 10th grade was high school. 9th grade had started and I was like, “Well, I’ll do wrestling in 9th grade. But my sophomore year I’m going out for the basketball team because I’m a basketball player.” And he’s like, “Okay, whatever.”

So 9th grade I started wrestling and I start liking it, but not loving it. I remember my very first wrestle off, and the way wrestling works, it’s kind of cool, it’s not like the coach picks who’s going to be first tier or second tier, all that kind of stuff. You wrestle and whoever wins, wins. So they line up all the weight classes, there’s like 5 or 6 people in my weight class and then you have a wrestle off.

So you wrestle everybody else to see if you’re going to be first string, second string, third string. So there’s one dude who is really good, he was varsity, then there was a JV guy and a couple of other guys and then there was me. So we all got to wrestle and the guy who had been JV the year before, I had him in a wrestling match and I was like, I had no plans of winning. I just thought, he’s a high school kid, he’s a man for crying out loud. I’m a little kid.

Anyway, we wrestled and I beat him. And the coach is like, “Congratulations, you’re going to be JV this week.” And I’m like, “What?” and he’s like, “Yeah, you’re going to wrestle in a tournament.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” So I go home and tell my parents. I’m like, “I beat the guy in the wrestle off.” My dad’s like, “What?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to be wrestling this week.” And he was all excited obviously and told my mom and told, you know, everybody.

Fast forward now a couple of days, it was the wrestling tournament, we were wrestling Bingham High School. I remember we get to weigh-ins and I’m a little tiny, skinny 130 lb kid at the time. So I get on the scale and you know, you strip down to your tighty-whities and you step on the scale and look at your weight. And then the guy who I’m wrestling gets on the scale, he steps up and I look at him and the dude had a mustache. I don’t know about you, but to this day I can’t grow a mustache. I’m not still not quite manly enough to do that. He had a mustache, and again this is in high school.

I was like, “Are you kidding me? I’m a little kid. This guy in a mustache is going to destroy me.” I was so scared. So I remember after weigh-ins, we’re getting warmed up and I see my dad and I’m like, “Dad, the guy I’m wrestling has a mustache.” And my dad’s like, “What does that matter?” I’m like, “I don’t know but he’s like a real man Dad. I can’t grow a mustache.” Anyway, I go out there for this match. I go out there I’m wrestling, I’m going through the whole match, I’m wrestling this guy and I don’t remember much about the match. All I remember is at the end I won. I stood up and I shook his hands and I remember looking at him in the face and I was like, “I just beat a dude who’s got a mustache.”

And then the ref raised my hand. As soon as I raised my hand, my head went up and I look at the audience, it’s the bleachers, and in the bleachers there’s two people, my mom and my dad. My dad’s standing up clapping and that day I became a wrestler. I was like, this is the greatest feeling I have ever felt ever. I never got that from basketball, never got it from anything else. I’m a wrestler, that day I became a wrestler.

I was thinking about that. I was like, different parts of our life we identify with different things. For over a decade of my life, I was a wrestler. I still am in my mind. I identify with that, that’s who I am. At my core, there’s a few things I am, I’m a wrestler, I’m a Mormon, I’m a dad, I’m a husband, there’s a couple of things and I’m an internet marketer. There are things, four or five things I really self identify and each of those situations, I know the day that I became that person. I know the day I became a wrestler. I know the day that I became a Mormon. I know the day that I became an internet marketer. And it’s when you have that experience and you’re just like, “Dang, that feeling, I never want to lose that feeling again. That was the greatest feeling in the world for me.”

For my business, I remember when it was. I got online and I was trying all these things, you’ve probably heard my back story a million times. I was trying thing after thing after thing and all sorts of stuff and nothing was working. I remember the very first time I created something and put it out there and somebody bought it. And it was $20 and the $20 came to my Paypal account and I was like, “Dang.”

I remember coming home and telling my wife, I had a Paypal credit card at the time. We had no money in the Paypal account, but i had a Paypal credit card. Someone bought and we had $20, and for me as a college kid, $20 was insane. I came home and told Collette, “We made our first sale.” And she’s like, “What? You made a sale?” I’m like, “Yeah, someone paid us $20” and we were so excited we went out to dinner that night. And we used my Paypal credit card and paid for dinner. I mean, it wasn’t a fancy place, probably Burger King or something, that is my favorite restaurant. But we went to Burger King or something and I think we went to a dollar movie.

But it was like, I earned this. This is something, because at that point, my parents had supported me my whole life. My, I had Summer jobs, but I was wrestling all the time, so I never had a real job. Then I got married, my beautiful wife supported me. She was doing two jobs. For the first time in my life, I had created something that made money. That night, that dinner, that was mine. That was my gift to her. I created something that paid for that dinner. It paid for that movie. That night is when I became an internet marketer. I had that feeling. I love this feeling. I never want it to leave. I want that for the rest of my life. And then I became obsessed and passionate about it.

So for you, I’m curious. I want you to think about it and hopefully it’ll be fun for you to go back and think, but what was the day, think about whatever it is your business is, the thing that you’re so passionate about giving and serving and sharing with people. What was the day that you became that person? That you became a wrestler, that you became a marketer, that you became a fitness coach, that you became whatever it is for you. What was the day that that happened? I want you to think about that, and that’s my gift for you today.

Because as I thought about it yesterday I was just like, what a cool experience. It’s just cool. I hope that this gives you a minute to remember that time for you and enjoy it. Because that feeling is what drives you now. You had that feeling once and you want it again and again and again. I want you to remember that because it was interesting, when Tony Robbins came to Funnel Hacking Live he talked about why we do things and it all came down to basically we do things, everything for humans is about a feeling. We want that feeling. We want to feel good, we want to feel loved, but it’s a feeling. That’s why we do everything.

That’s why people turn to drugs, to try to get the feeling. That’s why people turn to love, they want that feeling. That’s why people turn to all, it’s all about feelings. Sometimes we have a feeling and that’s what drives stuff, but forget about it. We don’t think about it, we don’t….just remembering that feeling of me getting my hand raised yesterday, it was, it felt good. You forget about that. We’re always racing for the next good feeling, but sometimes if you stop back and just think about the feeling you had, the day you became who you are, because that’s the feeling you’re chasing after every single day.

That’s honestly a feeling I chased for 12 years of my life while I was wrestling. That feeling of raising my hand and looking in the stands and seeing my dad, that was the feeling. That’s why I woke up super early in the morning, that’s why I stayed up late at night. That’s why I cut weight week in and week out, day in and day out for years. It’s the reason I got my eyes cut open. I had stitches, I had blood, the reason I sacrificed my body, my time, my energy, my effort, my everything, is because of that feeling. I wanted that again.

So what’s cool about us, as humans, we’ll stop and remember we can get that feeling again. So today I want you guys to sit back and I want you to remember that feeling. And that’s my gift to you. Just enjoy it for a little bit, before you go chasing it again, because it’s there and you can remember it and you can bring it back.

So I hope that helps you guys, it felt good for me today. Hopefully it felt good for you as well. And that’s all I got. I’m almost back to the office, I’m going to let you guys go. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day, and talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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Let’s talk about your moral obligation…

On today’s episode Russell talks about his book, Dotcom Secrets being mentioned on another marketing podcast, but how the host says Russell’s methods may be too aggressive. He explains why it’s okay to be aggressive when you are passionate about what you’re selling.

Here are some of the awesome things you will hear on this episode:

How Russell’s book was mentioned in a top ten list of marketing books.
Why Russell feels like it’s important to be passionate about what you’re selling.
And also why Russell isn’t afraid to call out his competitors on what he believes is inferior software.

So listen below to find out why being aggressive is essential to selling something you truly believe in.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright everybody, so today I’ve actually got a Go Pro on me as well. We’re thinking about starting a behind the scenes reality TV show, showing the behind the scenes reality TV show. That’s what Funnel Hacker TV is going to be. So I’m filming a whole bunch of stuff today, and I found a really cool dude and we’re going to see if he can turn this into a cool daily video thing, showing behind the scenes and if we can, that’d be awesome. And if it doesn’t work out then this might be one episode thing. So I’m excited for it.

But I’m heading to the office today. A couple of cool things, first off, I may have ordered my own life size Batman suit. It was custom fitted and it may have showed up on Saturday and I may be trying it on today for the first time. I’m so excited. Those of you guys who are JV partners, you will see this on the Expert Secrets JV page because we’re going to be giving away a bunch of these super hero outfits, which is going to be really fun. Batman is one of the ones, and it’s the one I really wanted, so I got it. And I’m really excited about that.

I wanted to talk to you guys about something today, because it’s kind of interesting. This morning I was getting ready and listening to a bunch of podcasts and there was this one podcast that I like, and on there the episode was talking about my favorite marketing book. I was like, “Oh please, please, let my book be one there. Please, please.” They started going through their top ten marketing books and they went through and about half way through they said, the guy who is one of the hosts said, “My next book is called Dotcom Secrets, by Russell Brunson.” I was like, “YES!” so excited.

He started talking about how cool it is, the sales funnels and stuff and then he said something that I was just like, “ahh..” he said, “You know some of the stuff Russell teaches in the book is kind of aggressive, and if you don’t like those things, you can kind of tailor it for your own needs.” I kind of stopped for a second, I was like, aggressive? Are you kidding me? Oh crap. My camera just tipped over while I was driving.

But I was like, aggressive? And I was thinking, I hate that people think that what I do is aggressive. Not that I hate that they think that it’s aggressive, I hate that they think that being aggressive is bad, that’s a better way to put it. Because I was like if you, and this comes from Jay Abraham, I first heard it from him. Actually I think Matt Bacak was the first person I heard say it, but he was quoting Jay Abraham. It was basically saying that if you believe in the product or service you are selling, then you have a moral obligation to do everything in your power to get it into the hands of your customers.

I don’t know about you, but I feel that. I feel like I have a moral obligation and I try to serve people and teach people and train people who also, they’re not just trying to get rich quick on the internet, but they feel like they have a moral obligation to their audience. They’ve created some product or service or thing that they feel can change the world and when you have that, you need to be aggressive about it. Otherwise people are going to miss it. For me, I’m just like I want people missing out on all this stuff I’m sharing between Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets, with Clickfunnels and all that kind of stuff. I don’t want them missing it because they’re like, “Oh you sound kind of excited, but you don’t really push me over the edge.” I want to push people over the edge because I believe in it that much.

I was thinking back about my life at different eras, for things that I really believed in. And one of them, a lot of you guys know I’m a Mormon, and I went on a two year mission. I was in New Jersey, Cherry Hill New Jersey, in Morristown, Camden, all over the southern two-thirds of New Jersey. I was out there every single day knocking on doors. I’ve had people in the past be like, “Why did you do that? Why did you push your religion on people?” I’m like, are you kidding? First off, I wasn’t pushing my religion on anyone. I was trying to share something I really, really believe in. Second off, I’m being aggressive because I believe it matters. I believe in what my message is so much that I’m willing to go out there and knock on doors, I didn’t get a penny. In fact, I paid my own way because I believe it so much.

It’s the same thing with this business. I believe in what we do so much that I’m going to be aggressive about it. I just want all of you guys that if you feel weird about being aggressive and marketing aggressively and trying to sell your product, it means you don’t believe in it enough. That’s the only logical thing that I can say. For some reason you don’t believe in your message. You need to believe in your message so much that you would literally go out and knock on doors, without getting paid a penny to go and share this with people, because that’s how much you believe in it. When you believe in your message that much, then everything else will take care of itself. You will go out there, share, talk and you’re not going to be embarrassed to go and make a video or talk about it, or do a podcast, or interview someone, or drive traffic, or lose money, risking to try and do this thing. It’s not going to matter because you’re going to care so much about your message, that all those other things just fall apart.

So I would argue that if you’re struggling in your business right now, it’s because you don’t believe in your message enough. Because you don’t believe in your message enough, you’re not being aggressive enough to share it and get people. I literally want to get people when they walk by and grab them and say, “Dude, there is a better way.”

It’s funny, people ask me, I got a lot of people who just like, “I can’t believe that you talk about your competitors like ConfusionSoft and Lowkey Pages. I can’t believe you call them out and say their names.” And I’m like, “Honestly, as an entrepreneur, I’ve used those tools in the past. It was expensive, frustrating, hard to get. I feel for those people and I want to save them from these things that are keeping them from the success they deserve.” That’s how passionate I am about, I’m not afraid to call people out because I’m like, “Look, if you’re over here, you’re going to spend twice as much money, take ten times longer, and you’re probably not going to be as successful. Where if you come with us to what we’re trying to share with you, do you understand what the difference….”

That’s how much I believe in what I’m trying to share. And until you believe that much in what you’re sharing, I think you’re going to struggle. In fact, it’s interesting, this is back probably 7 or 8 years ago. Before I knew what message I was trying to figure it out. I was selling different things, I was trying stuff. I remember, I had different programs I created. Some I was insanely passionate about. Some of you guys remember Microcontinuity, I was nuts, passionate about that. And you could hear it, and the sales were amazing because of it. I couldn’t stop talking about it. That was my life.

And then I had other products that didn’t do as well, and I remember one of my friends, Garrett Pearson, I don’t know if Garrett even remembers this or not. I can’t remember where we had this conversation but it was during the middle of some other launch after Microcontinuity and he asked, “how are sales doing?” and I was like, “They’re doing alright.” And he’s like, “I can tell.” And I’m like, “What do you mean, I can tell?” and he’s like, “I can just tell by the passion in your emails about how excited you are and I know that…” and I don’t remember the rest of what he said, but I remember him saying that. He could tell by the sound of my emails how excited I was.

And that’s how he was guessing how much sales were coming. And I was like, isn’t that weird. I’m writing an email. You can’t hear my voice, you can’t sense anything, but just when I’m really believing in something, the way I speak about it and to it, is different. Enough that Garrett reading an email on the other side could tell how passionate I was. And obviously, a lot of other people did. Maybe not consciously, but subconsciously they recognized it and because of that, they didn’t buy the product.

So if you’re kind of thinking, “Oh yeah, my products good, it’s nice.” That’ll wear off in everything you do. It’ll wear off in your emails, in your podcasts, in your webinars, every single communication point. If you don’t believe in your product so insanely strong, it’s going to come off and sales are going to tank because of that. Even if you’re like, “I followed the script, why is no one buying?” It’s because you don’t believe in it enough to have the passion you need to get people to say yes.

So what I would say, for those that think that I’m marketing aggressively, or if you’re trying to figure out where you fit in this whole thing, you need to be obsessed with your product or service and your message. So obsessed that you are willing to go out of your comfort zone completely and share things and talk about things and that passion that some people will call aggressiveness, is what would get people to buy from you. And it’s going to rub some people the wrong way.

I hope this isn’t sacrilegious. It might be. I don’t think it is, I hope it’s not. If it is, I apologize and I repent in advance. But I was thinking about this, when you study Christ and you study his life and you read the Bible and those teachings one of the things that he says is that, and it’s the reason why Christ taught in parables. He taught in parables and people would hear the story and be like, “Okay, cool. I get it.” But then there’s so many layers in the parables that go deep. And he said, and I’m sure I’m going to mess up the quote, but he said something to the effect of, “My sheep will hear my voice and come to me.” Christ was speaking, giving his message and sharing things like that. And everyone can hear it. But his sheep, his people will come and they will actually follow him. They hear it at a different level that it affects them.

I think for all of you guys, it’s the same thing. A lot of people out there are going to be turned off, they’re not going to like it, whatever that is, but your sheep, your people will hear you and they will follow you.

It’s interesting, the other day we had a guy came to the office. Someone who I have tons of respect for. He happens to also be a speaker. He speaks at events and he gets paid to speak. And while we were sitting there, I kind of smiled and said, “Well, there’s two ways to be successful in the speaking world. Number one, you get paid to speak, you be a celebrity. For example, Tony Robbins spoke at our event. He’s a celebrity so we paid him a lot for him to speak.” I don’t think I’m allowed to say how much we paid him, but it was multiple six figures. It was a lot. I think we were doing the math and it ended up being $50,000 an hour that he was on stage, or something crazy like that. It’s a lot because he’s a celebrity.

And this guy was like, “Yeah well, I could never get paid that much.” I was like, “Yeah, neither can I.” but there’s a second way you can speak. So you speak and then you sell. Tony Robbins spent, X amount of hours on our stage and we paid him a lot for that, but three weeks later I spoke at Grant Cardone’s event and Grant did not pay to speak, he did not pay for my flights or hotel. I cover my flights, I cover my hotels. I did my own stuff. I booked my travel, for crying out loud. I get there and I stood on stage for 90 minutes, a fraction of the time. I did my presentation, sold my product and I think when all was said and done, I think when all the checks cleared it was $850,000 that we made from that presentation. I was like, “You can be famous and make blah, or you can learn how to sell. I got paid 4 times what Tony Robbins got paid.” Not because….and the only reason is because I know how to sell right.

So I share this story with this guy and if someone told me that, “Hey Russell, you made almost a million dollars in less than an hour.” I would have been like, “What? What did you do? Explain to me, give me that information. I need to know that.” I tell this guy and he’s like, “Wow, cool.” And then he changed the subject. He did not hear my message, he did not….we talked about it before. My sheep will hear my voice. Some of you guys, when I tell you that, you’re like, “Holy crap, I’ve got to learn that. I’ve got to master that skill.”

The first time I saw someone on stage and they sold and they did 100 grand in 90 minutes, I was just like I have to learn that. I don’t know what that was, but whatever it was I have to figure out that skill set. Because that is something I want to do, I need that. The same is true with your message. It’s okay to be aggressive. You’re going to turn off some people, but your sheep, your people, your whatever you want to call them, will hear your voice and follow you. And it’s the key.

So don’t be afraid of being aggressive if you truly believe in what you have. You have a moral obligation to share it with everybody in any way possible. If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, you gotta find something else to sell, or you gotta change your believe patterns. Because if you don’t believe in it, there’s no way someone’s going to give you money. Because their belief in giving you money is based on your belief in the thing you’re talking about. The more powerful your belief is, the easier it’ll be to get them to believe as well.

So that’s what you got guys. It’s okay to be aggressive, you’ve got to get them to believe. With that said, I am about to go. I’m starting my juice fast today. Stephen just showed up in his motorcycle, he’s got a backpack full of juice. Oh man. He’s got a t-shirt that says, “You’re just one funnel away.” I’m going to get some juice, and I’m going to go and get started. Because I haven’t eaten yet today, in fact I’m not eating for the next four days because I’m on a juice fast. That’s what happens when you binge all week, all spring break long. That’s what I got you guys, I’m out of here, have a great day and I’ll talk to you soon.

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My strange encounter at the grocery store at 10:30 at night, and what that has to do with you getting more traffic into your funnels.

On today’s episode Russell talks about being recognized twice in one day while out running errands in his home town and why that makes him nervous. He also talks about the next steps he will be taking to go from $30 million a year in revenue to $100 million a year.

Here are some interesting things you’ll hear in this episode:

Find out the two places where Russell was recognized and how he reacted.
See what moves Russell is making to grow his business and why that may lead to him being recognized more often.
And find out how Russell plans to dominate every social media platform.

So listen below to find out why Russell needs to get used to being recognized while he’s in public.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. It’s actually, I’m not sure what time it is for you but it’s late night for me. I’m coming home from the grocery store. And I’ve had something interesting happen to me twice today. I’m excited to talk about this because I’m not sure what to do with it and maybe you guys can help me. It also ties into my other, it’s a negative weight against the goals I’m going after. You guys are my therapy session for tonight. I hope that’s alright.

Okay, so the first thing is. It’s been spring break and my kids and wife and I have been having tons of fun doing stuff. We decided to get them some of those watches, have you seen those watches where you can, they can text me and I can text them, they can call me? When kids are gone, you always know where they’re at. There’s GPS on it, so any given time you know where your kids are at. You can call them, you can text them. It’s pretty awesome.

So we went and bought some of those, but they didn’t show up until today. Today we went to go get them from the store. We’re in there getting them all pre programmed, everything working and then I’m sitting there. And what’s funny is my wife, she has something happening this morning, so she got dressed up, she looked gorgeous. But me and the kids, the kids were all in their jammies, I was in my sweats. My hair’s all over the place and I’m just like, I told my wife, “I’m so sorry. We’re going to embarrass you going out today, but I don’t want to get ready.” So she looked gorgeous and we all looked like, we just got out of bed, because we kind of did.

So we’re at the store getting everything put together, but it doesn’t matter because I’m at the Verizon store, so who really cares. So I get stuff all checked out and all the sudden one of the workers there says, “Russell Brunson.” I’m like, “Yeah?” I assumed he was reading something off of whatever. He’s like, “How did you build such a big following?” I just froze. I didn’t even know what to say. I’m like, “Um…a lot of hard work.” And he’s like, “Didn’t you just write a book or something?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I wrote a book and I have another book coming out next month.” I didn’t know what to say. It was the most awkward thing. I was like, you know that scene in Dumb and Dumber where he comes out and says, “Hey Big Gulps huh. Alright, well….See you guys later.” That’s what it felt like.

I didn’t know what to say, I was so out of my element. It was just awkward. I felt bad because I was like, a horrible host or I don’t know what exactly it’s called. It was just kind of, I felt bad. And when I got in the car with my wife she’s like, “Why didn’t you talk to him more.” I’m like, “I don’t know. I could’ve, I should’ve.” It totally just caught me off guard. I didn’t know what to say. I felt bad, I hope that……I always want to be nice to people. I’m sure he’s like, “That Russell dude is weird. He seems really nice on his podcast and stuff, but he’s weird in real life.”

And then tonight, so it’s like, 10:30 at night and I’m at the grocery store listening to podcasts, I’m in my, once again, my sweats. I’m walking around getting stuff, doing my thing, listening to podcasts, having a good time, taking my sweet time at the grocery store because it’s kind of fun on late nights and no one’s around. I’m doing that and start checking out, so I take my headphones out because in case this cash register person wants to talk to me. I’m putting stuff on the belt thing and as I’m doing that, all the sudden I look back and there’s a guy standing behind me. He’s like, “Hey, is there a Ferrari in the parking lot?” I was like, “I don’t know, maybe.”

Then someone grabbed him, “The lane over here is open.” And he left. I was like, Okay, that guys must, I assume he knows who I am. Because I used to have a Ferrari, it was kind of awkward. It was kind of like, once again I was like, I didn’t know what to say. “Maybe….ugh.” I’m sure I sounded so stupid.

It’s funny because in the past no one ever knew who I was, which is nice. In fact, in Boise I never advertized hardly here because I didn’t want anyone to know. Because it’s kind of nice to have some normal life. And then it’s been funny, every once in a while, maybe twice in my life, I’ll be in the airport and someone will be like, “Russell Brunson!” and it’s kind of cool because someone recognizes me in the airport, how cool is that? But now it’s happening more often in my own home town. It freaks me out a little bit.

So why does that freak me out. I’m not going to lie, I’m kind of flattered by it, it strokes my significance and I like those kind of things, but it’s also like I don’t want to be on. I still like going home and not being on. I’ve been in the grocery store twice today in my sweats. I don’t like being on so it makes me nervous, I have a lot of fear about that.

It’s funny because this year the book’s coming out and the book is like mass market. I think it’s going to do well, hopefully. And we’re going to try to do an infomercial with it and if we do that it’s going to be on TV, we’re doing radio ads, so it’s going to be on the radio. It’s going to be out there. And then Clickfunnels is continuing to grow and there’s a lot of cool stuff happening and I’m trying to get me and the message and all that stuff out there, but then I had this nervousness of the more I’m out there the more people might know who I am, which I guess is okay, but I don’t know. It adds another layer of what makes me nervous and all that kind of stuff.

With that said, I’m going to tell you what was really fun about today. A couple of things, first off, it’s general conference. So for the Mormons out there, you know what it is. For those who aren’t, twice a year we have what we call General Conference, it’s two days. Saturday and Sunday where basically the leaders of our church, the prophet, the 12 apostles, a bunch of people all speak. We get donuts and we sit at home with the TV and watch church on TV with the kids. It’s pretty fun. That was today, Saturday and then tomorrow we have that again.

So after the conference, I went to Best Buy and I bought a blogging camera, I bought some other stuff. And basically I’ve been thinking a lot about this, one of my things I’ve been digging and drilling deep in the Inner Circle members this session has been diversity. I’ve been around now for 14 years, and I know, I remember what happened when I got slapped by Google, a lot of times, paid, then free, then free, then free, I got slapped a ton. Facebook got slapped a year and a half ago, and luckily we got through it. Facebooks been really good.

In fact, I feel like we penetrated Facebook. We kind of were all over it. I’m sure that if you ever have been on one of my pages, you see my face every day and I apologize I’m not better looking because you have to see my ads all the time. But we’re pretty much dominating Facebook, we’re everywhere. It’s fun and we’re having great success with it and it’ll continue to grow. But we’re doing really, really well there. But I hate putting all my eggs in Zuckerburg’s basket. So we do a lot of other stuff. Like Dream 100 and we have partners, so we’re growing there. But I’m also looking at what are the other core platforms, because we’re not doing great in the other platforms and I want to go deep into each of them.

I tried Snapchat for a little bit, I was pretty consistent with it too, but we just can’t. …Snapchat is hard to grow. I think I’m moving off Snapchat, so I’ve decided to give up on that platform. But I’m really excited about Instagram. Instagram is cool because it’s actually better than Snapchat, plus, easier to grow an audience. I started doing Instagram whatever it’s called, Instagram lives this week. And I already get more viewers on Instagram live than I did on Snapchat. I’m like, crap I should’ve been doing this for the last year.

So that’s been kind of a cool thing. So I had a chance to meet a dude who’s the number one guy in my industry in Instagram. He’s got a huge 3 million person following. So I’m friends with him and we’re paying him to help us grow ours and promote us. So I’m trying to go deep into that channel. So I want to just, again, it’s all diversity in platforms and channel and people. So I’m trying to go really deep into Instagram. Then my next big play is Youtube. We’ve never had an awesome YouTube and I want to own it.

So we’re launching, some of you may know if you’ve been listening to the podcast, Funnel Hacker TV, which is going to be all on YouTube, obviously on Facebook and other places, but I want to force the audience to go to YouTube to consume and grow it. So we have a lot of cool stuff happening in YouTube right now, but it’s just not growing that big. But I think Funnel Hacker TV will be because it’s actually a TV show that’s going to be awesome.

But then with that I want to, we have 10 episodes that we’ve recorded that are being edited and are mostly done. When the book launch ends, so are we six weeks away, well book launch is two weeks away, so six weeks away from launching Funnel Hacker TV. Funnel Hacker TV episode one will launch as soon as the book launch is over. And then basically once a week one will be coming out. So those will be really cool. But to stimulate those, because those take a lot of energy and effort to do it. I’m starting a Funnel Hacker TV behind the scenes, which is basically going to be me doing a daily vlog. Casey Neistat style. Yes, I have been watching a lot of Casey Neistat, I’ve been geeking out on him, he’s really cool and I like him a lot and I like what he’s doing. I may be trying to get him to speak at Funnel Hacking Live, which would be cool. So lately I’ve been watching him and I was like, “I want to do that.”

He’s awesome, he has all his own camera’s, videos himself, and edits it all and I don’t have any skills like that. So I found a guy in our community who is posting in our Facebook group. We have like 50 people asking to help edit videos, but there’s one guy that for some reason I really just liked him a lot. So he’s doing the first test when we’re starting next week. Basically I’m going to be video blogging this whole behind the scenes thing and then each day he’s going to take all the footage and dump it all in a drop box the next day and take it and try to make a video blog, Casey Neistat style, and it’s going to be living on YouTube and that’ll be kind of its home. It’ll be what, I don’t know if it’s the right word, but it’s going to help boister up the funnel hacking show. My goal is to go deep into YouTube and dominate and to own it and just figure that out.

So we’re going to be hiring all the best YouTube people in the world to get to understand it and know and spending a lot of money and energy and effort. So we can dominate that platform so that it’s a big platform as we have on Facebook. We’ll have the same thing on Youtube, the same thing on Instagram. Just keep going to the core of the platforms that our people are at. Same thing I want to master TV, I want to master radio and potentially direct my own magazines too.

So if you look at me, that’s my, in fact, I wish all you guys were in Inner Circle, if you were all in my Inner Circle, this would be so much easier, I could show you all how to step deeper. But at Inner Circle meeting I was showing people, my first 8 or 9 years of my business was all about creating offers and we’d jump from offer to offer to offer. We got stuck at 3 million bucks a year. And then as we figured out which offer was our best, which was Clickfunnels, then we shifted into instead of creating a bunch of offers, we kept one offer but then we created, I used my creativity on different front end offers to get people into Clickfunnels. My webinar, my books, all these things are creative things we’ve created to get people into the one thing we’re trying to sell, which is Clickfunnelsl.

So there’s little nuances, when I go from zero to 3 million dollars, I got stuck there for 5 or 6 years we couldn’t break past that. I was focusing my creativity on lots of new offers. When I shifted my creativity from instead of creating a bunch of offers to how can I sell more people into one offer? That’s when I went from 3 million to 30 million. And my goal to go from 30 to100, shift my creativity from different offers to mastering traffic. So my creativity is going to be focusing for the next year to two years on traffic. Does that make sense?

So in my early life it was like every month we’re launching Neurocel is our supplement. Our thing in the weight loss market, Body Evolution. Then we’ve got the thing with dating market. Then we got this thing in the couponing market, and every month was rolling out our new offer. Again, that’s where we got stuck at that level. And then when we focused everything on one offer, Clickfunnels, first it was the webinar, promote that. If you listen to the podcast, every single week for an entire year, nothing but the podcast, then we added the book funnel in there. Excuse me, the webinar and the book funnel both pushing into that. Now I got the next book, the perfect webinar script, a bunch of front ends that all lead to the thing that’s all we’re really focusing on selling, Clickfunnels.

When we focus on one singular thing, it went from 3 to 30, then we go from 30 to 100, I think we’ve got enough front end offers, I don’t want to create anything new. I just want to focus on creativity within traffic. What are all the ways we can get traffic into it? So it’s mastering all these other platforms and getting creative and figure out how we can be the best in Instagram, the best on TV, the best… and really spending the effort and energy to do that, and that’s really how we’ll scale to the next level.

So anyway, as I was showing the Inner Circle members, this is a million dollars businesses, creating different offers figuring out what people like. You go from a million to 10, to 20 it’s like, now you figured out what people like. Now focus on things, front end funnels to get people into that offer and then going from 10 million to 100 million is now focusing on creativity in the traffic.

So for me it’s like that. But the thing that sucks though is for me to go and do that and get them more traffic, what do I gotta do? I gotta put my face out there and then what happens? Its 10:30 at night and people are asking me if I have a Ferrari while I’m checking out at the grocery store. That’s my fear. So there’s the conundrum. But it’s all good problems to have.

Anyway, I just more wanted to catch up with you guys because that was funny. But a lot of times we have a goal that’s pushing us one direction, but then we’ve got our fear of something else pulling us the other way and it keeps us in the middle, and I just don’t want that to happen to me. I thought if I confessed it on a live podcast, I guess it’s live right now but it’s not live when you listen to it. If I confessed it on the Marketing In Your Car podcast then I gotta forsake it. I don’t know. I don’t know how that all works.

Alright guys, I’m done. Take the groceries in and get to bed. We’ve got a long day tomorrow watching conference in our jammies, eating donuts. It’s going to be amazing. Then Monday is when I have to repent of my sins. Monday I’m doing a week long juice fast because I’ve eaten enough carbs in the last 48 hours to basically be all next week and the week on. So I’m going to jump back into normal life mode. Plus I’m going to be vlogging, which is fun. One of the cool things about vlogging, is that it makes my life not boring.

Which is what is kind of fun about Snapchat or Instagram. It forced you to realize if your life is boring or not. It’s documenting all these things throughout the day. And if I don’t do anything, it’s going to be a really boring show. The next four days is actually insane. I may or may not have purchased a full custom fit batman suit that may or may not have showed up yesterday. So that’s going to be on episode number one. Because I gotta open it, reaveal and show JV videos behind it and a bunch of other stuff. That’s insanely cool.

Then we’ve got a whole bunch of other things. Anyway, you have to watch episode one, if and when it ever gets done. So anyway, that’s the plan, but it’s going to be fun. So I will share you guys a journey of what we’re doing to dominate all the platforms and if you were at Funnel Hacking Live, we sold a course called Fill Your Funnel that will eventually be at Fillyourfunnel.com, but the live training actually starts on Monday, which is kind of cool. But we’re taking people through this journey with us over the next year, how do we scale traffic. It’s going to be kind of fun. So we’ll probably open up registration for it in a couple of weeks, if you guys are interested. Go to fillyourfunnel.com get on a waiting list and you can get your funnel filled with prospects who want to give you money. That is my focus at least for the next 12 months and probably on.

With that said, appreciate you all, have a nice day. Have a nice night and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

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Until you’ve come completely okay with failing, it’s going to be really hard to succeed.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how people are scared to take a risk because of the personal responsibility if they fail.

Here are some of the interesting things you will hear in this episode:

The biggest reason people are afraid to take risks and why it’s so scary.
How Russell’s mission for the Mormon church helped prepare him to cope with rejection and failure.
And why we shouldn’t be afraid of people seeing us fail because people only pay attention to themselves.

So listen below to find out why you shouldn’t be afraid to take some risks with your business.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. It’s a rainy, rainy day here in Boise. It’s like a monsoon outside, it’s kind of fun. But it’s still spring break so I’m going to go get some stuff done for the next three hours and then I’m coming back to go roller skating with the kids. And our kids have never been roller skating before, so it’s going to be kind of a big deal and really hard, I’m sure. But it’ll be fun.

So I wanted to share with you guys today, something, a kind of cool interesting thing. I had my call with Tara a couple of days ago and on there we were talking about some of the things that make people successful and unsuccessful. There’s a lot that goes into it, but one of the things was really kind of interesting and fascinating, as we were talking about it. It is one of the biggest reasons why people don’t have success, and it has to do with….can you guys guess? Drum roll please…..

The personal risk involved. It wasn’t just risk, because there’s risk in everything. “What if I lose all my money?” there’s always a risk of whatever you’re going to try, but it’s a personal risk. How will I personally cope with this if I fail? What’s going to happen to me as a human being? What are people going to think about me? That’ll be the worst thing in the world. It’s interesting because, maybe it’s because most of you all know at this point, hopefully, that I am Mormon. So I spent two years on a mission. I was in New Jersey, Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I spent a lot of time knocking on doors and a lot of people telling me no. A lot of people yelling at me, a lot of people cursing me out in their native New Jersey tongue and it was fun.

It was scary at first though, not going to lie. I remember my very first day on the mission, I went out there with my companion and we started knocking on doors and I always assumed I was going to watch him knock for three or four weeks, then when I was ready I would go and do it. But that was not the case. The very first door he knocked on. He did his little thing, and the next door he knocked on the door and said, “You’re up.” And then stepped back.

I was like, “What? No.” So I’m like, all nervous so I say, “Hey my name is…” and I’m totally stuttering through this thing and about half way through, it was this cute little old lady who’d answered. I was like, she’s going to be so nice, we’re going to teach her and it’s going to be so great. Then boom, she slammed the door in the middle of my thing. Mid sentence, mid word probably. I’m like, “Huh, well that’s awkward.” And I remember at that time, I turned around in the driveway and we were walking back out and there were these cars driving by, and they started honking. And I was like, “Oh.” Because you guys remember, I grew up in Utah, there’s always people when missionaries drive by, you honk and wave, “Oh it’s the missionaries.”

So I hear this honking and I’m like, “Oh cool. I’m a missionary now. This is so cool. They’re going to wave at me.” So I look back and these guys are waving at me, but not in the same way that I was used to do when I saw missionaries. They were honking and they were sticking their heads out the car and flipping me off, and like “Go back to Utah!” I was like, “Oh man, these people hate us.” And at first it was really, really hard. But then, we knocked on more doors and more doors and eventually, thousands and thousands of doors, I stopped, I was so ashamed of myself with rejection. They’re not rejecting me, they’re rejecting something else, whatever, it’s all cool. And I was fine with it.

It’s interesting, if you look at, this is a side note for those who wonder. If you look at network marketing, or door to door sales, you notice one common theme. 90% of all the network marketing companies are founded in Utah, and 90% of all direct, door to door, like Cutco knives, alarm systems pest control, they’re all founded out of where? Utah. The reason why is because they have all these Mormon missionaries who have spend their whole life knocking on doors for 2 years and getting rejected. They have forgone, they no longer care, they don’t have this personal fear of rejection. So they’re able to do those things.

So I think maybe I’m kind of lucky because I have that so many times, being rejected, that I don’t really fear that much anymore. That’s what keeps a lot of people back. Just that fear of “What are people going to think if I try this and I don’t succeed?” All the personal risk of putting you out on the line. It’s scary.

It’s not so much the financial, I think sometimes we hide behind the financial. “Is it going to make sense? Or not make sense?” In fact, it was funny at Grant Cardone’s event, after we came back off the stage and I was in the back and he was all excited about the presentation and everything. And then he was like, “I’m going to get out there and tell everyone to buy. If they don’t have money, they should buy anyway, if you’re already broke, what’s an extra $1000 on your credit card. It doesn’t matter, just buy it.” I was like, at first kind of laughed, and I’m sure that’s one of his closing techniques. But I was like, it’s so true. If you’re already in debt, what’s an extra thousand bucks. But it’s the personal risk of what if I try this and fail. That’s the real fear. It’s not like, “My credit cards are almost maxed out.” Who cares? That doesn’t really matter when all is said and done.

It’s that personal risk of “What if I try this and it doesn’t work. I tried all these other things and it didn’t work.” In fact, I think that I have a lot of friends and family members who have gone through a lot of school. They keep going to school and they’ve got their bachelors and their masters and they keep going on and on and on. I think part of it is they like learning, but they’re so scared of jumping in and trying that they never do it, right.

Being an entrepreneur is less about learning in a formal setting. Formal setting’s is the safe happy place. Nothing could possibly go wrong. You study and learn and you take a test and fail or pass or whatever. But there’s no personal risk ever. So people stay in there forever. Being an entrepreneur is the opposite. You’re out there with no shield, no breastplate, no nothing. You’re running out and people are shooting arrows at you like crazy. And if you’re so scared of personal risk, you’re not going to be willing to run out there. You’re in trouble because it’s tough. Honestly.

It’s funny, the problems you have when you’re small versus the problems you have when you’re big. I remember being smaller and trying to figure out how to make more sells. Now we’re so big, it’s like how do we slow sales so we can keep up with customer support and the technology. There’s a whole new set of issues that come. But every single day there’s something. I remember I heard, I think Dan Kennedy said, once every month and entrepreneur faces a decision that either bankrupts their business or takes it to the next level. And that was back, direct mail days, radio, or TV. Stuff like that. Now days, I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a daily thing. Every day it’s like, alright. Put it back on. What’s the choice?

And I take personal responsibility. This is my choice, I think it’s going to work, I don’t know but let’s just go. Boom, we take it and we go and we go and we go. And I think instinctively you get better, but I make a lot of mistakes still. But instinctively get better and better at it. It’s interesting, in some of my coaching programs, one of the biggest things that people, I let everyone in my Inner Circle vox me. What’s interesting, most of the voxers that I get are people telling me, “this is what I want to do. Do you agree with that?”

It’s interesting because what they’re looking for is confirmation and again, there’s nothing wrong with this, I’m just explaining it. It’s interesting as I watch it. What they’re looking for is somebody else to hand the personal responsibility to if it fails. They want to be able to say, “Russell said this and so if it goes wrong, Russell told me this.” As opposed to “This is my business, my life, I’m going to try it out.” I’m okay with that. I don’t mind it. In fact, it’s what keeps me sharp, keeps me going. It’s really, really fun. I enjoy it. So I’m not saying it’s negative, I’m saying it’s interesting that that’s what most of the questions are that come to me.

It’s more like, they know the answer, they just want to be able to get me to approve it so that way if it goes wrong they’ve got somebody besides themselves to place the personal responsibility on. And it’s just fascinating to me. Even at the higher levels, there’s still that fear of personal responsibility. The personal risk. Those things that go into it. So I don’t know the right answer to that other than you should all get door to door sales jobs, or become Mormon missionaries and go get rejected for two years. I know for a lot of you guys, that’s not the right answer. But it’s becoming okay with that and realizing what’s the worst case scenario? If I try this thing and it fails, does anyone really know.

It’s like the credit card thing. An extra thousand dollars on your credit card. Does it really matter? Does anyone really know that even exists besides me and maybe my spouse? That’s, again, I don’t know the right answers to that, but it’s becoming okay with that personal risk, because you have to do that or else it’s going to be really hard to jump. Otherwise you’re going to be stuck in this learning mode. People always tell me they have information overload, what I’ve found with pretty much all of them, it’s because they’re scared, so scared of the personal risk involved. They like the safety of learning so they study and they learn and they study and they learn and then they don’t do because they’ve learned so much that the information overload is the way to take personal risk off of them. “I’ve got so much stuff from all these people. I don’t even know what to do.” So they claim information overload and it gets them frozen in the spot. So they keep learning, “I gotta learn through this information overload.” And they’re just stuck in a safe place that the school system screwed us up, giving us.

And I think you gotta get out of that. You gotta get out of the learning and that concept and just jump. Just running and jumping. So for you, and I’m talking to you, who’s listening to this. Not everybody listening, just to you. You’ve gotta be okay with that. If you fail, it’s not that big of a deal. Nobody else even knows it’s happening besides you. That’s what you gotta understand. We all think everyone is looking at us, the problem and the reality, is that everybody is looking at themselves. We’re all self conscious. I’m as guilty as everyone else. We’re all self conscious of ourselves.

So we dress the way we do, and we do our hair. We do all these things because we’re so self conscious and we don’t want everyone else to think something about us. But the reality is everyone’s doing that. Everyone’s looking at themselves, nobody is looking at you. So when you understand that, I hope that gives you permission. Nobody’s actually looking at me. Nobody really cares. I have people come up to me and they’re like, they start confessing all their failures to me and I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And they have all these things.

In fact, it was interesting I was at Boise State was wrestling UVU and the head coach at UVU was my old high school Greco freestyle coach. One of my favorite people in the world. I look up to him like no one else. So we’re at the tournament and Boise State beats UVU. After the match I run down and I’m so excited to see him. I’m like, “Greg, how’s it going?” and he looks and he’s like, “Well you saw how bad it was.” He just starts kind of justifying why they lost. I was just kind of smiling. I was like, “I didn’t even watch the match. My kids were running around like crazy. I didn’t even see the score. I’m just excited to see you.” And he was like embarrassed they lost and trying to shift that personal risk on, “Here’s the reasons why we lost.” Trying to justify. I’m like, I just wanted to see you. I don’t even care. I couldn’t have cared less who won. I was just excited to see you.

And ij think that’s what we all gotta understand. Nobody else really cares about you and what’s happening that much. It’s all you and you’re putting this stress and pressure and all those things on you. If you take that off a little bit then you’re okay. If I risk and if I fail, what’s the worst case scenario? Who cares? No one really is looking that close. It’s you. It’s you becoming okay with you. Because that’s a big part of it too. You’ve got to become okay with you. It’s interesting, the personal risk and responsibility is more like you becoming okay with yourself. Because nobody else really cares.

Anyway, I don’t know if that helps or not, but I hope it does. This rain outside is now shifting to snow. It’s crazy. The weather is insane. Everything is turning green here in Boise between the cold winter and the long snow in the winter and then this. Kind of fun. Alright you guys I’m going to go in and get stuff done before I go roller skating. Appreciate you all, I hope you have a great day and we’ll talk to you soon.

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What I learned this weekend while playing both Mom and Dad.

On today’s episode Russell talks about the difference between masculine and feminine energy. He shares what he learned from Tony Robbins about what causes all relationships to fail.

Here are some interesting things in this episode:

What the difference between masculine and feminine energies are.
How a woman can cause a man to lose his masculinity, which cause the deterioration of the relationship.
And what Russell is doing to combat his constant need to produce instead of just being present with his family.

So listen below to find out how learning about masculine energy versus feminine energy helped save Russell’s marriage.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, good morning. This is Russell once again, you probably know that at this point. But welcome to Marketing In Your Car, I hope it’s been good. It is officially spring break here in Boise, which means the weather is nice, the kids are out of school, we’re wearing shorts. The last time the kids were out of school we had our two weeks of snow days, like two months ago. So it’s nice to be on the other side. It’s been so fun, we had a chance to go swimming with them, and playing and movies.

What I want to talk to you guys about is my struggle. I’m curious, my guess is if you’re an entrepreneur, you might have this struggle as well. It’s really hard to just be. I don’t know if that makes sense or not. Just to be present in one spot and I’m thinking a lot about this over the last day or two. My wife was at the Tony Robbins event last week, so I was, we had four days of Inner Circle, she left during the fourth day. After that, we have a helper who helps Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday was all me and the kids, and I loved it.

But it’s hard. I mean it’s hard work, yes. It makes you love and respect and appreciate your wife a million times more, when you get to be the mom and the dad. But more so than that, I think it’s just different. Because I work really, really, really hard, probably too much. If you ask any of my people in my world, but I love it.
I think it’s, there’s two types of work. There’s directional and then there’s circular….I don’t know if that makes sense. I’ve been kind of geeking out a lot lately on masculine and feminine energy and things like that as well. In fact, if you go to Tony Robbins Date with Destiny, he has a whole day on relationships, it’s fascinating. Basically, it’s funny, no matter what problems you’re having in your relationship, if you go to regular counseling they try to fix the symptom of it.

They’re like, “you need to talk better.” Or whatever those things are right? That’s what they’re touching on. The foundational breakdown of every relationship is actually the loss of the polarity between masculine and feminine. So Tony’s whole thing is don’t fix the symptom, come back to the issue. What happens is men start becoming women and women start becoming men. As soon as the polarity for masculine and feminine dies, the whole relationship falls apart.

It’s really fascinating. That’s why in every relationship that’s successful there’s a masculine and a feminine. Sometimes it’s the females’ more masculine, sometimes the male is more feminine. It’s interesting, if you look at it. It’s such a not marketing topic, but it still gets me excited.

If you look at, I’ve got friends who the man is more feminine and their wives are more masculine. Almost always there’s this thing where the polarity between the two has to match, and that what causes connection. So Tony’s whole thing is you fix that, you fix some of the masculine and feminine, because what happens….alright, we’re going to go on a longer tangent I think, because I’m getting excited.

So what happens in a relationship is you get married and there’s a masculine and a feminine, and again, I don’t even care. I’m not going to get political or non political, but in all relationships. From… I don’t even know the politically correct way to say it. I’m not going to go into that part. We’ll leave that there for your imagination. Any relationship, masculine and feminine.

Let’s say you get married and at first the man’s very manly, and the woman is very womanly, and everything goes good. And then what happens, if you look at how masculine energy works, and how feminine energy works, the way that feminine energy causes change is through criticize, so women will criticize them to try to get them to change, it’s just kind of a thing that happens. Believe it or not, it just happens to be that.

What happens at first, the first year or two, or five, or seven years of marriage, the man has the masculine energy and that doesn’t bother him and they’re fine, but after a while it breaks down the masculine energy and the sudden as soon as the man stops, the criticism keeps happening and then all the sudden there’s a point where all the sudden it breaks men down and then they break from being masculine energy and absorbing those things to hurts their feelings and then all the sudden they switch to feminine energy.

And as soon as they do that, that’s the deterioration of the relationship. Everything bad happens after that. As soon as the man, the masculine becomes feminine, then women lose their attraction to the man and then the women end up becoming more masculine because they have to step up for the man. All this stuff happens and it all breaks apart. Tony’s whole thing is it shows you when a man becomes a man again, boom, instantly the masculine and feminine polarity comes back together and the magnetism happens there and all the other problems fall away. Really fascinating.

I learned that at a time when my wife and I were really struggling, and I realized at the time I had become very feminine. I still struggle with that part of my life, to be completely honest. When I’m at work, I’m very masculine and when I’m not sometimes I slip into my feminine, but any of the issues we have, it’s weird how I can tie it back to me switching into my feminine. Anyway, it’s really weird.

Why did I bring up this? Oh yeah, so as I’m thinking about masculine and feminine trying to understand. What is masculine? What is feminine? Really understanding those things, masculine energy is more moving towards something, there’s my goal. I need to go hunting and kill and go get that thing. Whereas feminine energy is more circular, if that makes sense.

I remember the first time I kind of got this, was with my wife 5 or 6 years ago. I was home with the kids on a long weekend and I was struggling with it all day long. Stressing out and she’s like, “What’s the matter?” I’m like, “I don’t know. We’re just sitting here playing games. The same game over and over again. Then we’re doing this, there’s no point to any of this. We’re just here.” And she told me, “That’s the point.”

When I got that, I was like, huh. I was able to stop trying to get somewhere and sit back, I don’t know if this goes against what I talked about earlier. It’s more the feminine energy being able to be, and be present and stuff like that. It’s fascinating. What’s interesting is as I was with my kids this weekend I was noticing my feelings. Why do I feel…..I’m having so much fun, but I feel things.

I think what I was feeling, as I was trying to identify it, I’m used to going, here’s the thing. Go hunting, kill, get that thing and come back. I’m running, and I’m so comfortable in that zone or that whatever, that I’m able to do that. But then when it’s just being, being present and just be with the kids, it’s really, really hard. Really hard for me. I don’t know if you guys feel that as well. It’s just not natural to me.

So this weekend was really kind of fun because I was trying to do that. I try to be present and try to be there. And it’s this insane mind game with my mind coming back to “No, go produce.” No, I need to be present. This is where I am. The back and forth between that was fascinating in my head. To watch my struggle constantly. So this week it’s spring break week. I’m trying to figure out how to get more balance in my life. I don’t know about you guys, but I think a lot of us struggle with that.

So I’ve been looking at that. Okay, how do I this week with my kids, how do I do that? How do I be present and also have a producing thing in me that I need to be able to do that thing? So today, for example, I woke up really early at 6 and I had a call with Tara, and I had a bunch of projects. I spent two hours and produced. And when it was done I unchecked, and I looked at my clock. Okay, right now it’s 7:30 or whatever. Til 10:30 I’m going to go and just be. There’s no point and that’s the point.

So I went out with the kids and I had a good time. We just hung out. It wasn’t stressful because I knew at 10:30 I was going to jump in the car and come and produce. So basically, this is where I’m at now. I’m driving to the office. Well, I’m at the office, in the parking lot waiting. But now I’m going to go produce. I’m trying to make it finite. So it’s not producing for forever. I’m going from now until I think 4:00, I have a dentist appointment. So I’m going to produce til 4:00, I have one big project to get done and when it’s done, the rest of the night I have to be done. I’m going to go home and me and some of the kids will watch some Lord of the Rings, and we’re just going to go and be present. Not produce, which is going to be hard.

But I did the same thing yesterday and it was really cool. Except for right before we started watching the movie, I had all this stress and things I was trying to figure out. I was like, I could create this thing while I’m watching a movie with the kids. And then I was just like, no I’m going to be present and I’ll worry about it tomorrow. As soon as I was able to turn that off and say okay, I’m not a producer right now, from this point to this point. I’m just going to be and that’s the whole point. I can do it.

And I did and it was awesome and I had such a good time with them. So anyway, I don’t know if this helps you at all, but in my mind it’s, at least the last two days have been really cool. I’m excited to test it out this whole week. I hope I can keep rolling with it, because it gave me so much more good times with my kids and my wife. And it wasn’t uncomfortable because I was segmenting that. So for me, like I said, I’m going to start chunking my days, this is my time to be a producer and this is my time to be, and be okay with that. And when I’m trying to just be present and be here I’m going to not try to produce. I’m going to forget about production and moving forward and going after a goal.

Because the goal is just to be there. Anyway, I hope that helps some of you guys. It’s helping me to overcome my entrepreneurial issues. Anyway, hopefully one of you guys out there heard that and it helps you as well. So with that said, I’m going to go produce. I’m going to go hunt something, kill it, and bring it back home. I’m excited for it. It’s going to be exciting. Thanks so much for everything guys and I’ll talk to you soon.

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Behind the scenes of one of the most amazing Inner Circle meetings ever…

On today’s episode Russell recaps some of the cool stuff from the last four days of Inner Circle meetings. He also shares his insights on a TV show he loves and talks about his new Batman suit.

Here are some cool things you should listen for in this episode:

The new rule that will be enforced within the Inner Circle.
Why they came up with this rule in the first place and why it will help Russell to go deeper into his teachings.
And hear Russell’s crossover prediction with one of his favorite TV shows.

So listen below to find out some insider stuff from Russell’s Inner Circle.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell and this is a late night Marketing In Your Car, I hope you don’t mind. I’m actually just about to start watching 24, before I do I wanted to kind of reflect on the last 4 days and share some cool stuff with you guys.

We had our Inner Circle group here in Boise. We had 2 Inner Circle groups. One group on Monday and Tuesday, and a second group on Wednesday, Thursday. It’s the first Inner Circle at the new office, which was so insane. Because that was the whole reason I moved into this new office, if I’m completely honest. It’s because I wanted to have a room to do Inner Circle meetings in. A year and a half ago, almost 2 years ago, I went to Joe Polish’s Genius Network Event at his office. We were in his office and we walked up the stairs into this room, it was layed in a way where you could have a lot of people in it. As soon as I saw the room, I was like I want this.

I took a bunch of pictures of it and then went home and messaged our realtor and said we wanted a place and we started looking around and all the sudden I remembered this place we looked at before. I didn’t like the office before because it was layed out really weird, but I was like if we gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it, we could do this. So we put the offer in and now a year and a half later we’re in and we just did our first Inner Circle meeting, which is so cool.

So there’s lesson number one. When you see it, then you gotta go and get it. Which actually reminds me of one of my favorite stories, it was a story I’ll probably mess up the details. I think it was at the grand opening of Disney World, and they were there opening day and the news and the reporters and everyone’s there. And they’re opening up Disney World and at the time, Walt Disney had passed away and one of the reporters standing next to Roy Disney, who was Walt’s brother. He looked at Roy and said, “Hey, it’s a shame that Walt didn’t live to see this.” And Roy looked back at the reporter, he said, “No, you don’t understand. Because Walt saw this, that’s why we’re here today.”

It’s such a cool thing, so many of us have a vision of what we want and we don’t get it. Anyway, I hope that’s inspiring. I saw it, and I didn’t think about it. We had got it, and now it’s here and it’s insane. I think it was cool and it was fun having our own room because we can control the energy and the music and the motion.

Thanks to Garret White, he came to one of our last Inner Circle meetings at our hotel room. They used to be in hotel rooms and he kind of shifted how we do the format of stuff, which has added a whole other level of energy to it.

It’s crazy, in Inner Circle, there’s a hundred people in it. But we broke it down into four groups, 25 in each group. So we had 25 that came Monday, Tuesday. 25 came Wednesday, Thursday. And then in April we’ve got two more groups that come through. It’s funny because April groups are packed. We had to shut those groups down because we had so many people. These groups are smaller and I get super nervous during smaller ones. Because I’m like, “They’re not going to meet as many cool people.” And all these things, but it seems like the smaller groups almost are better sometimes. Because the smaller the more intimate, we get a lot more done.

The two groups, I wish ….first off, I can’t even believe that I get paid to be in that room with these entrepreneurs and people that legitimately are changing the world in so many different areas and have so many unique ideas and things that I would never think of or fathom. To be able to sit there, honestly for four days just have a chance to absorb their ideas and mindset. Watching these people and we have companies from smaller companies doing whatever, up to, one of the guys in our group is the main marketing guy for the Truth About Cancer, they did a launch, did 20 million dollars. They’re about to do a launch, and my guess, this new launch they’re putting out called the Truth About Vaccines, and they’ll probably do 50-60 million dollars.

Then there’s people in the software space and people in the….it’s so unique. I’ve been to other mastermind groups but it’s like everyone’s in the same industry so it’s hard to glean much because everyone’s trying to do the same thing. It’s so diverse. It’s almost like there’s not two people in the same genre of business so it’s just insane.

And so this is kind of a cool thing and this is what I wanted to share with you guys because……I might be ruining the surprise for Inner Circle members, but the first few groups at the end of it, I basically got up and thanked everyone and we gave everyone these shirts that say Inner Circle For Life on it. And I told them, “Look, this is the deal. The Inner Circle for me was never about making much money. I make good money on it, but you know Clickfunnels is what makes my real money. This is kind of a thing, in fact, there’s been multiple times where I almost shut it down because I don’t know if it’s worth doing and pursuing because it’s pulling me away from Clickfunnels, which is my focus. I finish I four day event like this, I can’t even fathom not having this in my life, how much I get from it. From the group and the people.

My goal with this was never a big coaching program where I could just keep running people through it, bring people in and let them back out the other side, which is how most other mastermind groups that are out there happen.” So because of that we set a cap, about a year ago…..and I think at the time we had 37 people in it. I was like, “If I was to know how I could facilitate this, I can’t facilitate more than 100 people the way I do it. So I’m going to cap it at 100 and when we get to 100 we’re going to stop selling it and close it out.”

And at first it was kind of a dream. I didn’t think that was actually possible. Then after we kind of put that limit on it, it grew almost instantly. It was crazy, bloomed and filled all the way up to 100 so we shut it down. What’s interesting is after we shut it down, then there’s always some kind of float where one or two people go out and then people come in and it goes back and forth. It just kind of…applications come in and if we have spots we call them, if not we don’t. That’s kind of how it works. We have people fight and beg to get in sometimes.

So that’s kind of what happens, but recently, over the last few months, there’s been probably 5 or 6 people that have been in Inner Circle and then they’re like, “I love it, I don’t want to lose it, but I’ll put it on pause for 3 or 4 months and come back later. Hold my spot, though.” I was like, a couple of these first off, it’s not really fair to me or my team. I was like, it’s not really fair to them. It’s really not fair to the rest of the group. I said, “My goal is not to keep bringing new people into this group, my goal is I want to take this group and go deeper and deeper and deeper.”

So I basically told them that today. So because of that, we decided to set this new rule. We gave everyone a shirt that says, Inner Circle For Life on it. The rule is if you need to leave the Inner Circle, for whatever reason, it’s totally cool and we’ll always remain friends but if you leave, you can’t get back in. That’s the new rule, that’s it. So if you leave, your spot’s gone. And what’s interesting is for the most part, everyone is laughing and cheering and excited for that. And I didn’t tell everybody this but while I was sitting in the meeting, just today, not like the last four days, just today, we got 17 applications for Inner Circle during today’s session.

I almost wish I told them that. If you decide to leave, there’s a line up. 17 people today applied for your spot. And that’s coming in all the time. Some days are less, some days there’s 10, some days there’s 5. Whatever, but today alone, 17 applications came in for Inner Circle, and there’s not any…I actually have no idea. But I mean, it’s pretty dang close. If it’s not full there’s one or two spots. But then when those are in, it’s done.

Like I said, what I kind of told them is that if you cancel, we still love you, but you can’t get back in. And I want people there, in the Inner Circle for life. Because I want to be able to go, because even we have a new batch of probably 8 or 10 people that came in new since the Funnel Hacking Live event, it kind of got it back up to being at capacity. And today at, or the first day I spent the first 3 hours sharing the insanely cool stuff that we’re doing that I don’t have a chance to share anywhere else. So I’m showing all this stuff and I’m like, ahh….New people don’t have a foundation to build on this next level stuff. I’m trying to show what we’re doing to get from 8 figures to 9 figures, which is insanely ……it’s kind of crazy.

We went from 7 figures to 8 figures in a year and then I think in two to two and a half years we’ll pass 9 in a year. Which is crazy but how do you do that? It’s really shifting from…the traffic source isn’t how you do it, how you scale. I remember showing these guys all this stuff, but it sucks because some people, the newer people aren’t ready for that yet, because they don’t have the foundation of the last twelve months. The first twelve months of the Inner Circle is all about getting your front end funnel and lead in acquisition right to where you can consistently bring in people.

Not everyone, but the majority of the Inner Circle have that now. They’ve got funnels coming in consistently. It’s like, okay now we gotta build on this. So I wanted to shift and go super deep and I did, but I had to back step and spend almost 30 to 45 minutes giving the foundation. Here’s kind of to catch everyone new up. This is what we gotta focus on and you still gotta do that, but now let’s jump into where we’re going.

So many cool things I wish I could share with you guys. I wish everyone could be inner Circle. I wish it was possible. One of the cool things we were sharing was basically there are, and if you study Jay Abraham at all, there’s three ways to grow a company. Get more customers, get them to spend more, and then get them to buy more often. That’s the only three ways. Get more customers, get them to spend more, and get them to spend more often.

So you look at that, it’s like well how do you execute on that? So getting more customers are all about acquisition funnels. What are the funnels you have in your business that are there to acquire customers? Again, that’s the whole months of the Inner Circle have been getting our group masters at customer acquisition. I’d say more than half of our Inner Circle has a front end webinar that they’re consistently driving leads into every single day. It’s an acquisition thing. I would say the other half are other types of funnels. Some are book funnels, some are high ticket funnels, but most everyone has a really good lead acquisition funnels in place. That’s step number one, how to get more customers.

Step number two then, how to get your customers to pay more. That type of funnels is what we call an ascension funnel. We’ve got step one, the acquisition funnel, acquiring customers. Step two is ascension funnels for ascending customers. So I showed them behind the scenes of our ascension funnels. How are we getting people from dollar trial Clickfunnels to $97 a month to $297 to our $3000 to our $10000 and then to our $25000. What are the funnels inside of our business that are ascending people.

Where else can I talk about this kind of stuff. People have to be a certain level to understand this part of it. So I want to keep the group so I can keep going deeper, but I showed them acquisition funnels. I’m sure some of you saw Follow up Funnels. At the Funnel Hacking Live event I did a presentation about Follow up Funnels and we did it all for my birthday. Probably didn’t all sink in, in a week or two. But that ascension funnel is huge for us. It’s ascending people up from $97 a month to $300 a month and it’s huge for the growth of our company. So that’s number, again Number one, get more customers through acquisition funnels. Number two get your customers to spend more through ascension funnels. And then number three is get them to buy more often, and that’s through your monetization funnels.

So now it opens this question. What are all the monetization funnels that are possible? What could they be? So I was showing the ways for monetizing people on the back end. What’s interesting, this comes back to the new book, the new opportunity. So in the Expert Secrets book, the foundation, I wish I could…I wish you were sitting here and we were all on the same page. So three ways to build a culture, three ways to build a mass movement, attractive character, future based cause, and then the new opportunity. Then there’s two ways to structure the opportunity. One’s an opportunity switch and the other’s the opportunity stack.

Opportunity switch is usually your acquisition funnel, you’re switching them to a new opportunity and then everything else you sell that person in the future is an opportunity stack. So the monetization funnels are what are the other opportunities I can stack within this vehicle? I know for some of you guys, especially if you just got on my podcast are like, “What is Russell talking about? This sounds like math or PHD or something.” But if you go back through and listen and read the book…again, I just got done spending four days with my advanced members, so I’m geeking out.

So hopefully, those of you guys who are at that level are kind of geeking out with me. And those who are beginners are thinking, “I don’t know what he’s talking about, but this sounds amazing. I’m going to go study and this will make sense pretty soon.” When I was in school I remember my teachers talking, I had no idea what they’re saying and by the end of the semester I was like, “Oh, that’s what they’re saying. It’s still boring but at least I get it.” This won’t be boring when you get it. You’ll be like, “Oh my gosh. I’m making insane amounts of money.”

But that’s it, there’s three ways to grow a company. Acquisition funnels, ascension funnels, and monetization funnels. That’s it. So when you understand that, how these things flow together. Here’s an acquisition funnel, how do those link to ascension funnels? And how do those link to monetization funnels? Boom, there’s the process.

And then what’s cool is me showing…I talk a lot, and if you read the Dotcom Secrets book, I talk about hot traffic, warm traffic, and cold traffic, right. And typically I would say, if you get anyone online teaching traffic, they’re teaching hot or warm traffic. Hot traffic’s your market that loves you, so you just, they give you money because they love you. Then you go one step back to your warm audience, people always call this cold traffic, but it’s not. My definition of warm audience are people who are in your market but don’t know who you are yet.

So if I use Facebook ads, just by the nature of how you’re running them, you are running interest, right. They’re interested in internet marketing, they’re interested in weight loss, so you’re running ads to those people. That’s warm traffic. Again, people always tell you it’s cold traffic. It’s not cold, you’re targeting interests, so it’s warm.

What cold traffic is, and I’ve been geeking out and studying Gary Halverson recently. Gary and also Kennedy, Dan Kennedy, he was talking about it in Renegade Millionaire, which is a cool course. But he was saying, every marketer’s dream is to be able to, and he’s talking about direct mail. Every marketer’s dream is to be able to take the yellow pages, or the white pages and just mail direct mail through the white pages and have it convert.

Offline this is the easier to quantify. You’re….well, it is for me because I understand a mailing list. If you understand a mailing list it works, right. Here’s your own mailing list, that’s your hot market. Your warm market are other buyers in the market that you are. You will rent lists of buyers, that’s your warm. And then cold is the phone book. So that’s the next level I’m trying to get with a lot of these guys, which is, even for us, we’re just starting to dabble in legitimately cold traffic right now. But I showed them what people in our industry are doing.

I showed them Brendon Burchard, what he’s doing right now with radio. He gets cold audience, the phone book people to come into his funnels. I showed what Dean Graziosi’s doing with infomercials to get cold people in. I showed just other things. That’s the next level. How do you structure, how do you switch your offers. I show them our hot market, this is how we structure an offer. Our warm market, that’s the Dotcom Secrets book was all about. We created it for our warm market, people who understood marketing and sales and had some kind of business. This book was for my warm audience.

The Expert Secrets book was designed for two reasons. One it would be a really cool book you guys are all going to love. And number two, it was built for cold audiences. Built so I could go mail the phone book and get everybody to come in. At least that’s the goal.

Anyway, I’m actually getting tired. I may make zero sense right now. It’s just exciting. So why am I sharing this with you guys? A couple of reasons. First off, for all of you guys who are selling coaching this would probably be for you. Number one is don’t just build a program where you just push people through. That’s how most of them are done out there and it’s like you’re just pushing cattle through. You can make money along the way but you don’t get to go deep with people.

So like I said, the first thing is we limited ours and said, okay we’re only going to have 100 people in our group and we did. And we figured out a way to facilitate 100 people that doesn’t destroy me, but also gives the group and people what they need from me. But then it also makes the group insanely strong because there’s so much, it’s just so awesome. So that’s step number one.

Step number two is try to build a culture. When people come in, when they leave they can’t necessarily come back. Most of us allow customers to leave, come and go. And I understand. We do that in Clickfunnels and other things. I was listening to a Matt Furey CD from like, I don’t know, 10 years ago and he’s talking his members. He had a continuity program at the time and he said, “You can cancel any time you want, but if you cancel you can’t come back in.” I was like, “That’s cool.” It puts more personal responsibility back in their hands and it kind of does for you as well. You’ve got to carry a good enough experience too that you can keep people in. It can be a challenge for me.

Mandy who helps run the Inner Circle with me, we brought it up to her and she was game, and I was game. So we were like, alright. Let’s do this. It was interesting because I shared it with half the group, the first 50 entrepreneurs that came through the last four days. For the most part, all of them were really excited by that.

So I encourage you guys when you’re hiring coaching to do two things. One thing is limit the number, number two is don’t let people leave and come back in. And it’ll force you to be better. It’ll force them to commit. And it’ll give you the ability to go deeper with people. And all the stuff I shared with you over the last 18 minutes and 28 seconds is stuff that probably over a lot of people’s heads and I understand that. But when you’ve been in the room with me for a while, those things start lighting up and all the sudden it’s like, “Oh my gosh.” It becomes more clear.

For me, it’s taken a long time to get this clarity and even in Inner Circle, we’re layering things on. Every meeting we’re layering things on. We’re layering and then I just look at the, I was thinking about last year, for example. Last year, at the last funnel hacking live, when people started coming into the Inner Circle that was the first time we started talking about building a culture. And started talking about epiphany bridges. All last year my entire focus with that group was building a culture and epiphany bridge stories, and perfect webinar. That was our message for the last twelve months.

And look at it now. Look at those who came through. We’ve got, I always brag about them. You guys can guess who they are, I’m not going to say their names again because…..alright I’ll tell you, it’s Brandon and Kaelin. Their webinar, they’re getting 500 customers a day right now off a webinar. A perfect webinar that they did through Facebook Live. It’s so cool. They’re doing the best with their webinar, but seeing person after person after person, Tara Williams did her first webinar and closed 20 or 25% of her audience. Just killed it.

And then Alison Prince did her first webinar, She joined Inner Circle six weeks ago. She never heard who I was and then she was at Affiliate Summit, and I was the only speaker that who didn’t get drunk, who wasn’t drunk speaking. So she called our offices, and she joined the Inner Circle, came to the FHAT Event, wrote a webinar and this Monday, four days ago, she did her first webinar and did $20,000 in sales and now she’s got this tool that will make her millions over the next six months or so. I’m not sure exactly where I was going with this. It’s been a long week, a long night.

It’s just fun because she can go deep with people and that’s what I want. I want to be able to take this group, my Inner Circle and I don’t look at it as a way for me to make money because this is a way to legitimately change the world and go really deep with these entrepreneurs. And it’s just fun.

Anyway, I hope that helps. It could be just rambling, and if it is, I apologize. You can just skip this episode and listen to the next one when I’m not quite as tired. But it’s been amazing. The last four days have been fun. It’s been a hard week though. It’s funny, Monday and Tuesday we had the first group. Tuesday we did a little dinner party that both groups could hang out at. Then Wednesday my wife flew off to go to a Tony Robbins event. So she’s gone. Luckily, we’ve got a helper who helps out during the day, she helps with the kids. Wednesday night, I forgot I had to teach scouts. I got done with the meeting, I had to come home, get my kids. My twins are in scouts. I grab the kids, get our scout shirts on, leave my little daughter with the other kids, we race over and I teach scouts for an hour. Race back home and get the kids to bed.

It’s funny, without your wife here, I know my wife works hard, but it always seems easier….I shouldn’t say this but from an outside view, it looks easy what they do, but when you’re in charge of doing it you’re like, “Wow, they really do a lot. Who knew this whole time?” you know what I mean? Playing dad and waking up early in the morning and getting kids ready, getting their lunch ready, getting stuff done. The hustle and bustle, getting them on the school bus, getting their hair combed and boom, they’re out the door. And I’m like, oh crap. Inner Circle starts in 30 minutes. So I’m running, showering, shaving, racing out the door.

I get to Inner Circle meeting like 5 minutes late. I’m like, “I’m so sorry. I’m not used to playing mom and dad.” Then run the Inner Circle and today was an emotionally impactful day, it was awesome. So as soon as I get done with Inner Circle and I had to race and get my kids and get my daughter from soccer practice, and then they had a big school art party tonight. They were all starving because we didn’t have time to eat dinner yet. So we swung by KFC and ate a bunch of chicken and root beer, which was super unhealthy and everyone’s angry and tired.

I got them all to bed and now I’m sitting on the couch rambling. The last four days have been insane. Anyway, I’m excited for tomorrow. Tomorrow’s going to be a little more relaxed. I have some projects I gotta get done and then I’ll be having some fun while the wife’s away. And then she’ll be back and then we’ll be good.

Not sure why I’m telling you guys all this stuff. I must be tired or lonely or both. Anyway, I’m going to go watch 24 now because it’s still the best show on TV, even though Jack Bauer is gone. I’m going to cross my fingers that he comes back. In fact, I don’t know if you guys watch, 24’s got the new….I can’t remember what it’s called, the new one. Jack Bauer is not in it, but he’s the executive producer, but at the same time I’m also watching Designated Survivor where Jack Bauer is now, I guess it’s Keifer Sutherland, but Jack Bauer, he’s now the president in that show.

I’m thinking what’s going to happen is somewhere in the middle there’s going to be a crossover event where it’s 24 and all the sudden people at CET are going to realize that Jack Bauer is actually the president and they’re going to be like, “Wait a minute, you’re Jack Bauer.” And then he’s like, “Wait a minute.” And then Jack Bauer faked as the HUD secretary in Designated Survivor….anyway, it’s going to be amazing.

If you’re not watching either of those shows you have no idea what I’m talking about. But if you watch both of them you just had a geek out moment with me and you’re like, yes. They’re doing a crossover event, and Jack Bauer is coming back. Hopefully because that would be amazing. If I was writing for both these guys, I would be.

Alright I’m going to stop before I say something really dumb. Anyway you guys, I appreciate you all. Have an amazing night, weekend. We’re a few weeks away from the launch of the new book. Oh w’ere doing something cool. Okay, one more thing.

So the new Facebook Messenger stuff is the new craze. Everyone’s talking about how cool it is. Everyone’s convinced it’s going to be the greatest thing in marketing since sliced bread. I think it’ll be cool, but I don’t think it’ll be that cool. But I think it’s going to be cool for a while. I’m pretty sure people like me will abuse it and then Facebook will take it away. So I’m not banking on it as a long term strategy, but definitely banking on it as a short term strategy.

And then if it does happen to stay long term that would be awesome. But I feel like it’s way too easy to abuse. But while it’s abusable, we’re going to. So basically what it is, you can get people, you can run an ad in Facebook, get people to click on something and then it ads them to your Facebook messenger, and then you can send out auto responders and mass broadcast to everyone who’s ever subscribed to your Facebook messenger, which is awesome.

So I recorded a quick little video today, and we’re going to run it tomorrow through Facebook live and basically give away the first three chapters of the book if they click on the, if they join my Facebook messenger. So my goal is to try to get, I don’t know, 20-100,000 people in the next month to get the first three chapters of the book for free through Facebook messenger. Then when we go live, I can have 100,000 people to spam, I mean mass market, I mean communicate with about our book launch happening. It would be pretty amazing. Anyway, I’m excited.

And I also got, so many cool things. I forgot, so for our affiliate contest, we’re kind of having a big super hero theme, Todd found these Superman, not Superman, but Batman, Ironman, costumes. But they’re not costumes, they’re legit. I bought one, they’re 3 grand. They custom fit it to you. Then they mold the metal. I’m pretty much Batman. They ship me it, they took a picture, they’re about to ship it. It should be here, I think, early next week. I’m going to be doing a bunch of JV videos with it. And we’re going to be giving away a bunch of those outfits to people who win our affiliate contest. But I’m actually going to be Batman within a week.

And it’s not like the wimpy Batman from back in the day. It’s the Batman vs Superman. Even though Ben Affleck is lame, the suit that he wore, he looks like the biggest baddest Batman of all time. That’s the one I bought. So I’m really looking forward to that as well.

Alright guys, well 26 minutes. It’s the equivalent of 22 normal Marketing In Your Car podcasts. So I’m going to be done for today. Appreciate you guys. Hopefully this makes some sense. Talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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Here’s an update at what happened at Grant Cardone’s big event.

On today’s episode Russell recaps his experience at Grant Cardone’s 10x event. He shares some of the hiccups that happened as well as the successes.

Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

What some of the things were that went wrong at the beginning of Russell’s presentation.
How many sales Russell made with only 4 sales people taking orders.
And find out why Grant Cardone and his team said Russell had the best sales pitch they had ever seen.

So listen below to find out how well Russell did at the Grant Cardone event.

---Transcript---

Hey good morning everybody. This is Russell, and it is a little bit rainy and kind of nice today. I’m heading into the first Inner Circle meeting of this year, actually. It’s kind of cool. And it’s the first Inner Circle meeting from the new office, which is even cooler. So I’m definitely looking forward to that and it’s going to be cool.

I just got back from, if you’ve been listening to the podcast in sequential order, you know that last week we went to speak at Grant Cardone’s event, which was pretty cool. So I’m just going to give you a quick recap on that because it turned out pretty awesome.

Basically, I was doing an event out there, but I couldn’t go the whole time because I love my kids and my wife and I wanted to be with them, but also there was a whole bunch of buyers in a room. I was like, “I want to go speak to them, ask them for money and get them into Clickfunnels.” So Friday morning we jumped in a plane, flew all the, it’s crazy going east. From Boise to the East coast, we flew all day long. We left, we almost missed our flight actually, but then we left here at 8am I think and we landed on the east coast at 7 or 8 pm. You lose all the time, and the layovers and all that kind of stuff. So the whole day is shot.

So that was then, then the next morning I woke up and I was, there was one person speaking before me and then I was up. So that night before, I always get nervous until I see the room. So I’m freaking out nervous, and I go see the room. The room was huge, it was really long. Funnel Hacking Live we do it width wise, so I can be closer to everyone, this was long. Anyway, super long room. There was a little over 2200 seats that were there.

So I’m looking at the room, this is going to be awesome, so excited. So I went there that night, worked on my slides, made tweaks and changes. To make this match more stuff for his audience. I went to bed and woke up in the morning and it was game time. So I went down there to the event. The room was packed, tons of energy, tons of people. It was so fun. Obviously, slightly nerve wracking as well, it gets me nervous.

What’s kind of frustrating is we had all these things for them, this is how the room needs to be set up, we need to have tables, sales people and all these things. I don’t think they believed us. They didn’t give us any sales people to sell. We had luckily, two of our inner circle members, Alex Hermosian, Layla were there. So they came to help us sell. Dave Woodward was with me, so we had three people and they were trying to find other people from the audience. So we had 2200 people and basically 5 sales people. They didn’t have any tables, so we kind of brought some tables in to take sales from.

So it was not an ideal situation at all. But whatever, you do what you do, right. So I get on stage, it was fun. Grant got up the first morning he spoke, and I’d never heard him speak before. It was fun to see him, he’s all exciting. Then they had a lady spoke right after me. Then I got to introduce him on stage, it was nuts how big the room was. I felt kind of nervous at first, I started speaking, and I got, kind of a jumbled mess at first if I’m completely honest.

Then I started going through my slides and I realized they were using the wrong slides. These were not the slides that I gave them. These were not the slides I spent four hours on the day before on the plane and in the hotel room, getting it tweaked for these guys. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, what do I do? Do I just keep going, or say something.” So I’m even more flustered and I’m like, “These are not the right slides. Can you change them real quick?” I was freaking out. But luckily, pretty quickly they changed them out. I was like, “Thank heavens.”

So I start going on my presentation, and as I’m doing it, again at the very first it was kind of weird. I switched one thing around, I had put Garrett White’s testimony, if you guys have seen the webinar, I moved it up earlier in the presentation, but it was too early. So I showed the video and usually at that point in the thing people are laughing, but I showed it and it was kind of flat. I was like, “Oh crap.” I jumped a little too early. I changed it after I got back in the plane, for the next presentation. Shifted some things around.

But by the end, I started getting into my pitch and Grant Cardone is sitting on the front row. And I see him, every time I’m doing something he’s taking notes as fast as he can. Taking notes, taking notes. I’m like, “This is kind of cool. The dude who teaches sales is studying my sales pitch.” It was pretty cool. So I do my whole thing. Boom, we get a table rush, people running to the side. I finished the presentation and I go back behind the stage and Grant came up to me, “Dude, that’s why I’m not able to sale on stage. I’ve never done it the way you just did it.” And then all his team were like, “That was the best sales pitch I have ever seen.” Over and over and over again.

I was like, this is coming from these guys. It was very flattering. I was patting my own back, not going to lie, which was pretty cool. So then, when all is said and done, I went outside and took a bunch of pictures with everybody and then our guys, our four people in there taking sales, with an audience of 2200 people, four people taking sales, which is crazy.

After the break, comes back and I walk over to Dave and he’s got this huge stack of order forms. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” At the same time, we had to check out of our room, we were passed our check out time. And we called for an early checkout and they told us no, and we’re like, well we’re going to be down there anyway, sorry. So we went back to the room, Alex and Layla came up with us and started counting order forms. I’m packing my bags and trying to get ready so we can leave.

This is crazy, and this is considering the fact that we only had four sales people and not things ideal for selling. Had we had like 20 or 30 sales people, I think we probably could have doubled this. If we would have had a couple of things tweaked around. But regardless, the number of sales we made were, and I was selling a $2000 product. It was 300, I can’t remember. When all is said and done, actual money was about $750,000 in sales. So three quarters of a million dollars, from the activity.

Remember two podcasts ago I was like, “Basically I’m going to be flying down to Florida and picking up a check and flying back.” And that’s kind of what happened, which is cool. The way it works, so you guys know how the event seminar world works. The promoter gets half, so we’ll be processing orders this week and then we’ll send them a check for half of that, then we get the other half, and we get a whole bunch of members and hopefully we inspire people to use Clickfunnels, even those that did sign up, it was cool.

The funny thing is in presentation I talk about how we used to charge people 100 grand to set up a funnel and 10% of what they make, but we stopped doing that, because I don’t have time for those right now. I had two or three people, I had two people for sure and one person in between that came up like, “Okay, I want the 100 grand deal. Where? Do you want a check? You want me to wire the money?” We’re like, “I don’t really do that anymore.” Anyway, it was kind of funny.

But that’s about it. So there’s a recap of what just happened. And it was fun and thankful for Dave Woodward, and Alex and Layla for helping get the sales, making it happen. Those guys closed more sales in a 20 minute period of time than probably anybody on planet earth. It was awesome.

I’m at the office now, I’m going to go get things set up for the Inner Circle, I will talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

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This is the part of business that I honestly hate the most.

On today’s episode Russell shares what he feels are the worst parts of being a business owner including having to fire people. He talks about feeling horrible whenever he has to let someone go, even if they needed to be let go.

Some of the other things you’ll hear in this episode are:

Why when you start a business you don’t think about some of the not so fun parts that come with it.
What some of the parts of owning a business suck the most.
And why after 14 years of having employees, it is still so painful for Russell to let people go, and how he finds solace in it.

So listen below to find out the parts of being a business owner that suck.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, good morning. Today is a beautiful day, and I’m grateful. Yesterday was a tough day, but today is beautiful. I’m out here, riding my bike again, it’s a little chilly and I wore shorts today. Probably a little too early to be in shorts. I think I could do shorts or I could do bike, but doing both this early in the morning is probably not a good idea. I’m feeling it already.

Anyway, I hope… I gotta go back and listen to the last podcast I did on my bike and see if you guys can hear what I’m talking about. Hopefully the wind is not too bad. I’m heading into the office today, we’ve got a webinar for Funnel Scripts 2.0. It’s actually Funnel Scripts, but Jim’s at a lot more and we’re doing it. It’s been a year since we launched it, so we’re re-launching it and raising the price and it’s going to be fun. So that’s what’s happening today in about 90 minutes, less than that. It’s happening here, pretty soon.

I’ve been thinking a lot, most of the podcast I just talk about happy-go-lucky stuff and cool things we’re doing and stuff like that. But sometimes business sucks. Sometimes it’s hard and something I want to talk about today, and I have another idea for a podcast that I might share in the future. I’m nervous about sharing that one but I’m just going over my regrets of the past ten years. Because I do have regrets.

I almost did a podcast a little while ago, but then I wimped out. I have it in my head and I think I will soon, but not today. Today is not so much about regrets as much as just the sad side of business. It’s tough because when you get started as an entrepreneur, I don’t know about you but I just wanted to sell stuff. I just wanted to create and sell, create and sell, that’s the fun part. That’s the part of business that’s so much fun. Initially when you start it, it’s just you in your basement or closet or on your laptop in your bedroom. Whatever it is, maybe one day you get a partner and you’re starting and you’re starting the creative process and doing stuff and having fun and selling, trying to sell………dang it’s cold. My fingers are numb.

But what’s interesting, at first you have all these problems. “I can’t figure out how to sell, I can’t figure out how to do this. No one’s buying. I can’t get traffic…” all the problems that happen at the first of your business, right. And I understand those, I remember those. I worked with a lot of people going through those. That part of business kind of sucks too. But after a while you figure out what are you selling? What do people actually want? What are they excited for? You figure out how to get traffic and eyeballs consistently. You start doing some cool stuff there. And that part becomes really, really fun.

Everything is working and you’re like, “Sweet, all my problems are solved. Making sales, making money, things are good.” But then what happens? You start getting a lot of customers, they start emailing you, and you get more of them, and then eventually you start drowning in supporting all the customers that come in. I remember for a long time I prided myself, “I answer all my own emails.” And then after a couple of years of that I couldn’t do it anymore. I went crazy. I couldn’t go on vacation, if I was on vacation I was stressing out.

I couldn’t create anymore because I was so busy. So finally I had to hire someone to help support. And that freed me. As soon as you hire your first support person you’ve got people. There’s payroll and taxes and all these new problems introduced. And as you keep growing, you try to figure out ways to maximize your time and figure out things you like the most and do that and start outsourcing and hiring people to do the other parts. And you go from one person to two to five to ten.

Now in Clickfunnels, we have just shy of 100 people now. Crazy. I swore I would never get back to this spot. But we’ve been a lot smarter this time around. With 100 people there’s all sorts of new challenges and issues. Especially in my business where 90% of your employees are entrepreneurs and they all want to be selling stuff and it’s hard to keep them focused. That’s a constant struggle on my side. There’s other things, tax issues, trademarking, now we’ve got all sorts of people out there using Clickfunnels, so now we’re hiring a full-time legal person just to scour the internet for compliance. It’s like, ugh. Success breeds a whole new level of challenges and hard things that you don’t think about when you’re trying to figure out how to sell something at the beginning.

But they come and there’s just different, what do they call it? There’s different Swont Analysis. Strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats. There’s different opportunities at each level. But of everything the thing that I think sucks the worst in this whole business is when the people you love and care about and people who have done great work for you that for whatever reason you have to let them go. I still can’t get over that.

I remember the first time I fired someone I cried for the next hour. The person was a horrible person, looking back now, not only should I have fired them, I should have called the cops and locked him up. But I still cried like a little baby. Yesterday we had to let go a couple people that I’ve known a long time, that I care about. It didn’t, it wasn’t the right fit anymore. Man, for me it destroys me. All day yesterday I couldn’t even function or think or eat.

I hate it because I know what our business means to me and if someone took that away from me, how I would feel. I think I’d place all those things on them. It’s horrible. But it’s one of those things that has to happen and doesn’t always make logical sense but sometimes you…..I don’t know.

So I just wanted to share with you guys today because I know, depending where you’re at there’s different pains you are all going through. There’s different pains every step in this process, but the ones for me that are always the worst, is parting with people that are amazing, that you care about and you want to succeed. This is what the one thing that has given me comfort. I feel like if someone’s not completely happy in a spot or doesn’t fit, doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, us, as business owners, try really hard to make it work and try to, what do they say? Put a round peg in a square hole, or vice versa.

We can do that but I think not only does it hurt the business, but I think it hurts them more often than not. So usually there’s this huge pain of being able to let somebody go. But looking back now at the last almost 14 years now of having employees and seeing some of their journeys afterwards is like, it was so much pain letting that person go. But I look at what came from that, and it was the best thing. If that, if we hadn’t ever done this, that new door in their life wouldn’t have opened.

For example, I can’t give the details, but someone we had to let go about 6 months ago, probably 8 months ago now, it was really painful. I care about them, their family, their kids. It was, I bawled my eyes out. But I look now 8 months later and where that person went to at their next job, opened up the door, which radically changed that person’s life. Had we have selfishly kept them, it wouldn’t have served us or them.

Anyway, so that’s the only thing that kind of gives me solace. Is that the right word? Solitude? Solace? I think solace. Anyway, it makes me feel a little bit better at times like this. Anyway I just wanted to give you that podcast and let you know, wherever you’re at, whatever the challenges are you are struggling with, I get it. I’ve felt it at different levels. I think the biggest thing is just understanding that and being okay with it and just keep moving forward. Don’t lose sight of your vision of what you’re trying to create and who you’re trying to serve.

At the end of the day that’s the most important thing. There will be people who come and go and help you on your mission in different stages and I think those people are brought into your life and out of your life on purpose for different reasons. When you look at it that way, hopefully it makes some of the challenges a little bit easier. With that said, it’s a beautiful day today. It’s webinar day, it can’t get better than webinar day. We just sell some amazing stuff and change people’s lives, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m grateful for the sun shining this morning, and grateful for all of you guys. With that said, I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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Your real mission is to gather people and serve them at your highest level.

On today’s episode Russell talks about having a gathering and how you build one. He shares the kinds of gatherings he already has, and how gathering gatherers can help build your business.

Here are some of the cool things in today’s episode:

The different examples of gatherings you and your people can be a part of.
And how what you are doing has an impact on someone else’s life, which in turn has an impact on someone else’s live and you have the ability to impact many more lives than you originally could.

So listen below to find out how to gather and impact more people than you ever thought possible.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, good morning. This is Russell and I am heading to, not the worst place I can go in the morning. The worst place would be probably the accountants, they’re definitely the worst. Number two used to be lawyers, but my lawyer now is super awesome, so that’s cool. Number three is the dentist, so I’m heading to the dentist right now, which is not my favorite thing, but it’s that time. I got some weird thing on the left side of my mouth when I bite down. It really hurts, so hopefully they can fix that and I hope I don’t have any cavities, but I’ll let you guys know.

But this morning, I woke up and had a coaching session with one of my coaches, Tara Williams, which was really, really cool. She said something that I thought was cool and it got my mind thinking and then more and more cool stuff started happening. But we’re talking about the new book, and if I’m being completely honest there’s a lot of stress and pressure on me right now. Even though the book’s finally done, there’s…of course I can’t just sell a book you guys. I got all excited and had this idea for this Funnel Hacker Blackbox, which then meant I had a whole bunch of other stuff. And then there’s a bunch of….anyway, a lot of stuff going together to make this, I want to make this buying experience when you guys buy the book, the most fun thing ever. I want you to be like, “that was so fun we should buy it again.” That’s the goal.

So with that we’re just making a really cool funnel that would be really cool for you guys to funnel hack and then watch and learn and really hopefully model and use in your world. But we’re talking, oh I almost turned left and I’m glad I didn’t because there is insane traffic, and I’m already late for the dentist, so that was close.

But what we were talking about is gathering. What we do is we’re gathering people. So I think about each of your businesses, we talked about this from a list building standpoint, or from getting customers or things like that. Or I’d be putting products and services out there in the world. And you’re doing that to gather certain types of people to you. That’s the whole point of what we’re all doing. We create some amazing things that cause value in the world and in people’s lives. They get those things and then they gather to you.

Ten year ago those gatherings were like, “Okay, well people are on my email list.” But there was no physical gathering. Then we started doing events and there was kind of a physical gathering of people. Now, I look at facebook groups and it’s become kind of like the gathering spot. Most programs have a facebook group. We have that, we have our Funnel Hacker Group, which is all of you all. If you’re not in that by the way, you should come. We’ve got 50,000 people in that now. 50,000, if you go to projectclickfunnels.com it redirects you to our facebook group. Because I couldn’t remember how to get people there, so I bought projectclickfunnels.com.

But there’s 50,000 people gathered there together talking about what we’re all talking about. And then there’s, for different products we sell, like Inner Circle’s got a different group. People are gathered together. We communicate and hang out in this group. So we’re gathering. So for each of you guys, that’s kind of big piece of this pie. How are you gathering people together so that then when they’re together and they’re congregated together, you can serve them in the highest way that you are able to. Those are your products and services and training and podcasts, and coaching and blah. Supplements, whatever it is you’re selling, that’s really the goal.

Businesses become less transactional and is now more gathering people and figuring out how to serve them. That mindset shift is pretty big. There’s these gatherings and what was kind of cool. We were talking about, with the Expert Secrets book we’re gathering. That’s, I didn’t know this was my goal, but what’s interesting, and even with the Funnel Hackers and Clickfunnels and stuff, I am gathering gatherers, which is super cool when you think about it.

My goal is to gather all these people together and get them to start mass movements. That’s the whole point of the new book. How to build your own movement of people you can change and inspire and help and serve. So that’s my goal, is to gather all the gatherers, which is insanely cool and a huge honor. As I’m just thinking about that as a calling or a mission or whatever you want to call it. It’s a pretty cool thing. My job is to serve you guys so that you can gather more people and serve them. And hopefully during this whole process we have a little bit of impact on the world and we change people’s lives and we make things better and give people hope and faith in the future and what’s possible and make everyone’s journey’s here on the world a little bit better.

It was interesting, I heard someone talk about this before. Tony Robbins at our event was talking about why we all do what we do. He said, “When it all comes down to it. We’re doing it for feeling.” I was like, huh. How weird is that? We read books because the feeling, we watch a movie because of the feeling, we hang out with people because of the feeling we get. Feelings is what drives everything. It’s the feeling that we’re seeking, that we’re trying to get. A certain feeling we liked in the past, or that we didn’t like, we’re trying to stay away from that feeling.

And I’m not sure how this whole thing ties together, but when all is said and done, our goal is to gather people together so we can help them to feel good. I know that’s simplifying, way over simplifying the whole thing. Or is it? That’s kind of the thing. Why do I gather all of you guys together? I’ll say guys and gals. Why do I gather you guys together? Obviously there’s something I’m excited about and I’m sharing it. And it’s a tool and a theology and thought process that helps you be able to share your messages.

By me sharing it, I feel better. I feel happy. It makes me, it gets me excited, being able to share these things and seeing the light bulb go off in your heads. But then you gather people and you’re not necessarily teaching what I’m teaching. But you’re teaching your own thing. Maybe it’s weight loss or fitness, I guess weight loss and fitness are similar. But whatever it is that you do, you’re gathering people together and selling them products and services that make them feel good. And that’s kind of it. If you really boil it down.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting. I just started thinking about that. How do we give people those good feelings? How do we make support better so that people have good feelings when they deal with it? How do make the product better so they have better feelings? It’s all about feelings, that’s what we’re all looking for. That’s why people fall in love, that’s why they do drugs, on the positive and negative side, they’re all looking to get a special feeling or to stay away from a feeling they don’t like.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting. I don’t really know the point of my ramblings today other than I thought it was really cool to kind of look at this as each of us are gatherers. You’re gathering people. You’re gathering your tribe. You’re gathering your people that resonate with you and your message and who you are. And then after you’ve gathered them, you can serve them, help them and you can try to effect their lives by making them have better feelings. Feeling better about themselves and things around them, about the future and all those things.

What’s interesting is that when people are happy they treat other people better, it’s this huge compounding thing. It’s like a ripple, I hate using that because if you guys listened to the podcast back from day one, back when we were working on the project Rippln, but it never went. That was the whole concept. Throw a rock into the middle of a pond, what happens? There’s a ripple and it keeps going all the way out to the edge of the pond. And that’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re gathering people together, give them this ripple in their lives and it goes out.

It’s kind of corny when you say, “We’re going to change the world.” But we kind of are. Isn’t that cool when you think about it that way? The thing you’re doing has an impact and it changes somebody else’s life and it changes somebody else’s and it kind of ripples out.

So anyway, with that said, I just wanted to state that everyone keep on doing what you’re doing despite some of the pressure and stress and things that go into it. The ups and downs and failures and successes. All of those things are all wrapped into it. When all is said and done, what’s the real purpose? We’re gathering our people. Gather your people, they will come to you, the right people. And not everyone’s going to come to you or me or anyone, there’s people who can’t stand me. Especially after some of my fun jokes and stuff recently. There’s a lot of people who don’t like me. That’s cool. I don’t mind. It used to bug me, but it’s okay now. Because what is important, is my people, the people I am congregating will hear my voice, come to me and listen and I’ll be able to have impact and hopefully cause a change and make their lives better.

Like I said, my goal is to gather gatherers, and I think what fires me up more than anything is knowing that if I can affect you and help you gather more people, or serve more people at a higher level, if I can affect you and again, I’m not talking to everyone listening to this podcast, I’m talking to you. Yes, you the one listening right now. If I can affect you, to help people and to cause that gathering amongst your people, how cool is that? There’s thousands or millions of people that you can affect, that I never could. Because my gifts aren’t what yours are. But your gifts are special.

And I don’t want to, I think I might have bragged them yesterday because I’m so excited about it. But Brandon and Kaelin from Inner Circle, their numbers are insane right now. They’re getting 500 people a day joining their program. 500 women a day are coming and they’re helping these women look at themselves differently and lose weight and feel better. And usually what happens, I don’t know about you, but when I get on a weight loss kick, what do I do? I tell my friends and family and spouse and kids and we all, it’s a ripple effect that goes out there.

And I can’t do what Kaelin does. I can’t do what Tara does. I can’t do what….I’m trying to think of everyone in my inner circle. All the people we effect in the work, I can’t do what you do. But if I can help you gather more people and serve them at a higher level, that’s the key. That’s my mission.

Anyway, I thought that was kind of cool. I hope it helps you think about what you do a little bit. And understand that that’s the goal, gather your people and that could be through building a list, podcasts, groups, whatever it is, you’re gathering people together and you’re trying to serve them at the highest level possible. That’s it, that’s the game. When you do that, they’re going to feel good. And when they feel good, people around them will feel good and it’ll trickle down. Kind of cool.

Anyway, I’m getting close to the dentist, but I’m still stuck in a lot of traffic, but I’m going to bounce, cause I am behind on my Voxers and my inner circle members need some responses, dang it. So I’m going to go catch up with them. Appreciate you all and we will talk soon.

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An observation on people’s webinars who aren’t having the success that they want.

On this episode Russell talks about The Perfect Webinar and how people get confused about not teaching and goes over what you need to do.

Here are some interesting things in this episode:

How much money Russell is hoping to make this weekend at a seminar.
And why you should be teaching the “What” and selling the “How”.

So listen below if you are struggling with The Perfect Webinar, this might be why.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, this is Russell. I’m out riding my bike to the office because today is a beautiful day. I hope the wind’s not too loud. Anyway, there’s a huge hot air balloon out in the sky. This is a sign that it’s going to be an amazing day, it’s gotta be.

And then this morning I woke up at 5:00, which was awesome, I got three hours worth of stuff done, well probably two and a half hours before the kids were up. I’m feeling good and excited for today. This whole week is going to be amazing. This weekend I’m flying out to speak to Grant Cardone’s audience, teach those guys about some funnels, which is going to be so much fun. In fact, I’m going to fly for forever, by I fly Friday all day, I land and speak Saturday morning and fly home Saturday night. So twenty four hours, less than twenty four hours and hopefully we’ll go and you it’s kind of funny, I used to be a public speaker. I was doing that and that was my job, my gig, my thing.

I would figure out how much money I would make per attendee, then I’d be like okay, so based on this means I’m going to make x. For example this weekend Grant said there’s 2100 people in the room, if that’s true and his people, how do I say this nicely? They are funnel beginners, I’ll say funnel beginners for recorded history. My guess is if I screw it up, I should close 30% of the room. If I do awesome, it should be 50%. So let’s say 30%, let’s say there’s 2000, I’m not that good at numbers, especially while riding a bike.

So that means 30% would be 600 people, what I sell from the stage is 2 grand, so 600 would be 1.2 million and then I get to keep half of that. So I would bring home 600k. So basically I’m flying across the country to go pick up a check for $600k and I’ll be back in 24 hours. Isn’t that exciting? I’m excited for it, and hopefully I’ll close more than 30%. I’m hoping 50%, so we will see, but I’m excited.

It’s funny, because I’m not allowed to share how much we spent to get Tony Robbins to come, Marcus, all those guys out it in their contract and I’m not allowed to say, but it’s a lot. Somewhere between, on the low end 70-80 thousand, to the high end, over a quarter of a million bucks and beyond. Those guys are like famous people, so I’m not famous, but I know how to sell, so my check is actually bigger than them.

It’s funny, one of my first speaking mentors is John Childers, he used to talk about that, “I’m not famous but I make 10x of what Norm Schwartzkopf makes on a speech because I know how to sell from the stage.” I always thought that was cool. It’s really cool now, looking and being like dang, that actually happens now.

I wanted to share something with you guys today because I think it’s so tough and you learn this as you keep doing it. So Perfect Webinar, dang I’m out of shape. I’m just moving my feet barely. I should not be this tired, but it is freezing cold out here. My fingers are red and numb. Anyway, what was I going to say? Oh yeah.

So as I’ve been teaching this, the biggest thing how to get people to break, everyone was in teaching mode, and so they teach for the whole webinar and they’re not making any sales or very few sales. I was like no, the content of the webinar is not about teaching, it’s about using stories to break false belief patterns and rebuild them. So people are shifting that singular, and crushing it. For example, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to brag about this, I’ll do it anyway. So Brandon and Kaelin in the Inner Circle, who are amazing, I’ve talked about them a bunch. They joined Inner Circle a year ago. They did 80,000 dollars that month. It’s been now, almost a year, and this month they did a million dollars in a month. Which is nuts and insane and amazing. They’re amazing. So fun to watch them.

So some of you will get it and just crush it. Someone will get it sometimes and forget other times, but one of the big things, mistakes people are making is they shift all 100% to belief breaking and they tell a story but they’re not teaching anything. They’re like, “Well you said not to teach.” I’m like, “I said not to teach, but if you look at the epiphany bridge script, which you guys get more access when the Expert Secrets book comes out, but I’m walking through my epiphany, you hear the back story, the internal and external fears, and from there, you go on this journey and you have an epiphany, and from there you create a plan. So what is the plan? The plan is this what. What am I going to do? So first I’m going to try this and then this, and you walk people through what the plan was. Then in the plan you hit conflict, which causes emotions. You talk about the conflict, the issues that came up. Then you got the resolution and you have the resolution of the external and the internal.” So that’s like the process. But when I’m talking about the plan, I’m talking about, I’m going through it step by step. This is me teaching. I’m showing this is my plan. This is what I did. Step one I did this, step two…..so you’re showing the “what”. You’re not going into the “how”, but you’re showing the “what” when you’re showing the plan.

I can get people a plan, “Here’s the plan. You gotta build the funnel.” But they still gotta invest because they gotta understand the “How”. But I gotta give them the what. That gets them inspired, they see, “Oh my gosh, that’s going to make people feel like they’re learning” When they see the “what”, and then when you sell, it’s the how.

So I just wanted to kind of throw it out there in case anyone’s like, “I’m doing what Russell said, I’m not teaching anything.” I’m like, “No, it’s not that you’re not teaching anything. You’re doing it through story, with the goal of breaking the belief pattern and then when you’re walking people through the plan, that’s where you’re doing the teaching of the “What” not the “how”. When you understand that part, that’s what makes it crush it.

So I hope that helps, but I’m at the office. Not too bad, about a 5 minute bike ride from my house. Good to know now. Anyway, appreciate you all for listening. Have a great day, great week. And if any of you guys are going to be at Grant Cardone’s seminar, come say hi and please, please wear one of your funnel hacker t-shirts. Funnel Hacker, It’s a cult, we’re not confusion soft, any one you got, make sure to wear it. With that said, I’ll talk to you all again soon.

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Behind the scenes on what I’m recording today.

On this episode Russell talks about the new survey element now available for free on Clickfunnels. He also shares his plans for what his team is calling Superfunnels.

Here are some of the interesting things in this episode:

Find out what Superfunnels is and what it will do.
How Superfunnels will be able to sort new members by their market.
And hear about the cool new survey element within Clickfunnels, which is free.

So listen below if you want to know how Superfunnels is going to work and what it will do for you.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I’m heading out and I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of tired. It’s funny, people always ask me, “Russell, how do you stay so positive all the time? How do you keep moving? How do you get so much stuff done?” and the honest truth is sometimes I’m tired and sometimes I don’t want to move forward. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to get stuff done. But I do anyway. So I don’t know. There’s your personal development lesson for toward. Just keep moving forward.

There’s a really cool cartoon called Meet The Robinsons, it’s one of my favorites. When my kids were younger, the twins were younger, we used to watch it every day. But the whole message in it is “Keep moving forward. Keep moving forward.” That’s how it is.

Today I’m a little later than normal, it took me a little longer, but I’m done. I’m moving forward, and I actually am excited for today. This is why, last summer, it’s been a long time, we decided that we needed to figure out who was using Clickfunnels and speak to them differently. Because right now we kind of have one message that we shove down everyone’s throat, which has worked but I know there’s a lot of people who haven’t bought or been alienated or whatever because they’re like, “How does Clickfunnels work for me?”

So we messaged a guy on Ryan Levesque’s team. We’ve nicknamed him Survey Steve, he’s awesome. So we had him do a deep dive survey, which if you know much about me, it’s hard for me to go deep on things. Deep dive survey is so stressful for me. I always run really simple ask campaigns. “What’s your number one question about blank?” and that’s it. Whereas Survey Steve, he wanted to go intense and run the ones that Ryan talks about in his book. I was like, “Sweet man.”

So we paid him and ran this intense, crazy thing and came back with all sorts of awesome, juicy data and we were really excited. We were going to try to get this huge new, we’re calling it Superfunnel inside of our office. That’s the code name. The code name is Superfunnel. We were trying to get it done before the Marcus Lemonis thing, then we didn’t. So I kind of put in on the backburner because I have a few things going on in my life, if you haven’t noticed.

So Superfunnel’s been on pause, but it’s in the back of my mind. This is what we have to do. The book launch is coming up in about six weeks and I know that Superfunnel’s got to be done by book launch because people, we’ll get a whole new herd of people coming into Clickfunnels. At that time we just want to make sure this new Superfunnel is done.

So what is aSsuperfunnel. Basically the results from Survey Steve, was we had basically five different, well I think there were seven, but we were able to combine a couple, because they made a lot of sense, but into five markets in Clickfunnels. Each of those markets uses it differently and we needed to speak to those guys differently. And as you know last week we launched the new survey element inside of Clickfunnels, which is the most ninja, amazing thing on planet earth. If you haven’t used it yet, we haven’t talked about it a ton yet, because we’re just letting people use it first and then we’ll start bragging about it in a week or two, but it’s legitimately amazing.

So we’re using that. When the Superfunnels is done you go to Clickfunnels.com, there’ll be a video of me basically saying, “Hey, this is Russell. Welcome to Clickfunnels.” I’ll say something about, “you’ve probably heard about funnels, that’s why you’re here. You’re probably wondering if a funnel is right for me, if so which funnel should I use. Well I don’t know the answer yet either. There’s hundreds of potential funnels. But if you take this quick quiz down below, we’ll find out what funnel is right for you.”

And then I’ll have a training video show you exactly the funnel, how to use it in your business. So they take this survey, click the button, it pops up, the survey element goes through, they take the survey and we identify which of the five markets they are. And then there’s a video. Basically for each of the five submarkets, we’ve found three core funnels that would work out best for them. There’s going to be a video that I’m recording today, of me showing, “If you’re an author, speaker or whatever, these are the funnels I would use, here’s how they work.” Boom, we make a special offer.

“Oh, you’re in retail. These are the funnels I’d use. Here’s your special offer.” “Oh, you’re a ecommerce, here’s the funnels I’d use, here’s your special offer.” And kind of go through them, boom, boom, boom. Thing by thing.

Anyway, that’s kind of the plan. Somebody just pulled in behind me, but awkwardly blocking me, so I couldn’t back out now. Anyway, if I get shot I’ll tell you to….if something weird happens. We had someone the other day……This lady is literally taking a picture of our office, she’s probably listening to the podcast right now. You can come say hi if you want.

We had someone the other day Facebook live outside the office like, “I’m outside Clickfunnels headquarters.” It’s kind of funny for us to see people excited about our office. Anyway, that’s happening today. So hopefully soon you guys will see Superfunnel, and we call it Superfunnel because it’s not just a survey and five videos, that’s the beginning. There’s a survey and five videos and based on that there’s five different follow-up funnels, there’s five different…..a whole bunch of stuff on the back end. It’s pretty awesome, but that’s kind of what’s happening.

Anyway, I’m getting these done today and then what’s fun, if I get these done today then next week I can spend time actually building funnels, which I haven’t done in a while. I’m so excited. So excited. Anyway, that’s all I got you guys. I’m going to bounce and let you guys go. Think about that in your market, I recommend and encourage you guys to play with the survey element inside of Clickfunnels, it’s free you just gotta go and use the version 2 editor. Click on survey and it’ll work. It’s intense.

It does as much, if not more, than a lot of the software products out there charging two or three hundred bucks a month. You get it for free. Is it okay if we over deliver? Are you guys okay if we over deliver? I just want to make sure you guys are okay with that, if not I can quit, we can quit making features and doing awesome stuff. Alright, thanks you guys. Talk to you soon.

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Let me show you behind the scenes of what I’m doing on my birthday launch.

On this episode Russell talks about doing a Facebook Live presentation of the Follow-up Funnel presentation he did at Funnel Hacking Live for his birthday. He explains why they are doing the Facebook Live presentation and what it means to go all in.

Here are some of the cool things in this episode:

What the 3 ways to grow a business are, according to Jay Abraham.
Which of those 3 ways Russell has been focusing on and which one he is focusing on now.
And find out what else Russell has planned for his birthday.

So listen below to find out how you can be all in, it makes a great birthday present for Russell!

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, this is Russell and guess what today is? Today is my birthday. I’m an old man. Everyone’s like, “Take the day for yourself.” And I will be, but first, what good is a birthday if you can’t use it as a way to sell a whole bunch of stuff. Come on now.

So I’m heading to the office for the next two hours because we got a cool promotion happening and I want to explain the what, the why to you guys so you can see what’s happening.

Alright, so how do I start this? Let’s see….When I was first learning marketing and all this exciting-ness, almost 14 years ago now, it’s fun because I’m learning all these things and I thought they were so cool but I didn’t have a chance to use it. Now I have this cool chance to start using everything.

So Jay Abraham said there’s only 3 ways to grow a business. Way number one, get more customers. Way number two, get those customers to buy more. Way number three, get those customers to buy more often. For me, the first two or three years of my business was all about number one, get more customers and it still is, I’m not, not trying to get more customers. In fact, I’m trying to get a lot more customers. But the primary focus of our business for a long time was way number one, get more customers.

So now, as we’re moving into two and a half years, moving on three, one of our big conscious decisions is, everything’s working well, we’re still getting a lot of new customers, that’s under control, it’s working, it’s growing. So the way number two now is to get these customers to buy more. More customers, get them to buy, then get them to buy more often. Those are the three ways.

I’m driving to my office and the school bus is coming and all these kids are running out into the street. Sorry, I just gotta make sure I don’t hit any little kids. Oh, they’re so cute.

Alright, that’s our focus. For us, how do we get our customers to spend more on everything we’re doing? Obviously more often, that’s creating more courses and products and things getting them to buy more often. So that’s always kind of in the mix as well, but its not the core thing. The core thing is number two, getting them to spend more. So for us it’s all about ascension now.

So for those of you guys at Funnel Hacking Live, you saw when I did the Follow-up Funnel presentation, what was the strategy behind that, do you think, outside of just it was really fun and we got to make fun of Infusionsoft, or Confusionsoft and Lowkey pages, we got to take some swings to try to topple the dictator, which I talked about yesterday, which was really fun.

But the main thing was we’re trying to, there’s a lot of things, watch the presentation, there were a lot of subtle importance. Number one is to cause a seed of doubt in any other system besides ours. Number two is show people that email auto-responders are the past. And the new opportunity is Follow-up Funnels, to show them that we are the only people that control the funnels, so that all the stuff we’re doing, that Actionetics is doing. We’re the only company that can do that.

We’re trying to do a whole bunch of things, but when all is said and done the real major goal of that entire presentation was to get people to start spending more, to ascend. To move from a $97 a month plan to a $297 a month plan. And if you look at the last 2 ½ years $97 a month plan is way more money just because the volume of people. I think we’re at 33 thousand active members, we passed this week. So the majority of them, obviously are paying $97. In fact I think 10% are at the $297 level.

So the goal is getting that 10% to 20 and then 20 to 30 and getting people to spend more, Jay Abraham 101. Rule number two, get them to spend more. So that what’s this presentation was about. We did it at Funnel Hacking Live. I think most of you guys were there, saw it. It went crazy and we made a special offer for if you went all in. You can go over there and upgrade. They get a shirt that says, “We are not confusionsoft”, they get stickers that say, “I build funnels.” They got temporary tattoos, they got funnel hacker stickers, they got 15 follow-up funnels, share funnels with their account. A really good offer. And all they do is upgrade.

But what is cool. We did it all on their phones, we had someone at the very beginning of my presentation had everyone hold up their phones, and login into their Clickfrunnels account on the phone. And then when they got to the end pitch, it said, “Hold up your phone again and go to imallin.com” and they go to imallin.com and what happens is there’s a button that says, “Here, see if you’re all in.” and if they’re not all in they saw a picture of Macauley Culkin from Home Alone slapping his face, saying, “Ahh, you’re not in. Click here to upgrade.” They click the upgrade and it automatically upgraded them from $97 to $297.

If they were all in it took them to a page that said, “You are all in.” and they get a bunch of really cool stuff. So that was basically the offer. And we got the majority of the room to go all in, into upgrading and to become full members of our cult-ure. And it was awesome.

So today for my birthday, what we’re doing, we’re streaming that live for the entire world. That presentation, we’re going to try to get everybody to go all in. In fact, this month, even without this promotion I think this month will be the first month that our 297 dollar a month members are worth more to us than the $97 a month. And still it’s a fraction of a percentage, but each member is worth three times as much to us. Maybe it’s after this promotion, anyway, we’re getting close to crossing that, which is one of our big goals, obviously.

So today what we’re doing, we scheduled a Facebook Live on my birthday, starting in 25 minutes, from right now. And in fact, I’m in the office sitting in the car telling you guys this because I’m getting excited to go in there and get all this kicked off. Basically we’ve been promoting, Facebook Live let’s you schedule events now. So you schedule it and promote it and people can subscribe to the event. And I don’t know what happens, I’m assuming Facebook texts you or messages you or something to let you know it’s going live, I hope. So that’s the plan. We promoted hard yesterday, I did a Facebook Live pushing, a pre-facebook Live. I sent emails. Everything trying to get people to subscribe.

The only thing, it doesn’t show you how many people have subscribed unfortunately. Anyway, we’ll figure that out. So we’re going live, and he’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to go on first and we’re using OBS, some new Facebook Live software. It’s basically, hold up a camera and I’ll be talking for 10-15 minutes first, and then I’m going to click play and we’ll play the actual video from the live event so you’ll get the same energy and emotion and everything of us on stage, and then at the end I’ll come back on and make a special offer and push everyone to go all in.

In fact, if you’re listening to this and you want to go in, go to imallin.com. Isn’t that a cool domain name? We had to pay a pretty penny for it. Imallin.com, pretty cool. And then everyone can ascend and upgrade. But I recommend watching the Follow-up Funnel presentation, in fact if you want to just see the presentation I posted it on Followupfunnels.com, you can go there and actually watch it if you miss this, if you want to watch it in the future. Watch the presentation, see how I did, see all the subtleties of what I did and how I did. Why we’re creating an us versus them, how we’re getting people to want to upgrade. We’re causing seeded doubts in all other options beside us. We’re showing, again, it’s not an improvement offer. Notice how we structured it, it’s not improvement, it’s all about new opportunity.

Anyway, there’s a lot of cool things we did, and we’re really proud of the presentation. Even if you don’t go all, which you’d be insane not to. But even if you don’t you’ll learn a lot from watching the presentation and seeing what’s possible. So that’s the game plan. I’m going to go in there and test it out. And hopefully we get half of our members to go all in today and to ascend up and I’m excited. I’s going to be a lot of fun.

And that’s all I got. I appreciate you guys, I’m going to jump in here and go live for my birthday. Then when I’m done, my wife and I are going on a hot date and I’m done for the rest of the day. Then I’m going to pick my kids up from school and we’re going to goof off and eat junk food and it’s going to be amazing. Then I gotta do scouts tonight. Oh, scout leader. Anyway, it’ll still be fun. So that’s my plan today. All of you guys have a good, celebrate my birthday fun, come hang out with us, come watch our stuff, and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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One of the steps in starting your revolution.

In this episode Russell talks about what it means to topple the dictator. He also talks about not being afraid of taking risks and why it’s like jumping off a cliff and making your parachute on the way down.

Here are some fun things in today’s episode:

Why sometimes fear gets in the way of us achieving the things we set out to do.
How Russell plans on toppling the dictator in his market.
And hear how quickly Russell and his wife went from meeting to married, and why he decided to just take the leap.

So listen below to find out who the dictator is and how Russell is going to topple them.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell, I want to welcome you to Marketing In Your Car. I hope that everyone is doing amazing today. Tomorrow is my birthday, which I’m really excited about and at the same time I’m a little nervous, in a good way. For those of you guys who were at Funnel Hacking Live, well let me step back.

I talk a lot about this, I’m a big believer in first off, competition, which I did a whole podcast on that a little while ago. Most of you guys liked, I had one or two of you who were a little offended, but you know, whatever. But I like to compete. If there’s not something to compete against, then it’s not even fun for me. So it’s like, I gotta find somebody and go and compete towards that, right.

We also talk a lot about the attractive character and creating an us versus them and creating things like that, and it’s funny, last week I was at Dean Graziosi’s affiliate mastermind so everyone who sold his book got to go to this mastermind. Ryan Levesque and I were talking about building mass movements and cult-ure and those things we talk about and he was asking me if I had heard about, I don’t remember the guys name, I’ll have to go back and look at it. I was like, “no.” and he’s like, “you should go study his stuff on that. He talks all about 12 phases in a revolution.” One of them was topple the dictator, that’s a big part of it.

For us it’s like, alright so we can either be nice and just you know, not compete, or compete secretly, or we can bring our entire community in on this and make it a big deal. So of course, I decided to make it a big deal, because that’d be more fun. So the goal in the step here in us building this revolution, the Clickfunnels revolution is toppling the dictator. Who’s the dictator? For us, we had to find a common enemy and it really, right now, which it won’t be after we pass them, but for now it’s Infusionsoft was the common enemy.

At the Funnel Hacking Live event we did, I did a presentation called Follow-up Funnels and we talked about trying to get everyone to be all in. In fact, we bought imallin.com as the domain name that everyone goes to, to say “I’m all in.” And when they’re all in, it means using Clickfunnels and Actionetics, and you’re getting rid of Confusionsoft and Lowkey Pages and all these other things, which is kind of a joke for those who were at the event.

So it’s been fun. What was interesting is that most of the people at the event, most of you guys know, you ran in the back and said you’re all in. You got the t-shirt that said, “We’re not Confusionsoft”, you got the temporary tattoos, you got the “I build funnels” stickers, all these amazing cool things. So while that’s awesome, we wanted to keep that going so tomorrow, on my birthday, we’re going to be doing, we’re going to actually take the presentation from the event and we’re going to Facebook Live it. So not just the 1500 people who were in the room, but potentially hundreds, hopefully at least a hundred thousand people or more are going to see that presentation in the next week or so, which will hopefully get a whole bunch of people to go all in, in Clickfunnels, upgrade to Actionetics and stop dinking around with all these other crappy tools and just using what we’ve built for them.

I’m excited for that, but at the same time it kind of makes you nervous because you’re like, “We’re putting it out there, we’re putting Lowkey Pages and ConfusionSoft out there and I know…..” well, I’m interested, I know I’ll get some annoyed people, especially some of my friends that own these other businesses, and I’m curious what will happen, if they’ll leave and blow it off or if they’ll contact me. Who knows.

The reality is that’s, if you’re going to build a revolution and a cult-ure and all these kind of things, you can hide behind it and not talk about it, or you can make it a big deal and bring your community in on it, and I think it’s more fun to do that.

So anyway, I’m excited for tomorrow. If you haven’t seen that yet, stay tuned and I’m pretty sure I’ll put it on followupfunnels.com or imallin.com, somewhere that presentation will be in case you want to go see it, in case you missed it. You’ll have a chance to see what follow-up funnels are, how it’s the future, we’re no longer talking about email funnels, that was an old opportunity. The new opportunity is follow-up funnels and what’s possible inside of Actionetics, is second to none. So that’s what we’re really excited about.

I’m excited to show it to everybody. With that said, I’m at the office but the other cool thing today is I’m filming. We sold Fill Your Funnel, and I wanted to comment one thing because the podcast I kind of did to recap the event, the one for 40 minutes or something, I talked about how some of the things, follow-up funnels did better than I thought, but Fill Your Funnel didn’t do as well as I thought, it didn’t do bad, for all intents and purposes, it did really, really good. But obviously I always have big goals for myself and what I’m expecting and things like that, and I don’t think it was executed perfectly on my side, which I take total, it’s totally my fault and I’m okay with that. But what’s cool about it is that we still sold over 100 people that got into Fill Your Funnel, which is our new traffic course.

Today I’m actually all dressed up. I’m about to go into the studio and start recording a lot of the products and stuff for that, which is going to be pretty cool. Anyway, I got an email yesterday because I notified everybody that we had a Facebook group and let everybody in and somebody messaged me and said, “Hey Russell, I’m excited for Follow-up, or follow-up…..” Too many funnels, fill your funnel, follow-up funnels, funnel hacks, funnel hacking, funnel hacking live. I gotta get different names. Anyway, they said how excited they were. “Sorry you didn’t sell as many as you hoped for, but we’re really excited to be part of this.”

And I kind of thought for a second, I didn’t want anyone to take what I said as that. That I didn’t sell as many as I hoped for, because that wasn’t what I was frustrated about. I was frustrated about myself and the fact that the presentation was good, but it wasn’t great yet. The cool thing about this, this is why I preach this all the time to everyone. We do our presentations over and over again. That was my first time ever doing that presentation and from it I intimately, when you’re standing in front of 1500 people doing a presentation, you feel the energy of the room really fast.

So I know what parts were slower and sticking points that didn’t get people to move. I know what things did really, really well. And from that I know what tweaks and changes I need to make. So for me, it’s actually a really good thing. I did it and now it’s like, now I did it, now I know what changes and tweaks I need to make and then that presentation, after I perfect it, that’ll be something we use for forever. It’ll bring hundreds of people a month for hopefully the next ten years or more.

So don’t feel bad, it was a learning experience, I was just frustrated at myself. But now that I’ve done it, now I can perfect it and I can change it. So for a lot of you guys who, I think a lot of us get stuck in the fear mode. I’ve gotta bad habit that has helped me, luckily, serve you well. I’m not that good at planning and preparing something like that, so usually I set a deadline and then all the sudden it’s like, “Oh crap, the deadlines here, we gotta go.” And then I’ll pull an all-nighter and we just do it. And half the time it doesn’t do well and half the time it does awesome. I say it’s more than half the time. The majority of the time it doesn’t do well the first time.

But what’s cool, I just did it. It’s like I just jumped off the cliff and then on the way I’m building the parachute trying to figure it out and then we land and we’re like, “huh, that hurt. I broke my leg, but now that the parachutes built I can go do it again.” Then you jump off and you perfect the parachute every single time. Does that analogy make any sense? I don’t even know if it does.

So that’s kind of the concept as a whole. Hopefully, don’t anyone feel bad for me, but hopefully it motivates you to be like sweet, I can do that. I’m going to jump off a cliff and my first webinar is going to crash and burn or it’s going to do okay. But I can’t fix it until I know what’s wrong. So I have to get rid of that fear that’s holding me back and just run off the cliff and jump. The better you get at that, the better you’ll be in life. The better your business. If you look at everything that’s been meaningful in life.

I think about my marriage, yeah that was scary to get married. But I was like, I love her so, alright let’s go. And we ran and jumped off the cliff. Maybe this is, in Mormon time it’s a little different, but I met my wife on Halloween, so October. We hung out at the house a few times, and then in January we went on our first date. April we were engaged, and August we were married. So it was less than a year from meeting.

And I was so annoyed, the timeline. Because I was like, I went on a date in January, by March we should be engaged or something, what’s taking so long? It wasn’t until April until it was like definitely. On my side it was like, “I’m ready to jump off the cliff.” And she’s like “I don’t know. You’re a kid.” It’s funny, she asked some of my friends, “Do you think Russell will be able to support me if we get married?” It’s kind of funny looking back now.

But there’s fear right? So most of have so much fear, we wait and wait and wait and miss out on these amazing things and it’s like, I think I’ve become really good at like, “I want that thing. I’m scared, but I want it more.” So I just run and jump. I don’t know if any of you guys have ever cliff jumped or whatever. It’s like the longer you stand up there the harder it is. It’s easiest to get up there and be like, “I’m scared…” and you just jump. I think in most things in life, that’s what we gotta become better at. Just letting fear go away and just looking at what we want and then running and jumping.

And typically you’re going to get beat up and bruised from the fall, but after you made that jump you’re like, “That wasn’t that bad. My parachute’s half built now. I’m going to do it. This time I’ll actually be done by the time I’m finished.” And then it just gets better and better and better.

So that’s what I got today. Hope that helps you guys. I’m going to go in and film some stuff for our Fill Your Funnel members. We’re going to start filling our funnels with amazing prospects of people who want to give you money, who you can serve and it’s going to be awesome. Thanks everybody, we’ll talk to you soon.

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This is the reason why many of us, including me, often fall short of truly changing people’s lives.

On today’s episode Russell talks about struggling with his need to perfect his book as he’s reading it for the audiobook version. He remembers struggling with it 2 1/2 years ago when doing the same thing with Dotcom Secrets book and how that has helped work through it this time.

Here are some of the cool things you’ll hear in this episode;

Why Russell struggled to do the audiobook version of the Dotcom Secrets book, and how that is helping him get through it with the Expert Secrets book.
What Russell learned from listening to Brian Tracey onstage versus a Brian Tracey audiobook that was too perfect.
And why sometimes we should let our perfections go because that might be keeping us from changing others lives.

So listen below to find out why Russell struggles so much doing the audiobook versions of his books.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, it’s Monday, well at least for me. Who knows when you’ll listen to this. But even if it’s not Monday, treat it like it’s Monday because it’s going to be amazing today. I am actually on my way to go record the last half of the Expert Secrets book for audiobook format.

It’s interesting, I don’t know how many of you guys have done it before, but I remember the Dotcom Secrets book, when it was done we were planning the launch, everything was happening. And all the sudden the week before I was like, “Wait a minute, what if we did an order form bump that was the audiobook? That’d be the coolest thing in the world.” So then I was like, how do you make an audiobook? So I tried to start recording it myself, and that didn’t work. So I’m like, there’s gotta be recording studios that do this kind of thing.

So I search around, there’s this dude in Boise who has a recording studio for bands, but I don’t think we’re in the era where bands record a lot of stuff anymore or whatever. So anyway, I hired him to do the book and it was awesome, kind of. Well, it turned out awesome for those that got the audiobook version. But a couple of things, because I forgot the mental turmoil that I went through. So the problem is he said normally people spend a week recording an audiobook but I had to do it all in one day because I was in a huge time crunch.

So I started trying to do the whole book in a day, which had a lot of pain associated with it because it just took so long. And it was tiring and it was, I was trying to keep my energy level up because I didn’t want people listening and each chapter getting tired-er and tired-er with me. So I was doing all sorts of stuff to keep me awake and alert, which was really hard. Honestly, there’s a lot of pain associated with that first book.

And the other thing that is interesting, first half of the Dotcom Secrets book is written like a story so it sounds really well. Then the last half it’s like examples and things that don’t make sense as an audiobook. So I recorded it and I remember as I’m doing that whole thing, it made me really self conscious about the book because I was like, these don’t sound awesome. The first half of the book sounded cool, but these parts, me telling the script and plugging in examples, it just doesn’t work unless you’re reading it.

So I did it, but what’s interesting is when it was done, I was, and I forgot about this until Friday when I started recording this version, but I forgot how self conscious when it came to the book while I was recording the audiobook version. It was this weird mind thing where I was like, this book is not very good. Because I don’t think it’s that good as an audiobook. But because of that, I never, after that was the last time I read the book, was when I did the audiobook. I put it on a shelf and I never read it.

Then we launched it, literally a week later and sold, I think last we checked it was like 79 thousand copies, so we’re getting close to one hundred thousand copies, which is awesome. And I’ve had insane amounts of people tell me that the book changed their life and changed their perspective on things and helped them understand marketing and sales and funnels. It did it’s job and I’m really proud of it. Really, really proud of it.

What’s funny is that I know that as we’re approaching our next book launch, there was things I wanted to clean up in the book, and most of them are things that I remember came to my head during the audiobook version, things that bugged me back then. So last week when I was flying to Arizona on Wednesday I got the old book out and I was highlighting all the stuff I wanted to change. And as I was reading it I was like, “Man, this book…” I probably shouldn’t say this about your book, it’s not very humble, “This book is really good.” I was really proud of it, even though there’s things I want to change and tweak or whatever, but I was really proud of it.

And I forgot. I was like, “Man, I haven’t read this in a long time, I forgot about it.” And then Friday I went in to read the Expert Secrets book I started getting this, I was sitting in the exact same chair, in the exact same room, exact same everything as the Dotcom Secrets book. And the first part of the book is similar. It reads like a story, so it, I was liking it. But then I got to the parts that are similar, where it’s like I’m taking the power point slides and I’m plugging in all the stuff. And it doesn’t read good as an audiobook that way. So I started becoming more and more self conscious as I was reading it.

I spent probably 6 or 7 hours in the studio recording the book and by the time I left, I was a wreck, my whole brain was just second guessing the book, is it any good? Maybe it’s not any good? What if people don’t like this because it doesn’t make sense this way? And all the sudden as I was sitting at home I was laying there, after I think my wife went to bed. I think I was watching Shark Tank or something because I was hopped up on enough caffeine to give me energy to read the book and I couldn’t fall asleep.

I was sitting there and stressing out and then I was just like “Huh, I kind of remember this from 2 ½ years ago when I did it with the Dotcom Secrets book, and I remember how much I second guessed the book and I didn’t even want to sell it after I finished the audiobook. But we did it anyway because I was like I can’t do anything, I just have to put it out there. I kind of feel the same way about the Expert Secrets book. And this time luckily it broke up into two days, otherwise it would have been even worse. That’s why I’m going back to do the last. I probably got 68 percent of it done on Friday and I’m going to do the last 40 today.

It’s just funny how much you second guess yourself. And I started thinking about all the products I’ve created in the last 14 years, and the interesting thing is I’ve never gone back and watched any of the products ever. And I think that the problem that some of us have, is that we do. You put your heart and your soul into something and when you’re creating it, you know it’s right. When I was working on the book I was like, “I know this is right. I know.” I felt right about it and then when I went back for the book version, its me doing the audiobook, you start second guessing yourself because you’re like, “Ah, I didn’t say that right. I should have said it this way. “ So much of this stuff floods into your mind that if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s being published, it’s being printed, the launch date’s happening, all these things, I probably would just pull the plug.

“You know what? Screw it, I hate this book.” Just running away. Luckily the wheels are in motion just like the Dotcom Secrets book, I couldn’t do anything about it. The Dotcom Secrets book we were giving away a Ferrari, there were no if, ands, or buts. This is happening whether I liked it or not. The same thing with this and I’m grateful for that because I think a lot of us, we record something and we go back and listen to it, and then you second guess yourself and you cancel this thing that could have been life changing for somebody else.

So I would recommend for a lot of you guys, first off, if you’re editing your own videos or audio, I bet that’s hard. I luckily have no skills or talents, so I’m not able to do that, but if I could I can imagine how I would be stressing out and trying to cut our every cough or hiccup and everything. I would be trying to make it perfect, whereas the perfection is often times what kills the project or what takes the soul out of it.

You know Marketing In Your Car, you’ve guys have heard me sneeze, you’ve heard me almost kill squirrels, I even got pulled over once, or at least almost pulled over multiple times. But that rawness of it is what makes it intriguing. I think sometimes we try to perfect it so much that it loses it. I remember I was listening to a Jay Abraham course back in the day and it’s the first time I remember hearing Brian Tracey and I was listening to this presentation of him on stage and I was like, “Dude, this guy is captivating.” Everything was amazing about it. I was like I want to learn everything Brian Tracey. So I went online and to Ebay and bought every Brian Tracey course known to man, and the first one I plug in and it’s Brian in the studio reading a book and I was like, I listened for probably an hour and I was like, this is horrible. I just turned it off and I’ve never listened to Brian Tracey since, which is sad because the first experience with him live in front of people, there are flaws and things and it was amazing.

In fact, it’s interesting, everyone is obsessed with audiobooks, and I like audiobooks, but if you look at what I listen to, this morning while I was working out I was not listening to a course of Dan Kennedy onstage. Because there’s something, I like people’s energy on Stage much better than their energy reading a book in a studio, typically. That’s why I’ve tried to keep, in fact that’s one big reason why I read my own audiobook, as opposed to everyone else was like, “Don’t read your own audiobook, hire someone else to do it for you.” because of the pain I’m going through now, but I was like “Then you’ve got some dude reading a book to you. At lease when I’m doing it I’m able to use my own voice inflections and talk the way I would speak to somebody more personally and have a little more fun with it.

But there’s something about live, so I would just say, the reason why I’m sharing any of this, in fact, I think sharing my mental battles I have with myself over my own content is the same thing all of you guys are dealing with. And I would just recommend to, if I was most of you, don’t ever go watch your course after you do it. Let the people speak. Because you’re going to be so, at least for me, I’m so critical of myself, I would hat everything.

I literally, if I went back to every podcast I would edit out every stutter, which I just did three of them right there in a row. I would edit out every cough, every sneeze, edit everything and then it would become this perfect thing and you guys wouldn’t connect to it. I just think it’s important to pull yourself out of the editing of the content if you are the content creator, because I think sometimes because of our perfectionism, that we like and we expect of our own stuff, it will actually keep you from creating what will give people the lasting change that they had made.

So I hope that helps somebody who’s stuck in that part of it right now like I was and have been and am in often. With that said, I’m going to wrap this, for a couple of reasons. One, it’s kind of the end of the thought. Two, I’m about to get on the freeway and I have no idea exactly where I’m going, I’m really bad at directions, so I gotta turn GPS on my phone. I should have just done the episode with GPS on and you guys could have heard every two minutes, “Turn left here. In one quarter mile, turn right.” But anyway, I didn’t do that, so you guys missed out.

Anyway, I’m going to bounce, appreciate you guys all, have an amazing day and don’t be perfection, don’t try to be perfect in your content. Just create stuff and put it out there because I think perfection is the number one thing that’ll kill your ability to change your customer’s lives. With that said, appreciate you guys and I’ll talk to you soon.

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Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics can mean everything in your business.

On today’s episode Russell shares the difference between tactics and strategy after an attendee at Funnel Hacking Live complained about the content of day one. He tells why strategy is the key and tactic is just an element.

Here are some interesting things to listen for in this episode:

Why an attendee at Funnel Hacking Live was unhappy with day one at the event, and why he’s not seeing the gold Russell has given him.
Why it’s important to know the difference between tactics and strategy.
And how if you follow an overall strategy, the tactics will still be there, but you can earn 15x more money.

So listen below to hear what someone else had to say about Funnel Hacking Live, and why Russell thinks he’s wrong.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell, I am out taking the garbage out, Sunday night. And it’s a beautiful night, a little chilly, but looking out there’s a really cool ski hill called Bogus Basin here in Idaho. Anyway, where my house is at and I’m taking garbage out, I go out and I can see the mountain and the mountain is all dark and where the ski hill is, is all lit up and looks insanely cool. So that’s kind of fun right now.

But I had a quick message for you guys because I just wanted to make sure everyone’s paying attention. Because I feel like sometimes you can show people gold. Be like, “Hey, here’s gold. You want some?” and the smart people see that and they’re like, “Oh sweet.” And they take it. And there’s other people who say, “That’s not real gold. I didn’t want gold. I wanted platinum. I came for diamonds, why are you trying to give me gold.” I’m like, “Dude, there’s gold. You can sell it and buy diamonds.”

So let me explain this metaphor. Funnel Hacking Live last week, insane. Those of you there, you know, you experienced it. It was just amazing. And we’re starting planning next year’s and I think I finally figured out a way, took me three days, but I think I figured out a way to make it better than last time. I’m not sure yet, but I’m excited to try. That’s going to be in time, I got a year to plan it, so that’s going to be sweet.

But it was an awesome event and of the three days, day one was probably my favorite day because I think what I got to share got me most excited. I shared the first section of the book, which is how to build a mass movement. Went into all the strategy and the tactics behind how to do that. I wanted to break those out, because there’s two different things, strategy and tactics. Then I had a chance to go into the story. We talked about epiphany bridge stories. I showed the strategy and tactics behind that. Then Brandon and Kaelin spoke the first day. Jim Edwards spoke the first day, it was awesome. All the days were good, but the first day was, I was most excited about what I taught the first day.

Anyway, that was good, I thought. For those who were there, it was good right? Pretty amazing? It’s basically a year, more than a year, deep year of my thought, what I’ve been trying to really show and teach and coach everybody through. And what the new book’s going to be really going deep into. So it was also a big preface for the Expert Secrets book which is coming out April 18th. So anyway, most people were there and they got that and went and ran away with it. But then one of my buddies, one of my friends showed me the other day some post that one of the guys at the event posted in his private members area.

I know who this guy is, I’ve been watching him for a while, he’s been doing some cool things. But his business isn’t that big yet, he’s kind of……I won’t make fun of him publicly, I might later. We’ll stop for now. In his members group he posted, he said, “Day one of Funnel Hacking Live was stupid. Not a single tactic was taught. Blah, blah, blah.” Dropped like 5 or 6 F-bombs in this thing. I was just like, I’m glad it was after the event, because I would have called the dude out on stage and embarrassed him in front of everyone, which would have been amazing. I kind of wish I had that now.

But instead I saw it like two days ago. I was like, “What? Day one?” It’s funny, day two he came up to me afterwards and said, “I’m joining your Inner Circle, man. This has changed my life.” Did the whole thing. By the afternoon day two he had a change of heart, but after day one he was frustrated apparently because I didn’t teach enough tactics.

So a couple of things. First off, what you must understand is that tactics are good. Tactics are like the tricks you use to do things. But tactics in and of themselves are not that powerful. In fact, I think, when I first met Jay Abraham and Rick Shephard and the guys, they used to talk about this. Talk about how strategy is more important than tactics, and I used to think that were not smart. Because I’m like, “No, these tactics, these tricks, these tools, these things are the secret.” And as I’ve gotten older, in my old age, and I’ve shifted from being stuck at 2 or 3 million dollars a year, to shifting to 30 million dollars a year and beyond. Hopefully this year we’ll hit 80 or 90 million, and mass growth. Bigger than anyone I know of in our industry.

The big differentiation that took me from 2 or 3 million dollars a year to ten time that, it wasn’t the next tactic. It was the strategy, the strategy behind it. As I’m on stage teaching how to build a mass movement, I’m talking about the strategy of how you build a mass movement. This is how you get people to follow you, this is how I went from 3 million dollars, to two years later 30 million dollars in a year. The difference was not a magic tactic. And I showed tactics, I showed the different tactics, but it was the core strategy. When you understand the strategy there’s a lot of tactics inside of it, but understand the strategy is the key.

So we’re showing the strategy to everybody and I’m just hoping that you guys weren’t like this dude looking at this gold and being like, “but I came here for diamonds.” Dude, are you kidding me, take the gold I give you and go sell it and buy some diamonds if that’s what you really want. Don’t miss out on the lesson because you came thinking you were looking for something else. If there’s someone that’s showing you something, don’t be like….I was the same way. So I’m throwing myself as being guilty of this too. When I first talked to Shephard and Abraham, those guys who were way ahead of me strategically thinking, I used to make fun of them thinking they were dumb. Just like this guy was doing for me. I’m like, no when I understood it; I respected and understood that I gotta figure out the strategy.

The tactics are always there, the tactics will fit inside of any strategy, but the strategy is the key. That’s what expands your growth. And then, come on now, epiphany bridge story, the hero’s two journeys, that’s all tactical. Come on now. I’ll leave that there.

What I wanted to talk about is, as I was thinking through this, is I want to kind of tie in the tactic and strategy and all that kind of stuff. When I got started, whenever it was, 14 years ago, my first mentor was Mark Joyner, he always told me, “You gotta build a list, you gotta build a list.” Which is a strategy right. At the time there were a whole bunch of different strategies people were chasing. There was AdSense stuff, The was Google AdWords, there was Arbitros, there were all these different ways to make money. And Mark was my first mentor and luckily I listened to him by the shiny objects flying around me like crazy. So I started building a list, building a list, like he told me to.

And I did that and it was funny, a couple years later Mike Filsaime came out with, he kind of coined this originally, a lot of people say it since, but the first time I heard it, it was from Mike. He said, “You should average one dollar per month, per name on your email list.” I was like, okay, that’s a cool metric. I started looking back at what I was doing and it was interesting how close my business at that point had followed that. I had a thousand people on my list, I was making about a thousand a month, when I had ten thousand on my list I made ten thousand a month, when I had a hundred thousand on my list I was making a hundred thousand a month. It was eerie. Is that a word? How close that number stayed.

For me, I started focusing on the strategy is building a list. What are the tactics to build a list? I kept focusing on tactic, tactic, tactic to build a list. My list kept growing and my income would grow with it, but I didn’t have the huge shift. When we started shifting, I was telling this, last week, I can’t remember if I told you guys this or not. Dean Graziosi did this big book launch and he invited the top ten or fifteen affiliates to his office. So I flew down there Thursday and hung out, it was amazing. It was an amazing group. I could go on for days about all the people and what I learned. I got some amazing stuff that I will show you guys in the next few months. If you watch, you’ll see some of the stuff I learned from that group.

But what was interesting is, when I got there to talk, they wanted me to talk 30 minutes on whatever I thought was the biggest, most impactful thing in my business over the last few months. What did I share with them? I shared building a cult-ure. I talked about the three things. The thing I talked about first session of our group, we talked about charismatic leader, future based cause, and then new opportunity, which is the key. That’s the core strategy. What’s interesting is, I wasn’t planning on talking but when I got up on stage, I don’t know if you’ve done this when you’ve gotten on stage. Things pop into your head sometimes, so I got up in front of this group and the first thing that popped into my head was the Send out Cards event I went to 7, 8 or 9 years ago.

I remember going to this event all excited to learn network marketing and see how these guys do everything. And I was confused when I got there, to be honest. Nobody taught anything. I remember, the first day they gave awards to almost everyone in the group and they had people win cars, they had recognition, told stories, people crying about how sending cards changed their lives. And it was so confusing to me. I remember afterwards sitting there talking to David Frey, he probably doesn’t even remember this, but it had a huge impact on me. I was like, “Dude, nobody taught anything.” And he said, “You know what the craziest thing is Russell? They’re a software company. That’s it. They’re a software, but what have they done different? What was the strategy?” The tactic is how to build a software company, but what is the strategy? He didn’t say that, but I was thinking what is the strategy?

And we started talking and he said, “They’re a software company, but look what they built around it, it’s a movement. There’s people, this is a way of life for people now.” And I was thinking about it, send out cards, I love the guys who own that, it’s a cool company, but their software is not that good. There are thousands of better card editors out there. But they built a movement of people and that’s why that company did so well.

So when I was launching Clickfunnels that kept ringing in my head from David Frey. They’re just a software company. I’m like, “I’m building a software company.” I could have gone, what’s the tactic to build a software company. No, step back. What’s the strategy? How do these guys do it? They didn’t say, let’s build a software company. That wasn’t what they were doing; they were looking at the strategy of it. So as we launched Clickfunnels, I knew we were going to compete against, Infusionsoft, Leadpages, and all these crappy software products, and I was like, I don’t want this to become a battle of who’s got what feature. I want to build a movement. I want people, I want to build the best software in the world, and luckily I’ve got the partners that are able to do that, which is insanely cool.

But I was like. Even if our software sucked, I still gotta out market everyone else. Because I want them to follow us because we’re a movement, not because we’re a software company. If you were at Funnel Hacking Live, you remember Ryan
Montgomery, our CTO, he got up there and said, “hey guys, we’re not a technology company, we’re a marketing company. We’re building technology, the technology behind it to make us be able to market, which gives you the ability to market.”

That’s the big differentiator, that’s why we’re taking on the SASS companies that are fighting us on features and we’re thrashing them because we’re building a movement. And that’s the strategy. So I started looking at that, and I looked at our numbers over the last two years, and what’s funny, is for 8 years in my business, our metrics were one dollar per name per month on our list. And I look at our numbers now and I gotta do the math real quick in my head. But we are closer to probably 14 or 15 dollars per name per month on our email list. So we 15x’d it. Same people, same list building tactics to get people in, but the strategy shifted. What happened when we shifted the strategy? 15x, instead of one dollar per name per month on our email list, we make $15 per name per month on our email address, by shifting the strategy and the strategy was how do we build a movement? We’re not a software company, we’re building a movement.

I wanted people coming to Clickfunnels like they came to Send out Cards on stage crying because they send a card and it changed someone’s life. I don’t want them coming and talking about how much money they made. That’s the difference.

I just wanted to share that because I know sometimes we get caught up in what’s the new tactic. Some of my close friends are running an event this weekend coming up, and the difference, you go to that event and what do they do. There’s all these people on stage sharing tactics, and some people love that, but that’s not what wins wars. Tactics are the gun and the shot gun and rifle that you go out there, but if you got a bad strategy you’re going to lose.

So take a step back, look at the strategy and understand that, and hopefully this helps you understand the difference between strategy and tactics. How the tactics are good, but you switch to strategy and get that correct, 15x growth, going from 3 million to 30 million in 24 months. What’s the difference? It’s not changing my tactics, the tactics were all the same, it was the strategy behind it.

I hope that you guys get that. With that said, my fingers are freezing. I should have worn gloves out here. I’m going back inside. Appreciate you all, tomorrow I’m going to go finish…..Friday I spent the whole day recording the audio version of the Expert Secrets book and tomorrow I’m going to finish the last third. I drive out there, I have a message I want to share with you guys, but I’ll save that for tomorrow. Thanks everybody, have a great night and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

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The rest of the story…

On this special 2 part episode Russell recaps and summarizes what happened at Funnel Hacking Live. He also reflects on how he felt about different aspects and speakers at the event.

Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this 2 part episode:

An overview of the schedule during the 3 day event, who spoke, and what they spoke about.
How Russell felt about certain speakers and what he thinks went right with his own presentations, and what mistakes he feels he made.
What the best part of the event was for Russell (hint – It involves his lovely wife).
And what Russell plans on doing differently at next year’s Funnel Hacking Live.

So listen below for the conclusion of Russell’s thoughts and feelings about Funnel Hacking Live 2017.

---Transcript---

Day number two now, Devon got on stage he intro to government estate. Then we came up and did a section on follow-up funnels. Which was Todd and Dylan and Ryan and me and we talked about how email funnels are from 1998 and the future is follow up funnels. And we did a presentation and during the presentation we ripped our shirts off and we had these shirts. I’m actually wearing the shirt today. It says, “We are not confusion soft, we’re Clickfunnels” and then we challenged everybody to go all in and be all in, in Clickfunnels. And we gave them these t-shirts and temporary tattoos and a whole bunch of stuff for anyone who went all in.

Basically they had to open up their phone and go to imallin.com and if you’re not all in it had Macauley Culkin slapping his face saying, “ahh, you’re not in.” and there was a big button where you could upgrade. And if you were all in, it showed you were all in and basically you’d run to the back of the room, show them the funnel and then we’d give you a huge packet of swag, which was cool.

So if any of you guys are listening to this. Don’t do that right now. We’re updating it to make it work online, I think by next week. Actually my birthday, March 8th. So on my birthday we’re going to be doing that presentation live to Facebook Live and it’ll be live so you can all go all in and get the same swag shipped out to you, which will be fun. But it was cool to show people what’s possible in Actionetics. Most people don’t know, they assume it’s an email auto-responder, and that’s like saying that Clickfunnels builds websites. Come on now, that’s 1998.

I had a slide, I wanted to use Urkel, Steve urkel in my slides, and I was able to use him twice. I was like, “You know what else was cool in 1998, Steve Urkel. Actually no, Steve Urkel’s show was cancelled in 1998. So even in 98 Urkel wasn’t cool anymore. But that’s what you’re using if you’re doing email funnels. We’re talking about follow-up funnels and all the stuff that’s possible.” So we showed people what’s possible in Actionetics, and most people didn’t even know. And everyone is shifting everything over to Clickfunnels, which is the goal. We want everybody all in, I want you all in.

So that was what Follow-up Funnels is about. It was probably the coolest presentation. So much energy, it was awesome. Then we had a break after that. And then Justin and Tara Williams came on and did a whole section on podcast funnels, which was awesome. They told their story, which was cool. And basically showed how these three podcasts they had done, how these three podcasts had each launched three entire businesses for them and it was just cool to see.

Anyway, that part was awesome. So podcast funnels, Justin and Tara were amazing. They killed it. After that we had Emily Shay come up and she is 11 years old and she stood up there on a huge stage where most people would be so scared and so intimidated and she crushed it. She was so awesome. She had about 15 or 20 minutes up there and she told her story and did it in a really fun way that tied it to the audience. She’s just a superstar. Some people would say the youth speakers were the best one’s of the whole thing, and I was like, “Yes.”

So Emily crushed it. Caleb Maddix came on, I talked about him yesterday on the podcast. He came on and just did an amazing job as well. And it was just so cool to see Emily and Caleb, two young entrepreneurs who were able to stand in front of a room and control the audience like that. For me, it took me honestly, it took me ten plus years to get a spot that they were in already and it was just so cool to see them. They’re the future.

So exciting, so they both crushed it and did such an amazing job. Then we had a lunch break. Again, the annoying thing where our stomachs were hungry and we had to go eat. So everyone went to lunch. We came back and Trey Lewellen stood up on stage and Trey is really, Trey spoke at the very first Funnel Hacking Event and he did a great job then. But it’s fun seeing him transition, him owning the stage now, he just, he did awesome. He went into deep funnelytics, like here’s the metrics you’ve got to figure out to make your funnels works. And he showed this stuff where it’s just like, well I didn’t understand that. Most people who set up a funnel that doesn’t make a million bucks day one they’re like, “This didn’t work.” No, you gotta understand the math behind it. And Trey showed how he’s built these huge companies. 20-30 million dollar companies off of a funnel that was not profitable upfront.

But when you understand the funnelytics, the math behind the funnels, how it worked. It was so cool for him to document and show it all off, it was just amazing.

Then from there, we’re only halfway through, it just keeps getting, the whole thing was amazing. Then Jason Fladlien, who is someone I’ve learned, in fact in the Expert Secrets book, I dedicated a lot to him as well. Because there’s so much I learned from him about breaking belief patterns and rebuilding and reframing and he’s just brilliant. He got on stage and talked about Amazon Funnels. And even though a lot of people know him as the guy who’s the best in the world at selling from webinars, he happens to also be good at Amazon as well.

So he showed 7 different Amazon funnels that he uses in his company and then he gave everybody at the event. “Here’s the Amazon funnels, there’s 7 of them. You guys can knock them off and use them in your business.” Which was so cool. So if you’re using any Amazon or ecommerce stuff, Jason’s stuff was amazing.

From there Darrin Stevens got on stage. A lot of you guys probably don’t know Darrin Stevens but he is a legend. He was one of the, he did the marketing behind Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. Brilliant book launch and stuff like that. But he also runs events. He does these events that have 80 people in the room who make 2-3million dollars in a weekend, for a room of less than 100 people. And it’s all about how he structures his events and event funnels. So he walked us through the whole process and he had 18 or 19 things that he does at events to build rapport and get people buying. If I was able to close what Darrin does, again he did what did I say, 2.5 million dollars from 80 people. I would have done like 60 million dollars from this event, but I didn’t so Darrin is still the king. He’s amazing.

So he shared event funnel stuff, which was awesome. Then we had another break, then Setema got on stage, and Setema is the Super Bowl winner who had to sell his ring because after he won the Super Bowl his life kind of fell apart and talks about how you win again. How do you get that stuff back? How do you implement all the stuff you’ve learned? It was amazing. He’s nicknamed himself the reverend of the revolution. I feel like he was the reverend preaching to us about how to take this stuff and have success with imperfect action and just going through and doing it. It was so cool, Setema is the man. That was awesome.

After that we came onstage and we awarded the Two Comma Club awards, which was amazing. We had, I think right now, we have over 100 people who have qualified for the Two Comma Club. Which means they have a funnel that made at least a million dollars. 100 people! So we gave away I think 80 something Two Comma Club trophy’s. These huge trophy’s with a gold record on it with two commas etched into it. It was cool for everyone else to see that and be like, “Wow, these are my peers. And they’re all making a million dollars in a funnel.”

I was trying to make it so real. If they can do it, you can do it. So we did that, and afterwards I did a presentation called “You’re one Funnel Away.” Which basically I had no power point slides, I just told the story of all the ups and downs in my business and the funnels that have saved me. I talked about the two or three times I’ve almost gone bankrupt. I talked about the fears, the pain, all that kind of stuff. What were the funnels we created that saved us from that.

It was emotional, I started crying, which is really embarrassing, especially on stage. Other people were crying and it was cool. I hope people enjoyed that. It was a scary thing for me to get vulnerable like that, but I think it was important so that everyone understands, whatever you’re struggling at, it happens to all of us. It happens to me, it happens to everyone. So understanding that and being okay with it and giving yourself permission through that to be able to succeed.

That was really cool. After that we had a hack-a-thon at night. I was super tired. I went to the hack-a-thon, talked for a few minutes, then I went back up, ate some dinner and then passed out because I was so tired. But then I hadn’t finished my next presentation for the next night. So I set my alarm for 4:30 in the morning, the next morning to get started.

Hack-a-thon was awesome, people were up til midnight building funnels. We had a whole bunch of people who built, launched and made money on funnels that night, which was cool. We catered dinner again, which was cool. Then the next day, the last day, which was Thursday.

So the last day we came in, Devon brought everyone in, brought the energy high. Then Garrett White and his wife, Danielle and their kids were going to come to the stage and when the event started we couldn’t find them anywhere. I was like, “Where’s Garrett? Where’s Danielle?” We started freaking out. I was totally stressing out and we’re trying to Vox them and text them and call them and nothing. And finally Melanie found out what room number they were in, so Dave ran up and knocked on the door like, “Ahhh, we’re on stage trying to announce you, where are you guys.” It was a miscommunication, we had told them the wrong, we messed up on our side.

But they came down and during that time it was fun because Devon was able to invent a new secret handshake for all funnel hackers, out of necessity. He bought ten minutes time by inventing a new secret handshake, which all of you who have been to Funnel Hacking Live know the secret handshake. Don’t show to those who were not there. They’ll have to learn it at next year’s event. But we’ve got a secret handshake now that is so cool. In fact, I should add a chapter to the Expert Secrets book about secret handshakes, that would be cool.

Anyway, we got a secret handshake and then Garrett, Danielle and their two kids came on stage and gave a presentation that was, I don’t even know what to say, it was so amazing. It was so cool. I’m just going to leave it at that. It was something where if you were in the room you felt it and you heard it and it moved you. It was amazing. So there you go.

Maybe someday we’ll do a launch like warrior funnels .com and share all the presentations of Garrett throughout the Funnel Hacking Live events because they have just been amazing Anyway, who knows, but we’ll look at that. So then we had after they got done. I came up and did a presentation called fill your funnel, which is how to make it rain. How to get people into your funnels. And this was the only presentation where I actually sold-sold. We were selling things throughout the event and I’ll talk about this at the end, but this is the only one where I did the actual presentation.

It went good, but a couple of weird things. When I got on stage after Garrett, there was so much energy from Garrett and Danielle and it was amazing. I came on immediately afterwards and the audio/video guys didn’t turn the music on, so I got up there and it was just kind of a weird transition. And then we awarded Stu and Amy their checks for World Teacher Aide, which was the quarter of a million bucks, which was awesome. Then it was my chance to get up there and teach affiliate funnel and we sold a course called fill your funnels. And just something about that, I don’t know what it was. Something about the presentation was kind of off. I’m just going to be completely honest. I had numbers in my head of what I thought I was going to do and I didn’t do that. It did well, if I told you guys how many we sold, everyone else would think I was a selfish kid and rude.

It did well, but what I expected, and there was this, I was doing it, I couldn’t get the flow right. I don’t know if it was, part of it I think was because I worked on the presentation the week earlier, then that morning I woke up at 4:30 trying to get it done and I was tired and worn out. There was something about the energy that wasn’t quite right. I think it was good, but it wasn’t great, like I wanted it to be. But at the end of it we sold, and it was awkward. I’m like, in the pitch, “This is hard selling you guys through my perfect webinar, even though I’ve trained all you guys on it and most of you guys are doing it now. It’s like, I’m doing it onstage live. It’s funny how that works.”

But it did well, that was when had breaks, we had snack breaks. And then basically we had to clear the whole audience out, secret service came through for Tony Robbins group, swept the whole thing and then Tony was onstage and I was in the back super nervous and awkward and worried. It’s so different, because with Marcus when he came, he just showed up in his own Uber, it was laid back, he hung out with the crowd, it was really easy and laid back. And Tony was the opposite of that. He had his security detail of 10 or 15 people there who were like, swept all the chairs making sure there were no bombs or guns and we had check people as they came through.

I was in the back and they had to pull us all out so he could come in. Very intense and caused anxiety and nerves and all this stuff, that was nervous. Plus, I found out Tony was throwing up before he came. So he wasn’t feeling good. So much stress. He brought Tony into this little green room and they let us come in and he came out. It went from this nerve, all the nerves, it was like an hour of this, while we were waiting for him to get here. All the nerves and fear and anxiety. What if he’s sick and he can’t speak? What if people don’t get what, they were so excited for him to be there. Secret service security was honestly kind of frustrating because it just. You know how I am, I’m so laid back, it was beyond corporatey, it was secret service, military. Which is good, he needs that, I understand that. But it was just kind of, at first we were trying to make this cool experience and it was so hard.

And then again, Tony came in and did his thing in the green room and came out and came to us and we had moment before he got on stage where he just kind of came in and gave me a hug, and gave my wife, Collette, a hug. And Dylan and Todd and their wives, he just connected personally with us at a level. I was so grateful for that, because it just made all the stress and everything go away. It was like, it’s going to be okay. Tony’s here, he’s going to do what he does, and he’s the best in the world and everyone’s going to love it. I’m not going to stress and I’m going to let it happen and it was cool.

Normally, I guess they don’t let people introduce him, but I was like, “I would love to introduce Tony, there is a reason why I wanted him here and I want everyone to know that reason.” So they let me introduce Tony and I got all choked up during the introduction. But I was talking about how in his bio it talks about how he’s helped 50 million people around the world. I was like, well that’s cool. Tony helped me. He helped my wife. He helped our family. If it wasn’t for Tony, my wife and I were at a rough spot before I met Tony, before I went to his event.

It was honestly, it was what healed us. And I’m just so grateful for him and after I went to Tony’s stuff, I went to all of his events in a year period of time, and then right after that my company collapsed. Had I not been equipped by the tools he gave me, I don’t know if I could have handled that. I was just talking about how grateful I am and how excited I was to share him with my world and my people, my funnel hackers. Then we played a video of him and we all went crazy and Tony came up on stage, gave me a hug and took over.

And he was supposed to go for three hours. And again, he was puking five minutes before he got on the stage and I was nervous. And he stood there and he went not for three hours, not for four hours, but for five hours with everybody. It was just cool. Everyone’s jumping and screaming and having fun. It was awesome. It just made the event, it was already amazing, just that much more amazing.

And when it was done, all of the Inner Circle members had a chance to get pictures with Tony, which was cool. Then we went up and ate real quick, and then I had a chance to go up to his hotel room afterwards and interview him for his new book, which hopefully you guys saw him on Facebook live. We showed that. And it was just awesome. That night we passed out, woke up in the morning. We had late checkout, so we hung out for a while and it was just cool to sit there and reflect with my wife. And the coolest thing for me is that this is the first time that Collette has ever been to, I mean she’s come to my events and poked her head in and then had to leave to watch the kids or all these different things, that time the kids didn’t come. So she had a chance to be there and be present and sit in the audience for almost the entire thing. For me, that was special.

It was cool and it was I think the first time she’d ever seen me doing what we do. And you guys have a chance to see it through the podcast and through all the stuff I’m doing, but she’s not connected to that. She’s not connected to the business very much, she’s very much supporting from home, but not part of everything that’s happening. So for her to be able to see that and experience it with people in the audience, it was special for me. So I just loved that. It was awesome.

That was kind of Funnel Hacking Live. And then as we’re, that day we’re leaving, flying home and I look at the Facebook group, and everyday I’m looking, kind of scrolling through, and if any of you guys are in our Facebook group you’re probably bombarded by millions and millions, everyone talking about it. I was like, alright, ready fire aim. Everybody is excited right now. Why don’t we sell tickets for next year’s event right now? So from the airport I did a Facebook Live.

“Okay, we’re selling tickets. There’s a discount and Sunday at midnight we’re pulling the page down. So you gotta buy them now if you want them. Otherwise you gotta wait six months and who knows what the price will be then?” Did a Facebook Live, emailed the list and over the next three days we sold almost a thousand tickets to next year’s event. We almost sold as many tickets as last year, just from that. Hopefully won’t lessen the momentum. If the momentum is there, capitalize on it. Don’t wait six months, “Hey you guys remember the event we talked about six months ago? Who wants to come again?” When people’s energy and emotion and excitement are high, that’s the best time to sell.

So we sold a lot of tickets, which was cool. It’s funny, I had some of the Inner Circle members freaking out, “Do we get discount tickets or not?” I was like, “I don’t know, I haven’t thought through this.” This is the lesson for everyone. I’m a big believer in “Ready Fire Aim” We just fired and I have no idea. We’ll figure it out way later, but we don’t have time right now. We just fired. Sorry, but that’s how it works over here. Everything’s not scripted out and planned second by second. Some things are, but most things aren’t.

Hopefully that’s inspiration for you guys to. To know, “Look, figure things out and just do it.” So that was kind of the event in a nutshell. For those who were there, hopefully that was a good breakdown. I wish I could spend the hour or two hours on each presentation that people did, so you can experience it. But hopefully those that weren’t there, this will give you desire to come next year. I want you guys to be there. Yeah, I will probably sell recordings, and you will probably have some of these videos that are easy to see, but there’s something different about being in the room and being surrounded by 1500 of your peers who are doing the same thing. Seeing 100 of your peers on stage with a big trophy saying I made a million dollars with a funnel this year. There’s something different about that. So I recommend for all of you guys to make that break and come to the event.

One last thing I want to share, because I kind of hinted to this earlier. And I think it’ll be cool for you guys to know. This is actually not a victory, this is a failure. A failure in my eyes. But I want to share with you guys, just so you understand that I mess things up too.

So one of the cool things that I wanted to do is, usually at each Funnel Hacking Live we sell one thing. We did certification at the first event and second event. This year, I didn’t want to sell, I don’t want this to be a selling event, but there’s things we want to offer people. So we had this big trip to Kenya, which was awesome and people jumped on that. We had the Follow-up Funnels which was awesome and people jumped on that. Then I was trying to, we had this new event called the FHAT event that I was excited about and want people to come to that. Then we also had Fill Your Funnel and I think I tried to offer too many things. Not that we, it wasn’t like I was selling each thing, but we had them available.

At the Hack-a-thon, I was like “Hey if you want to come to the FHAT event, here’s one more thing on it.” And I think it almost caused confusion. People didn’t know what to do. I think moving forward next year, we’ll probably just pick one thing and focus on that again, just to not cause confusion. But one of my big things, again I only want one session when we sold, and that was Fill Your Funnel. That one went well, but it was just, the energy wasn’t quite right when I did it. So that was one thing.

But the other cool thing is that the entire Funnel Hacking Live event, if you look at it from the outside, it was a big perfect webinar. Session number one, if you’ve gone through the perfect webinar in detail and as you read the Expert Secrets book, you’ll understand it at a level I’ve never really shared it before. But the first thing we do is talk about the vehicle putting people in. So my first presentation was about creating a mass movement, becoming an expert. So that was the first vehicle. Session number one, would have been secret number one if this was a webinar.

Session number two is about the internal beliefs and that’s how I walked into, I shared the story, showing “Look, you can create a mass movement.” And they’re like, “Well I don’t know if I can.” I’m like, “If you can master stories you can.” Belief number two was all about can they internally do it? So the second presentation for me was all about that. The internal.

Then the third presentation, which was the One Funnel Away, was the external. I believe I can do it, I can tell stories, but I don’t know how to do this whole funnel thing. So I shared at the One Funnel Away presentation to help people understand the external fears. So if you look at, again if you break down the perfect webinar, you’ve got the belief pattern is tied to the vehicle, which is the new opportunity we’re putting people into. That was session number one, number two is their internal beliefs, false beliefs about themselves, and number three is the external false beliefs about themselves.

So that’s how we structure those three presentations, and what we do at the hack-a-thon is offer people to come to the FHAT event, because that was kind of the natural continuation of that. The problem I have is that, if you look at the perfect webinar, what’s the last step? It’s stack and close and we didn’t stack and close anymore. We just basically said, “hey you should come to the FHAT event because it’s awesome.” And we had a lot of people who did, but not what I expected or hoped.

My two big lessons, number one when you’re doing a webinar you can’t forget the stack and the close. It’s important even if you break their beliefs, if you don’t offer them the opportunity to buy and do it in a way that’s going to convince them to buy, a lot of people that you could have served, won’t be served.

I honestly think that everybody should be at the FHAT event. I don’t think there’s anything I could do to serve anybody at a higher level than that. And because I kind of shied away and didn’t sell it and skipped the last step, I’m not able to affect as many people’s lives’ because of that. For me that looks like a failure. IT’s not the money. Money’s a cool way to keep score, but for me, I should have had 100 people from that room coming to Boise so I could help them create the perfect webinar. And I don’t. I have a lot but not that many because I…..I don’t know the exact reason, but I didn’t do it right. It came down to me having fears of trying to make it an official offer to people. It’s funny, even after this long I still make the same fears that other people make as well. That was one big thing.

And then the other thing, is again, shipping the focus of the event to being focusing on core thing we want people to do. Because I think people were confused, “I’m coming to Kenya, I upgraded and I’m all in, there’s this FHAT event Russell’s talking about and I don’t know what that is because he didn’t tell me about it. Sounds cool, but I have no idea. Then there’s Fill Your Funnel.” So I think that that was my other mistake. There was confusion in where I wanted people to go from here.

So those are the things I learned, and again, that’s something you always learn as you do them. So it’ll be fun, next year my goal is to make the event even better. It’s shifting the focus, well I don’t know what the focus is going to be yet. But it’s making sure that everyone has an amazing experience, both from a marketing standpoint and also a personal development standpoint. I think that’s one neat thing we bring that nobody else does, which is cool.

And then the third thing is really figuring out for people who come through the experience, what’s the next step for them. And focusing everything on that and not having two or three next steps, but one. And saying, “This is what you guys should be doing next. Those who are interested.”

So that’s what I learned at Funnel Hacking Live as well. Anyway, I appreciate everyone who was there, I had a great time. With that said, this is probably the longest marketing in your car of all time, but it’s a recap for those who missed it. And hopefully you guys will come next year, because it’s going to be amazing. Tickets are not for sale right now, but in four or five months we’ll open it and we have probably 1500 more tickets or so I believe. When we do open it up, the price has gone up, I apologize for those that didn’t get my emails and everything else. I tried to warn you. With that said, thank you guys and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

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What happened at this year’s event.

On this special 2 part episode Russell recaps and summarizes what happened at Funnel Hacking Live. He also reflects on how he felt about different aspects and speakers at the event.

Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this 2 part episode:

An overview of the schedule during the 3 day event, who spoke, and what they spoke about.
How Russell felt about certain speakers and what he thinks went right with his own presentations, and what mistakes he feels he made.
What the best part of the event was for Russell (hint – It involves his lovely wife).
And what Russell plans on doing differently at next year’s Funnel Hacking Live.

So listen below for the first half of Russell’s thoughts and feelings about Funnel Hacking Live 2017, and don’t forget to tune in tomorrow for the conclusion.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to Marketing In Your Car. But today’s actually a special episode because first off, I’m not in my car, I’m in the conference room and second off, I got this brand new little microphone that plugs into the bottom of my phone. People have been asking me ever since I started this podcast, “What microphone do you use on your phone?” I always just tell them that Iuse the microphone on my phone, which is true until today. There’s this really cool thing, I don’t know what brand or style, I have no idea but I’m testing it out. So if it seems to be good, I’ll let you guys know.

It’s so cool, it plugs into the bottom of your iPhone and it’s got this big huge thing on it. I’m excited, I’m trying it out. Hopefully this episode goes well enough and I’ll let you guys know more about this thing, because it’s pretty awesome.

So what I wanted to do, I wanted to give a recap of Funnel Hacking Live. I know 1500 of you guys were already there and experienced it and went crazy with us, and for everyone else who wasn’t, I wanted to catch you up on what’s happening and why it was amazing and why you should be at next year’s event. If you missed this one for some insane reason, because there’s no logical reason to have missed it, only insane ones. So if you had an insane reason, I want to give you guys some cool behind the scenes of what was happening.

So this year’s event, this is the third year we’ve done it. The first year was in Vegas, we had about 600 people come. The second year, last year was in San Diego and we had 1300 people come and it’s funny because you have to sign a contract for next year’s event before the event, because you have to, because if you’re going to sell tickets for the event you have to know, here’s the venue and dates, blah, blah, blah. So last year we’re like, let’s make it a little bit bigger, let’s do 1500 people. And then we ended up selling out three months early.

We probably should have done bigger. So next year’s event we’ve got a little bit bigger place. Hoping that we’re able to fill it. Just so you guys are fully aware, nothing on Earth stresses me out more than events. Filling events is the hardest sell. You’re not just selling, “Hey, you should come to an event.” Because that’s an easy sell. The hard sells are all the other sells someone has to make in their mind. “I gotta ask for work off, I gotta talk to my spouse, I gotta fly, pay for flights, pay for hotels.” All these other things, so it’s not just a simple sell, I want to….usually when you sell something you create desire and people want it and you sell it.

This is harder, even if I create desire for it, you still have to go and close yourself on all the other logistics that are a pain. Event’s are scary. In fact, the last time I did an event before Funnel Hacking Live, which I swore I would never do another event after. I think we sold 3 or 400 tickets, and when we got there only…and it was $100 tickets, so I assumed that $100 commitment was enough to get people to show up. I was wrong. We ended up only having 100 that showed up.

It was so embarrassing for me. I remember having all these empty seats. I was like, “I will never do another event again.” Then fast forward a couple of years, about the time this podcast was starting, I probably talked about it. There was this new company we were working on called Rippln, and they did their initial kickoff and there was 1200 people, and we ended up getting 1.5 million people to sign up over the 60 days or so. And then there was an event on the backside of it.

So I thought there was going to be 30,000 people at this event, I was all excited for it. But at the time, the company hadn’t launched the actual thing that we’d built the hype for. There was a huge loss of momentum, at the event we had 1000 tickets sold. I showed up and we were getting ready to open the doors and went in the hallway and there was only about 200 people out there. We were like, “oh crap.”

The guy, Brian, who ran the company was like, “Oh crap. Let’s pull chairs out.” So we sat there, right before the event and pulled 800 chairs out of the room and then we had this huge empty room and then 200 seats in the front and brought people in and did this event over three days. And it was, for me, I was emotionally scarred. I was like, “I don’t know what’s happening, but this is not a good sign.” And sure enough the company crashed afterwards. A lot of wasted energy, time and money on my side that never materialized, but learned a lot of good lessons.

That’s the point, right? So because of those experiences, I had this fear of events. I never wanted to do one. So when the first Funnel Hacking Live, after we launched Clickfunnels, people were saying, people started doing meet ups. I was like, “We should facilitate this.” So we decided to do the first one. We were going to sell 600 seats, and I was so scared, panicking about what if we only sell 100 and we have this room for 600? S

o finally we did it. We launched it, and we sold out, I think we sold out 2 weeks early, so it wasn’t huge, but we did. We did the event and I remember even the day of the show I had so much fear and anxiety. What if people don’t show up? And I remember even before the event started hiding in the back and peaking through and I was like, “Oh good, the seats are full. Thank heavens.” And then I was able to, we did the event and it turned out amazing.

And then last year, same thing. We had 1300 seats sold and I remember the night before we have pre-registration, we only had 200 people pre-register. I was like, “Oh my gosh, nobody’s coming. This is it. This is my greatest fear recognized once again.” And I’m freaking out and went out there and the next morning tons of people registered and we ended up having the entire thing filled, all 1300 seats and then we did the event, it was awesome.

So this time, I had the same thing. I wasn’t quite as, I had two successful events now, I wasn’t quite as scared, but I still get nervous. So the event happened and this time we, usually the event’s on a weekend, but to get the hotel space we had to do it on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so we all flew in Sunday night, which was nice. We all flew in there and had time to just relax. Then Monday, my wife and I got up and went shopping to go buy clothes, and my team was doing everything, my team is amazing. They’re stuffing binders and getting things ready and all that kind of stuff. So it was kind of nice, they were taking care of that.

I was able to go and spend time with Collette, and just get ready for the event and shop. Just kind of mentally get prepared for this thing. And then that night, we had a big VIP dinner for our Inner Circle Members, as well as our certified partners who have actually finished certification. We had a big dinner with them and it was really, really cool.

Now a couple things, this will be one of my themes of this podcast. It’s interesting, and I’m going to be vulnerable and let you guys know all my fears and my things in hopes, not that you judge me, “Man, Russell’s a wuss.” I want you to be like, “Wow, if Russell can do it, I can do it.” That’s more of the goal with this. I love being on stage. I feel comfortable in front of 1500 people talking, and I feel really good there. I get really, really scared one on one or even in groups.

So even at our Inner Circle dinner, there’s 150 or so people, maybe 200 people, I can’t remember, it was kind of a smaller thing, but tons of anxiety being in that room talking to people. Throughout the event people come talk to you one on one, I really struggle. I feel bad. I had my coaching call with Tara Williams this morning and we were kind of talking about this. I was just like, “Man, it’s funny how comfortable I feel up in front of the stage and how scared and nervous and awkward I feel one on one.” And I feel bad about it.

I think a lot of times, for anyone who did have one on one interactions with me. I apologize if I’m super awkward. I don’t know why, I feel nervous. I get really nervous there and I struggle. Which is why I try to hide as much as I can. I try to be out there to take pictures with everyone as well, but it’s really, I struggle with that part of it.

Anyway, we did the dinner that night, it was really fun. Bart Miller, who is one of our Inner Circle members who’s transitioning into becoming a fashion coordinator, he designed all my clothes for the week. And he did the same for Alex Harmosian and a bunch of the Inner Circle members. So he was there and had me dressing up all nice. So I was nervous because I wasn’t comfortable in my clothes, completely. And then in this room with these people that I admire. I wanted to make sure they had such a good experience, it gets you nervous. At least for me.

But what’s cool, at the end I had a chance to give a quick speech, it was amazing looking out at that room. And I knew most of the people in that room. All the Inner Circle members I know really intimately. I know their businesses, and often times I know their fears, hopes, desires, dreams, passion, all those things. I’m aware of those things, so it’s kind of cool to look out there and realize and look at those guys like, “Man, the ripple effect” That’s funny, because of Rippln, that was our pitch there, but the ripple effect of these people is amazing.

And I kind of talked about that like, how cool it is for me and for us as a company that we get to be a little piece in that journey. For me, it’s such an honor. I get a lot of credit for those things and it’s like, no it’s not me, it’s you guys. We provided a tool, some training, but it’s you guys taking that leap of faith to go and do it. Because the tools and training is out there for everybody, but most people don’t do it, and the reason why is there’s so much fear and anxiety and things that happen. Just seeing this room of people who are taking those leaps, it was awesome.

That was the first night. We went to bed that night and I could not sleep. I really needed to because I hadn’t slept much earlier, and I ended up being up until 2 or 2:30 before I passed out. The next day started and it was insane. We got there and people were packed. Devon Brown, who is the best MC on earth was MC-ing it, getting people’s energy, he had everyone dancing and it was so exciting. And then we brought the certified partners on stage so everyone could see, “Here are the people who are certified. Here are the people you could hire if you need help with funnels. And if you want to become certified, you want this to be your career, go ask someone from our team because you could be certified. This could be your new career, just like these guys.”

We had most of our Clickfunnels team come on stage, so people could see who was actually behind the event. Then after that, I had a chance to get up and it was cool because these events are always fun for because I get to share what I’m thinking about, I’m geeking out about at the time. And it’s usually stuff I’ve shared in the Inner Circle, I’ve shared some of on the podcast, but it’s never been formally presented. So this is the first time I had a chance to formally present the first section of the new Expert Secrets book, which is creating a mass movement. And it was so much fun to share that and walk through the models and show people that.

And I think a lot of, I don’t know, I felt like it was for a lot of people, just such a new, exciting thing to see and realize that we’re not just selling things. You are creating a movement. What’s interesting, one thing that kind of made me sad about the event, I know it frustrated some people, in the initial sales letter we had a little section saying I was going to talk about supplement funnels, and I didn’t because of just how things shift as you start growing the event and speakers and some things have to get cut and some things don’t. And that was one that got cut.

Someone came up to me afterwards and was like, “I came all the way from Australia because I wanted to learn about supplement funnels.” I was like, “Well I’m not specifically talking about supplement funnels, but this stuff is the same. It doesn’t matter. We are building the supplement line right now and the difference between the first supplement funnel was all a media based thing where we had a really good funnel and drove traffic. But we didn’t build a culture, we didn’t build a following and that’s why it grew and then it went away. It was kind of over.

I was like, “With the new supplement stuff we’re doing, this building a mass movement, is the same. All these principals we’re talking about are the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling supplements.” I was trying to explain to her and I don’t think she believed me and she was frustrated and walked away.

This is the key to all business. This is the key to everything you’re doing. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, this is still the foundation of how you position an offer and how you treat your customers and how you get them to buy over and over and over again. So I was excited to finally share that and it was just so cool.

Then we had a break and after that Todd Brown came up. And Todd is, I always say if you look who are the two guys out there in the market teaching funnels the most it’s me and Todd. Todd’s a lot smarter than me. A lot more analytical I think at stuff and he has a chance to hang out with some amazing marketers. So I love his perspective, he came in and we were talking about the big idea. How do you create the idea behind the marketing campaign’s to get people to buy your thing? And it was fun just to see how he breaks things down and how he looks at things.

He’s definitely different than how I look at things, but I appreciate it so much. The way that he views things, I respect him a lot. And it was awesome having him up there sharing his perspective on that. Because I think a lot of people are getting good at building funnels, but they’re missing my first presentation which is creating a mass movement, and the positioning of things, and that kind of stuff. And then Todd is figuring out the big idea. So that was the next cool thing and people loved that.

From there we broke to lunch, which I feel like eating is such a waste at these event. We’ve got two hours we gotta block out for lunch so people can go and eat. But nobody needs that. We need to be sitting in a room talking. We let people eat, because I think people need that. Humans have to eat every once in a while. But yeah, we went to lunch. For most of these meals, we bought lunches and dinners and stuff like that for most of the stuff. Because I didn’t want people to have to leave, it’s just kind of a nice touch I think, to help provide those for people.

So we fed a lot of people. I can’t remember if we fed people that lunch or not, but whatever. But then after I came back, this is where I had a chance to go into story, which is the next thing. The epiphany bridge, I shared a lot of pieces of that with you. But another cool thing for me, Daegan Smith, who is one of my favorite people in the world, one of my mentors, peers, friends, whatever you want to say. I actually had him come to the event because I wanted him to see a lot of this stuff that I was talking about, a lot of stuff I initially learned from him and then stuff that we talked about what inspired ideas that made me test things and try things.

So I had him there, and it was cool because I had to give this cool presentation on story and I got to give him credit for being there. In fact, the Expert Secrets book, most of it is dedicated to him, because it was the foundation for so much of this cool thing that became. It was fun having him in the room to hear that. I was a little nervous, honestly, I was like, “Daegan, I learned tons of this stuff from you and this is where I’ve kind of taken it.” And it was fun to share that.

So I shared the story and epiphany bridges and how all those things work together. We talked about the hero’s two journeys, all the stuff that’s from the Expert Secrets book, which you guys are going to love. Then I got done and I was able to bring up Brandon and Kaylin Polland, who last year, they were at last year’s Funnel Hacking event and I met them in person there. Then they joined the Inner Circle and I’ve had a chance to be around them and experience them and their business over the last year. And I wanted them to be at the event, so they spoke. They talked about social webinars and telling their story, which is super cool. Their whole thing is #dowhateverrussellsays, and I think their end thing was give Russell all your money and he’ll turn it into more money, or something, which I appreciate.

But it was cool to hear their whole story. What I think what Brandon and Kaylin, outside of they’re crazy talented as a whole anyway, but showing when they got in a year ago or two years ago when they first got started, they didn’t have a ton of money, and they invested in the Funnel Hacks course, a thousand dollar course a lot of you guys already have. They said, “We went through and pushed play and watched thirty seconds and we paused it and implemented that. And pushed play again….and for three weeks we went through the entire course in thirty second chunks.” They heard it, stopped an implemented it.

And what’s funny is he told me afterwards, that a bunch of people came up and were like, “What was the course you went through with Russell. I want to go through the same thing the same way.” And he told them and they were like, “Oh. I’ve owned that for a year and a half.” And he’s like, “Yeah.” The difference is that they implemented. That’s the key, they’re the most amazing implementers in the world. They’re presentation was amazing.

Then we had a break and after that, Jim Edwards came up, my co-host with Funnelfridays.com. And he gave a presentation on Copy Blocks, which was amazing. I think that hopefully for most people it was liberating. Showing wow, this is, I don’t have to be a creative writer. I just have to understand how blocks work and copy and how Funnel Scripts works and all that kind of stuff. And Jim made it really fun. He did a great job. He made the whole session really fun and exciting and people loved it.

Then when Jim got done, then Stu McLarin came up. Stu is one of the greatest human beings, literally, to be birthed on this earth. I don’t know if I can say it strongly enough. Just an amazing human being. He came and talked about membership funnels, which was awesome. And showing the pre-launch process and how he launched his programs, and it was cool seeing his pre-launch stuff. How he launches, 90% is pre-launch stuff that most people, like me, don’t even think about. It was like, “Here’s a video we launched ahead of time on Facebook and Youtube that got viewed. From here we moved to here…” it showed the whole process which was cool. And From here we launched this funnel and it made 3.3 million dollars and it was cool to show that.

Then afterwards I had a chance to come up with Todd and Dylan and we did a special presentation about World Teacher Aide and we talked about coming to Kenya and we showed a video of me in Kenya from last year. And then this time we said, “Look, if you guys want, we’re going, if you guys will pay for a classroom you can actually come to Kenya with us and do a special Mastermind.” We had 11 spots that were open and that night we sold all 11 of those spots and I think we had 7 or 8 people on the waiting list, which is crazy. When all is said and done, by the last day we had raised between the money, it was almost, just shy of a quarter of a million dollars, that we had raised for World Teacher Aide from the event, which was insane.

What a quarter of a million dollars will do in Kenya, is the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars here in America. There’s so many people and kids and communities, lives will be effected because of that. I just, everyone was gracious and giving, which is awesome.

After that, we ran down and did our round tables. Which had a bunch of people at round tables and anyone could come and ask questions and it went really, really well. We had a big buffet down there and everyone was eating and partying, asking questions. It was good. I think next year we’re going to tweak that a little though. There were pros and cons. The pros were everyone who got at a round table it was really, really powerful. Those who didn’t though, they were kind of like, it was hard. And I don’t know if we need to get microphones or something. Have people rotate from table to table. Some people purchase a table and sit there for the entire two or three hours and other people can get it.

We’re going to figure out how to make the round tables a little better. But it was really cool for everyone come out and have a chance to talk directly to the speakers and the Inner Circle members and things like that. It was awesome. That was day number one. I slept really good that night, which was awesome.

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A quick little rant after I woke up this morning.

On today’s episode Russell talks about standing up for Caleb Maddix in a marketing Facebook group after people twice his age begin making fun of him. He also talks about having good character no matter what.

Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:

Who Caleb Maddix is, and why he’s so amazing.
Why Russell stood up for Caleb when other marketers were making fun of him.
And why it’s important to have good character no matter what room you’re in.

So listen below to hear how you can still build the tallest building without having to knock other buildings down.

---Transcript---

Good morning Funnel Hackers. So today we’re home with my little Norah here. She’s holding me. She’s a little sad because she wanted to go and say bye to the kids at the bus stop, but instead we’re hanging out and we’re going to do a podcast because, in fact, I’m going to do a big update on Funnel Hacking Live because I know a lot of you guys want to know what happened behind the scenes, all the cool stuff. Conversions, numbers, metrics, all the nerdy stuff we all care about.

But today, I’ve wanted to do a podcast this morning on something, a little something I like to call character. I’m sitting here because I’m a little upset this morning. Upset as I can be because I’m usually pretty happy, but definitely just kind of annoyed and wanted to share this with you.

Yesterday was Sunday, I was home, I went to church, hung out with the kids, having a good time. Then I jumped on the inter-webs because, honestly because we were selling Funnel Hacking Live tickets for next year, and we were looking at numbers and stats and went to Facebook to see if people were talking about it and what was happening. And then in the middle of my news Facebook feed I see a big old video from my buddy Caleb Maddix, now Caleb, if you don’t know him yet, he’s 14 or 15 now, amazing kid. He spoke at Funnel Hacking Live on stage and crushed it. One of the best presenters we had by far and he’s a 15 year old kid and just one of the most talented, amazing humans, individuals I’ve ever met in my entire life so far on this earth. And Caleb is so cool, him and also Emily Shay, we had both of them speaking at Funnel Hacking Live.

Both of them actually came out here to my home in Boise and helped share with my kids. Right now, my kids are part of the Maddix book club, maddixbookclub.com, where every morning they get a text message from Caleb with the video, he’s got them reading books and all sorts of cool stuff. It’s the coolest thing in the world. He’s inspiring kids, changing the world, he’s able, as a 15 year old kid, he’s able to stand up in front of 1500 people and control the audience like no one I’ve ever seen. Just one of the most amazing humans I’ve….on earth.

Anyway, he’s got so many talents and so much drive and he’s a hard worker and just awesome. And his dad who is an amazing human as well. Just can’t …..there’s no way I could think more of them. They’re just so amazing. Everyday I’ve actually had with Caleb has been super professional, super polite, just love that kid.

So I’m on Facebook, I’m scrolling and I see this big video of Caleb. I’m like, oh it’s Caleb’s video. And above it I see some moron posting something about why…something about this kid and blah blah blah, making fun of him. And it was in a marketing group that I’m part of. And this marketing group……It’s one of those groups that they got in there because they’re all marketers and then they all like to make fun of everybody. They make fun of Gary V. they make fun of, they probably make fun of me. If I wasn’t in that group, I’m pretty sure that I’ll get kicked out eventually and then they can all make fun of me. Whatever.

And I don’t really, whatever. It doesn’t really bother me that much. But I saw Caleb sitting there and they all started making fun of him and they all started going and at first I just read them and I was like, whatever these guys, that’s what they do to whatever. So I just kind of ignored it and then for the next hour it just bugged me. I was so visually bugged. I’m playing with my kids and I just had this annoyed feeling. I was like I gotta go, if I was at an event or sitting somewhere and a bunch of people were saying things like that about someone I love and respect and is a friend, I would stand up and be like, I’m going to go and just…

So I go back to the group, find the post, I just posted some really simple, I don’t remember exactly what it was but it was like, “Hey, Caleb’s awesome. He came out to Boise and trained my kids, he’s got my kids off video games. Right now they’re reading and they’re writing and they’re learning. He’s amazing. It’s interesting to me how many haters….” It drives me nuts because Caleb has tons of, you see his videos, tons of comments from jerks. People who just have to put in their two cents because they feel like they’re tough because they’re behind the computer.

So I said, “Caleb has tons of haters, but it’s typically from people who are double his age and making half as much money as him. There’s two ways to build the biggest building in town. One’s to actually work hard and become better yourself, and the other is trying to knock down the other buildings around you.” I just posted that and left it there.

So they get some people coming in like, “oh yeah, Caleb’s cool.” So at the playground, someone’s getting bullied until one cool kids stands up and says, “Oh yeah, he’s cool.” So all the sudden all the people who were too afraid to say anything come out, “Oh yeah, Caleb’s cool.” That kind of made me happy.

So this morning I woke up, and this one drove me nuts. This morning I woke up, in this thread where they’re all picking on a 15 year old kid, who is a thousand times more talented than any of them, by far. Some guy comments to me and says, “Hey Russell, don’t you think you were kind of harsh on so and so? Especially considering the room that you’re in.” I was like, “Okay. You guys are bullying a kid behind his back in a Facebook group and then one guy comes and sticks up for that person and teases there person who makes the post because he’s half as successful as this 15 year old kid and now you’re mad that I’m bullying that guy that made the initial post?” I was like, “Are you kidding me?”

So I wrote a comment back, I just said, “You know I try to treat all people the same no matter what room I’m in #character” and I left it there. Anyway, that was how my morning started this morning, and I thought it was interesting and funny and I just wanted to leave a message for you guys.

First off, a couple of things. So number one, if someone is a thousand times more successful than you and doing their thing and having fun with it, it doesn’t help you to cut them down. If you’re feeling insecure because they’re doing that. That means it’s a problem about you. And posting trash about it is not going to help you. Looking at that and inspired will. That’s number one.

Number two, I don’t know about you, but what my parents taught me and what I teach my kids and I hope that you will learn as well is that you should treat people the same no matter what room you’re in. That’s ridiculous that, oh we’re in this room so we’re okay picking on a 15 year kid behind his back. No. What kind of character do you have? If you think that’s okay, that is ridiculous. That is insane.

If you’re in a room and everyone is making fun of people behind your back, I don’t care if it’s the internet or offline or whatever, just know when you’re not in that room those same people are making fun of you. That’s called lack of character. If you have character you treat people the same no matter where you are. I don’t care if you’re…….it’s just ridiculous. I feel like I’m working with my 11 year old twins. This is not something that an adult should still be struggling with. If you have any character at all, that’s how you treat people the same. Especially people……just ridiculous. #character, my new slogan for today.

That’s kind of all I wanted to share with you guys. Seriously, what’s that thing they say, if you’re pointing outward at somebody, there’s 4 fingers pointed back at you. That’s the reality you’re in. That’s what you need to feel good about yourself. Then there’s other issues.

Alright, that’s all I got. Me and Norah are going to go eat and later on today I’ll do a podcast recapping the whole event. Let you guys in on the behind the scenes of it all. But I just wanted to drop that really quick because I think it’s important and says a lot about who we are as human beings. I don’t know about you but I’d rather be friends with Caleb Maddix than any of those people talking trash about a kid in a Facebook group. Grow up and have some character. With that said, I appreciate you guys. Thanks for being funnel hackers. Thanks for doing the right thing. Thanks for being people that I would like to hang out with. With that said, I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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The one little shift that transformed everything.

In today’s episode Russell mentions some of his preparations for Funnel Hacking Live. He also talks about changing the way he sees and talks about Actionetics.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

What the difference is between an improvement offer and a new opportunity.
Why Russell doesn’t want to call Actionetics a better email auto-responder.
And what some of the features are that make Actionetics more than just an auto-responder.

So listen below to get a sneak peak about some of the stuff Russell will be talking about at Funnel Hacking Live.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome back to Marketing In Your…actually it’s Marketing In Your Closet. I would do it in my car but, I tell you what, things are going so crazy right now getting ready for the event. I don’t even…..I’m heading into the office in a little bit here.

But I’m getting dressed in the closet. So you can hear me talk in here, which I hope is okay. I have something cool to share with you. If you’ve been following along for a long time, or most of you guys haven’t read the book yet, because it’s not actually out. Yesterday from the publisher we got back the guts of the book. The finalized design guts. We had to go through it last night. So Dave was up, we were at the office until 3. I can’t remember 3 or 3:30 or something like that. He went through the whole thing, there was like 10 or 11 little edits and I sent it back in, which means now we can get the books printed. Which means we’re going to be able to sell these things on time, which is insane.

So that’s all happening which I am excited about. And in the book I was talking a lot about this earlier while I was writing, in the podcast, for those who are listening along as we go. I talked about the foundation and building a big mass movement, or culture. There’s three things, there’s charismatic leader or attractive character, number one. Number two is a future based cause and then number three is a new opportunity.

We talked about how you can’t create improvement, but if you created something that’s an improvement, teaching people how to become better then you automatically dis-include 98% of the world’s population, which makes it really hard to sell. So if you struggled selling, it may be you’re selling improvement. People don’t want improvement, the masses don’t. They want a new opportunity, so you could always create a new opportunity.

So last night, the presentation I was working on was to show Actionetics, and if I ask 99% of people who have ever heard of Actionetics, what it is they say, “It’s an email auto-responder.” So as I’m working on my presentation yesterday I was like, “If I call this an email auto-responder, what leverage do I have?” The only leverage is to say this is a better E-R, a better auto-responder. By saying better, it is now an improvement offer. Which means 98 % of the world’s population will no longer care about it. Including people in my market. The only people who care are the 2% who are actually looking for improvement.

So if I pitch that way, I’m going against my own rules. So because I try to practice what I preach at all times, in all situations, I spent the last almost two days now trying to figure out how we position this presentation and the tool, Actionetics as a new opportunity? Because it is. We were here forever trying to figure out the title of the presentation and the hook and angle and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, it’s kind of cool. Literally I spent, I think I told you yesterday, 8 hours figuring out the headline and title. Steve Larsen had a burst of inspiration after all of us were sitting there trying to figure it out.

I had email funnel secrets and I had email funnels and I had all these things. He came up with this idea, this name which was follow-up funnels. And I heard the angels in heaven singing. That is it. That’s it. Actionetics is not an email auto-responder. If I was the Actionetics guy, “Hey here’s an email auto-responder.” I would beat him up. No, I’m so much more than that. But that’s how you classified me because you are trying to make it an improvement, you’re better version of an auto-responder, which is true, but it’s different. It’s a new opportunity. It’s a follow-up auto-responder. All sorts of follow-ups.

So after we got the hook we started looking in December and found out, we went through all of our front end funnels, for every one dollar we made in front end funnels, we made $16.73, something like that, in the follow-up funnel, which is insane. $16 to $1 more than that. I thought it was a typo. I thought we did the stats wrong. We did it ten times. We did 16 times more from the follow-up funnels, than we did from any of the front end funnels, which is crazy.

The front end funnels, I think we spent $85,000 in front end funnels. We made $96, we made $11,000. That was it. Anyway, it’s crazy. So I started going over the follow-up funnels when I started doing this presentation and showing how this is not an improvement, this is a new opportunity. How auto-responders, that’s an old, dead idea, concept. It’s from 1998. The future is follow-up funnels and Actionetics is the tool, the only tool that can do that. Because it’s legitimately a new opportunity. It’s a blue ocean, it’s all these things. There’s no other service that can do what Actionetics does.

Some people compare head to head with the email auto-responders. These ones might have more features, from an email auto-responder standpoint they may be a little bit better. Any time I’m talking about E-R, it’s an improvement offer. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a whole new opportunity. Emails or only 1/10th of the equation. It’s actually the rest of the stuff. I’m going to be showing in the presentation everything. When someone comes in how with Actionetics you can do Facebook follow-up auto-responders, changing the pixels, changing the traffic, the images based on where the funnels are hitting.

We’ll show you how you can change the message based on who they are, how the funnel they have changes. How somebody leaves, they can come back because of sticky cookies and buy 6 months, a year, 5 years, or ten years later and not even have to put their credit card in. There’s so many insanely cool things that Actionetics does. Because it’s not an email auto-responder, it is a new opportunity, it is a follow-up funnel. And that’s the magic.

I just wanted to share that with you because it was a big…..when I got that I was going crazy. But you gotta look at everything you’re selling you guys. If you looked at me, if I looked at myself two days ago, I was selling a better email auto-responder. I look at myself today, I’ve created a new opportunity and it is….that’s what Actionetics is.

So those of you guys who are going to be at the Funnel Hacking Live event, Day two, which is what? Wednesday morning, I’ll be giving that presentation. I spent almost 40 hours straight on this stupid thing and it’s still not done. So I’m going in right now to go finish it off. Then I got two more presentations after that, so we’re getting down to the wire, but what’s coming from it is legitimately amazing. I can’t wait to share with you guys.

With that said, I’m done, I’m getting out of the closet. Coming out of the closet. No, not like that. I’m literally walking out of the closet and into the bathroom and I’m going to go get my hair and head out because I got a call with Caleb Maddix and Emily Shai, I always say her name wrong, Emily Shay in 15 minutes. So if you’re watching Facebook Live’s come check it out, we’re doing Facebook Live’s with all the different speakers, telling out stories and it’s been so much fun. I’m having so much fun with this so far. Come hang out with us and I’ll see most of you guys at Funnel Hacking Lives. Thanks everybody and talk to you soon.

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Some behind the scene thoughts, as I’m choreographing Funnel Hacking Live.

On today’s episode Russell talks about some of his preparations for the Funnel Hacking Live event next week. He talks about spending hours on the headline and sub headline for a particular presentation and why it’s important.

Here are some of the enlightening things you will hear in this episode:

What presentation was so important that Russell spent several hours over a few days coming up with a headline and sub headline.
Why you should be excited for after Funnel Hacking Live when Russell reveals a lot of the choreography that goes into planning an event of this magnitude.
And why having everything perfectly choreographed could mean the kind of difference that will effect your wallet.

So listen below to find out why the choreography of a big event is so important.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I hope you guys are doing fantastic, wherever you are listening in. So today a couple of things. First off, we are 5 days away from Funnel Hacking Live and so much crazy, insanely coo, amazing stuff is all happening that I wish I could share all or just a piece of. But I’m on my way to get a haircut and I’ve got 8 minutes so I thought this would be the perfect time to hang out with you guys. And I’m actually in my car, which is strange, seeing how that’s the name of the podcast.

And also, a couple of people told me that two episodes ago where I talked about the sport we call business, talking about the playground with the athletes and the drama and the skaters, all those things. A couple of people said they were kind of offended by that. I didn’t mean it to be offensive, I meant it to be, in fact I said at the beginning there the things I learned from those guys was awesome. The collaboration I….I wouldn’t have collaborated well had I not learned that from those other groups. I’m just saying you have to understand that when you’re in a group with a melting pot of a whole bunch of different personalities that there are people who are like me, who are aggressively competing and just being aware of that, hopefully to bring some competition to you.

So if you were offended that means that it’s time to build some aggression, instead of on me do it on your competitors. Anyway, I’ll leave that there. Let’s see, I just wanted to kind of walk you guys behind the scenes of what’s happening, because it’s insane.

So the event’s happening, which means we are creating order forms to print and signs and bags and backpacks and things and then presentations and speakers slides. It’s just, it’s crazy how many things go into this. Then we had this great idea, thanks to Trey Lewellen to do Facebook Live’s with all the speakers before the event to get excited. So we’ve been doing that twice a day which has been so fun. You’re going to be so excited to come and hang out with everybody, which is cool.

And then a big part of events, I’m going to bring you in on a little secret, don’t tell everybody this. I don’t know if you guys knew this, but we actually make money at the events. So there’s the big secret, it’s out, the pink elephant is out of the room. So now that that’s out there, the event, there’s a couple of focus, one is to get everyone together and build community and culture and myths and stuff like that. That’s one thing, obviously. And another is for us to make money as a company. So that’s one of the benefits, but there’s a fine line between having an event that…..When I first got started the way that events were is you had 15 speakers, every speaker is up for 90 minutes pitching something and that’s how the event was. People didn’t mind for a while. Then they started really minding and people stopped going to events.

I’m like, if I want people to come to my events, it’s not pitch fest where everyone’s selling. But at the same time we need to sell. So how do you do it in a cool way where it’s not distracting but it adds a benefit and those kind of things. You know, a big, big, big piece of this whole pie is choreographing the event. It’d be fun to talk about the event choreography for a long time with you guys because there’s so many cool things. I think after the event, depending on what happens, I’ll share with you guys some of this stuff that’s actually happening. Because there’s the surface level, what everyone will see, but there’s stuff happening at a subconscious level that’s so cool. I wish I could share with you guys right now. But I don’t want to ruin the surprise for those that are going to be there.

But there’s stuff happening that there’s patterns that I’m using in really interesting ways that are very, very thought through. If you guys watch who’s speaking, when. How they’re speaking, what the topics are, the length of time. All those things are choreographed for a purpose. It’s not just to put a speaker in here on this day, kind of stuff. There’s a storyline that we’re telling through the event, which is why I try to make it all so engaging, so people are not sitting in the halls, because if they do they miss the storyline. There’s a very key storyline that’s happening throughout the whole thing.

Even the pace of the speakers and where they’re at has a lot to do with it. The order of my presentations is very specific. There’s hint that I’ll drop right now and share with you guys post event, maybe. Hopefully, we will.

Anyway, it’s so exciting. And it’s really fun. I wish I could explain everything. But I mean everything from how do you build a rapport quickly with the audience? How do you get rapport with the speakers and with the MC ahead of time. That’s what these Facebook Lives, it’s a big part of it because rapport is huge. How do you teach in a way that doesn’t just overwhelm people, but brings epiphany bridges, or breaks belief patterns and helps people to learn and grow and have not just like, “Oh I learned really cool tactics.” But emotional shifts that change things.

Because that’s the experience we’re trying to deliver and there’s so much that goes into that. Again, it’s being impactful and making an amazing networking content, belief transformation event that also setting us up to make money. So it’s kind of cool how things will be weaved in. And we’re making a couple of really special offers at the event that aren’t going to be available to the general public for a long time. But will be available to those who were there. And it’s going to be cool. So I’m excited.

Those who are coming and watching, pay attention. I would say, if you buy stuff from me, buy slowly because everything that we’re doing is thought through. It’s not just, oh let’s blah. It’s all very, very well thought through. But one kind of cool thing, doing a presentation of the morning of day two, which in our past events we always called the Clickfunnels state of the union. We talk about all the new features and stuff like that. It was really good, but also was…the energy on that session always felt wrong. It wasn’t …..I wanted it to be like Steve Jobs thing, where he’s up there and everyone goes crazy. And it’s never quite been that.

So I wanted, how do we choreograph this in the right way? And I’m really proud of what’s happening. I started on this presentation yesterday, about twenty four hours ago. I spent the entire first 24 hours on two things. One is choreographing the presentation, number two is figuring out the title and headline, which is crazy. I’m not going to share with you guys here, because it’s cool but I literally at ten o’clock last night is when everybody else left the office and I was trying to figure out a name for the presentation.

Because I had a name initially and I was just like, it’s good but it’s not great. Most people would have done it, and it would have been fine. If we used it, it would have been fine. But I was like, I need something that has enough emotional impact that it makes you be like, “what? What is that?” So I literally sat there going through books and books and books of swipe files, trying to find a word.

From 10 at night until about 2-2:30 in the morning, so four and a half hours. And I didn’t find it. Then in the morning I woke up and I was stressed out, so I voxed everyone on our marketing group like, “Hey everyone, this is my dilemma. Give me your thoughts.” So everyone was giving their thoughts back. And then I came back and spent another two or three hours and then finally Stephen actually had the epiphany. He was like, “What about this?” I was like AHH! Angels from heaven singing. That is it, that’s the one. Yes. And we were freaking out and we got it.

Then I spent the next 7 hours trying to come up with the sub headline, which is crazy because all my slides have to be done tomorrow if they’re going to be in the booklet. So I’m on this huge time crunch but I still spent 7 hours on the sub headline. And then we got it. And it’s perfect. And it’s, it will cause the emotional response, number one. But it’ll cause the belief pattern to shift in people’s minds.

Because I look at people that are succeeding with funnels and those who aren’t. The difference between two comma members, who are making a million dollars in funnels and those who aren’t. And it’s a belief pattern in one thing, and if I can smash that belief pattern it’ll shift everything for them. That’s the key of this whole thing. I’m so excited to give this presentation now. Except now it’s 5 o’clock and I’m getting my haircut and then I’ve got scouts tonight, so I’m doing scouts.

Then after scouts, I’m coming back in the office after 9. So from 9 until 2 or 3 tonight I’ll be getting slides done because I have to get this presentation done tonight. And there’s a lot that goes into that. Because its, again, it’s us showing all the new features within the context of this presentation and the choreographing of it.

So the things I wanted to share with you guys because I know it’s kind of vague today, but I want you to understand the concept of choreographing things. The perfect webinar is a choreographed presentation that does a very specific thing. Those who were at the FHAT event last week saw it in very intense detail, more than I’ve ever done before. What I’m choreographing, what stories are where and why? What belief patterns are supposed to break at each point? The Expert Secrets book will go deep into that as well, but it’s the choreographing of the sales message.

Same thing is on this event. The choreographing of it, when I give presentations it’s the choreographing of that. How do we, what are the beliefs they may have and what order and how do we structure this stuff to fit within that? So I spend insane amounts of time. I spent probably 12, actual thinking time, probably 6 hours to get the title of the presentation. And then another, what did I say? Another 8 hours or so, 7 hours getting the subtitle. It was just insane. I gotta get 5 hours to get the rest of the slides done. But that’s how much thought goes into it sometimes.

So if you’re working on a presentation or a sales pitch or something, you spend 30 minutes on a headline, and you’re like, “ugh I can’t get it” and you’re frustrated and walk away. Know that it happens to everybody. It happens to the best of us. But the one’s when you get it right, that’s the difference between, again, a 5 or 6 figure campaign and a 7 or 8 figure campaign is getting that right. So don’t be afraid to put the time and energy and effort into that because it’s worth it in the end and hopefully it’ll be worth it for the attendees. You guys will have to let me know afterwards.

Again, I will share with you. After the event is done I will walk you guys through the choreography, the what and why and how it all worked. What worked and what didn’t work. So that’s all I got today. I’m at the haircut place, two minutes late. I’m going to bounce. Thanks you guys for everything. I can’t wait to see you guys at Funnel Hacking Live, those who are going to be there. Those who can’t make it there, please come next year. I don’t put out half a million dollars or more in cash from my pocket just for my health. It’s to serve you guys.

So take advantage of that, it’s worth the $1000 bucks and the couple grand for tickets and hotels. Because I’m spending 50 times that much on investing into you guys. So make sure you invest that back into yourself as well, because we do care and I do know that this stuff works and it can change your life. So if you’re on the fence thinking about next year if you’re going to come or whatever. Just remember you guys, you’re just one funnel away. I cannot wait to help you implement and create that funnel. Alright guys, talk to you soon. Bye everybody.

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This goes against all logic, but it’s the only way to actually do it.

On this episode Russell talks about procrastinating getting presentations for Funnel Hacking Live done and why procrastination works for him. He also talks about why he sells stuff before it’s even been created.

Here are some of the other exciting things in this episode:

What Russell’s dream car is and why some might consider it a downgrade.
Why getting work done right before it’s hard deadline is beneficial for Russell.
And what creative way Dean Graziosi makes bestsellers.

So listen below to find out why procrastination works so well for Russell.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Guess what? Today, I’m actually in my car, which is kind of awesome because there’s been less of that lately.

I’m backing out right now and I’m driving the Corvette that is the one we showed everyone when we launched the dream car contest. I’m about a week or two away til I get rid of this thing. Getting rid of the Corvette, and my Lexus is now smashed because I backed into it with my other car. Yes, I’m a genius.

I’m going to be finally getting my dream car. It’s funny, I’ve been, my whole life my dream car’s been a Jeep. Ever since I was a little kid I always wanted a Jeep, but for some reason I never had one. I’ve had a Ferrari, I’ve had a Corvette, all those things. But I don’t even like those cars, I’ve always wanted a Jeep. So all the guys at the office are making fun of me, “Dude, you realize Jeeps aren’t that expensive right?” I’m like, “yeah.” They’re like, “Why don’t you get one?” I’m like, “Because I have a Corvette now.” And they’re like, “Well, get rid of it.” I’m like, “I guess I could. Why don’t I just do that?”

So I’m getting a Jeep. I’m down grading in the eyes of some people, but I’m upgrading in my eyes, which is all that really matters when all is said and done. So I’m pretty excited for that.

But I’m heading to the office right now. Yesterday was planning out all the presentations, the offers, getting order forms, process flows, speaker lineup, all that kind of stuff was yesterday. Today is working on presentations. I got Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to get all my presentations done. And then after that I’m heading to the event. So it’s like do or die.

But I want to talk about, because I know some people have voiced concern that my presentations aren’t done and the event is happening. So I want to talk to you guys. I did a podcast a year ago called the Fine Art of Procrastination, which is worth listening to. So this probably part two of that. It just kind of a understanding that most people, we spend so much time planning stuff. And there’s some law, I think its, I can’t remember, Fredo’s law, one of those dudes. But there’s a law that basically however much time you have to get something done, you will fill that time completely up. It always happens.

So if I were to start planning these things six months ago and started working on presentations I would still be not getting it done until right now anyway. So in my philosophy, just why not just get them done right now and it’s better? The other thing, I don’t know about you guys when you do presentations, I’ve had presentations, where I’ve created presentations and I’ve done the presentations a bunch of times and it worked, and then I don’t do it for six months and I come back and do it and even though I’ve done the presentation and I know it, for some reason my mind can’t remember the process and some of the stories, all that kind of stuff gets messed up.

Where if I’m doing the presentations right before it actually happens, then I have better recall and clarity of what I was I doing and why I was doing it and how all the pieces fit together and all that kind of fun stuff. In fact, the FHAT event we did last week, I was up until 1:00 the night before doing my presentations. I was all nervous and all those things, but what’s nice, I’d gone through it so many times, I knew the process and what I was trying to cover, when and why and how they all fit together. So when I gave it, it was all top of mind. If I was to give the FHAT event today, I would struggle because it’s been a week since I did it. I would be like, “Oh wait, why did I do that in that order?” It would probably be hard.

So that’s another reason why I like to wait til the end. Because it gives me the ability to have it top of my mind. What I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and the order and structure and all those things. Anyway, that’s kind of what’s happening today.

So I’m giving you guys all permission, those of you guys who procrastinate. But it comes back to is having a firm, hard deadline. I don’t know about you guys, but if I don’t have the deadline of this is when this has to happen or else it’s never going to happen. If I don’t have those deadlines then nothing ever happens. So that’s why I always schedule things like, “Okay FHAT event happens this day, Funnel Hacking Live starts this day. Product launch is this day. Roll out of MP3 players is this day.” So I set these hard deadlines and that way my, I don’t know, my mind does not have the ability to keep pushing deadline further and further away.

Because it’s like, if we don’t make this one then we miss the next one and the next one. In fact, in our office I went and bought this huge calendar. It takes up an entire wall for the whole year. And what we’d be doing is basically blocking out almost every single week and in most cases every day of every single week for the next twelve months. Everything is so tightly fitted in there it’s like, okay here’s all the stuff that’s happening and there’s no room for deviation.

It’s like, okay this is when things are happening and if I miss something then it throws the rest of the year off. So we have to get things done. That’s kind of how I function. Is setting hard deadlines that are immovable and then reverse engineering to get that done. Like, when do I need to start the core tasks, and then starting those just in time.

I remember I took a class in college, it was a project management class. But I did really bad on it, but the teacher was awesome. I remember it was my senior year, last semester. I was either failing or I was close to failing, but probably closer on the failing side, and I was not going to graduate if I didn’t pass this annoying class. My teacher was super cool, he came up to me after class. He’s like, “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “So what are you doing? What’s your…what are your plans after you graduate?” I was like, “Oh well, I already launched this business, selling stuff online. I already have two employees, just going to keep growing that.” And he’s like, “So you don’t really need this engineering stuff right?” I’m like, “Not even a little bit.” He’s like, “Cool, how about this? I’ll give you a C.” I’m like, “Are you serious?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Dude, I love you. Thank you.”

And so he gave me a C, and it was the greatest gift that someone could have ever given me. I don’t remember the teacher’s name or anything, but if I ever see him again I’ll be like, “Dude, thank you for that C.” Anyway, I did learn something from that class, which is why I deserve that C, because I have retention to this day.

In that class he talked about, probably a lot of stuff, the only thing I remember was the concept of just in time production. Where people get things done just in time. I guess that doesn’t really warrant me getting a C, I don’t really know what that means other than in my mind it means I’m going to get things done just in time. I’m not going to try to have things done a month or a week or six months early, because if I do I’m going to stress about it, it’s not going to be right, I’m going to keep pushing it, and I’ll waste so much time.

For me if I can press those timelines I get ten times as much stuff done and sometimes things aren’t perfect when I roll them out, but that’s okay because I have time to perfect them over time. But I do not have time to over time to launch it, get it out the door. Because then it’ll just never actually get done.

For those of you guys who get stuck in that, what do they call it, analysis paralysis, in that mode of trying to make things perfect before you roll it out. What I highly recommend doing for you is finding a business partner who just likes to sell stuff. There’s something magic about sales people.

Like me, for example, not that I’m that cool but I love to sell stuff. And I want to sell stuff fast, before it’s even ready. In fact, Steven Larsen yesterday was like, “Dude, you sell all this stuff before you ever create it.” I was like, “Yes.” And he’s like, “How do you…why do you do that?” I was like, “well, first off, if I sell it and nobody buys it, I don’t want to create it. And second off, by me selling it, I say things about what it’s going to be and I then hold myself accountable to that when I create the products I have to fulfill on these different promises.”

A lot of people create the product first. I remember when I first learned copywriting, they told me that before I create the product, write the sales letter. Otherwise, you’re going to be like, “Oh my product doesn’t do that or that.” And your sales letter gets worse and worse. Instead write the sales letter first and write all the promises you want and say how do I make my product fulfill these promises.

And that’s a better way to sell. The other way around is backwards and doesn’t really work. The key is going up there and selling. So find a good sales person and go and take it. I’ve got, by far, the most amazing partners on planet earth with Clickfunnels. And we’ve joked about this before. If it wasn’t for me, I want to sell this, they would probably still be programming it because there’s so much they want to do. But I’m like, no we gotta sell it.

So I’m selling and they’re developing. So we sold it and the first version of Clickfunnels, guess what? It wasn’t that good. But it got better. The next version wasn’t quite as good, but it got better and better. IT’s continual progression, but the progression is much easier to do when you got cash in the bank from you selling the thing. So that’s kind of the moral of today’s story I think.

In this situation, if you’re that person, find somebody who can just go and sell for you. I was talking to Dean Graziosi yesterday and he was doing an infomercial, so he filmed the infomercial, got a book that had the cover on it, with blank pages inside. Did the whole infomercial, showing the book. And he launched the infomercial and saw what the numbers were. The numbers came back really good, and he said, cool the numbers are good. Now I’m going to go back and actually write the book. So he sent the next six months writing the book.

And then the infomercial knew worked, so he went and tweaked it. This time he brought Larry King on the infomercial, launched it there, it did good but the book still wasn’t finished. He tested it, refunded everyone who bought. He just wanted to see the numbers and now he’s getting ready to finalize it. And what’s cool, this is cool and a huge honor for me. He did the first version with Larry King, test it, worked good. Then a month or two months later I was out at the 100k meeting, and if you guys listen to episodes 300-302 I shared my presentation from the 100k meeting. We talked about epiphany bridges, belief and story and all that really cool stuff.

And Dean, it’s his event so he was there. He was like, this is awesome. So he messaged me yesterday, “Hey just so you know, after your thing I had some big aha’s that I forgot about. Things I used to do in my old shows that I didn’t do. I actually hired Larry King, flew him back out here and we re-filmed the intro.” I’m like, ‘’Really, can I see it?”

So he sent me the link yesterday to the infomercial. So I was watching it and at minute 2:20 he actually said the word, epiphany. And I stood up, clapped my hands. Not only is he using epiphany bridge, he actually used the word epiphany. I was freaking out and so excited, it was insane.

And then I asked him, “Hey man, when in your schedule can we block out to do my infomercial for my book?” and he was like, “Hey, we could do it blah.” And gave me a date, which is insane and way sooner than I thought.

So I may have an Expert Secrets infomercial in my near future. I’m so excited. So we’ll see. I’ll keep you guys in the loop as that goes forward. But how cool would that be. With that said, I’m going to go inside and get some power point presentations done. Appreciate you all; see most of you all at Funnel Hacking Live. And remember you guys, you’re just one funnel away. Thanks everybody.

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Understand who you’re competing against in this game, or else you’re going to lose.

On today’s episode Russell talks about looking at competing in business the same way he would compete during his wrestling days. He views business as a sport and he has figured out how he’s going to beat the competition.

Here are some of the fun things in this episode:

How being an athlete on the playground has prepared Russell to go against his competition in business.
How an underdog can still beat the company on steroids (venture capitalists).
And why you need to start looking at business like a sport if you’re ever going to be able to beat the other guys.

So listen below to find out why Russell is in it to win it when it comes to business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, I hope you guys are doing good. I’m actually taking the trash out right now. That’s what that wheeling sound, that’s the trashcan being wheeled. But this is going to be a crazy week. I thought I’d hang out with you guys before I get started on it.

Tomorrow is Monday morning, and Monday is basically the week before Funnel Hacking Live starts. Technically it starts on Tuesday, but Pre-registration starts a week from tomorrow. So Tomorrow is when I get to start doing all my presentations. Yes, I wait til the last week to do my presentations. You want to know why? Because the stuff we were doing six months ago, even a month ago has changed. So I want to make sure I have the most up to date content of all time at any given moment. That’s the reason why. That’s one of the reasons. The other reason is I just haven’t had time.

But that’s plenty of time to get everything done and make it amazing. I know what I’m going to talk about, I just gotta get all the slides and examples and case studies and all that kind of stuff and put it together in a really cool way. Hopefully you guys can hear me. It’s kind of loud, the trashcan. But I am….hold on a second I’m going to…

Alright, this might be the only episode of Marketing while you’re taking the trashcan out. I’m out here and it’s cool, it’s super dark, we just got new neighbors that built a house across the street. We’re on a really dark street where there’s not lights at all. Their house is lit up really cool and the moon is….I wish you could see it. It’s pitch black, it’s way off in the distance, right above the mountains there’s this glowing thing that looks misty and foggy over it. It’s pretty amazing.

Anyway, I’m excited because all the snow has been melting that we’ve had. We’ve had so much snow this winter. Then it rained three days last week and it all melted. And we’re back to where I can see the grass everywhere and it’s so exciting.

Anyway, tonight was really fun, we went to church and then had meetings after church and then went out with the kids, went and played in the wrestling room, jumped on the tramp which is freezing cold, then jumped in the hot tub which is super warm and now we put them to bed. My wife’s actually in there putting them to bed. I snuck out to put out the trash because they wear me out those little buggars. I love them, but they wear me out.

Anyway, Funnel Hacking Live is a week away, which is crazy. It’s interesting, last week we had our FHAT event, here in Boise in our new office, which is super fun and I just have this bad habit of booking way too many things all at the same time. But it’s been fun. There’s something with finishing the book and creating everything for the FHAT event, and everything for the Funnel Hacking Live event, where all these concepts and things we’re talking about right now are becoming so clear.

I don’t know if you guys have done that where you’ve had the chance to go through a really deep immersion. It’s weird all these connections get made that don’t when you’re dabbling and goofing around. That’s why I think people should go really deep when they’re becoming a master at what they’re trying to do. You know, become unbalanced for a while, spending insane amounts of time.

But it’s been interesting, one of the fun things I’ve been thinking about. My dad came to town last weekend as well, which is awesome. I was thinking about business as a whole, it’s such a weird I don’t know, playground is the word that pops in my head, I don’t know if that’s the right word. It’s this weird playground where you go to school, and there’s all these different types of kids. There’s the athletes over here, then there’s the people that are in band, and then there’s the drama kids, and then there’s the skaters, and then there’s…..there’s all these different groups at the playground.

When you typically go out there, you go and play with the people that fit in your mold. So I go play with the athletes. We play basketball, football. Competing against each other, trying to win. That’s what drove us at recess, but I’m guessing the other groups probably didn’t do that. They were, I don’t know what the other groups were doing. But I’m assuming, because we would play games with all the kids, but as I got older, I focused on wrestling and that became my thing and it was a deep passion of how do I become the best.

At first I wanted to be the best in the state. After I was State Champ I was like, I want to be best in the country. And my senior year of high school I took second place in the country. Then I was like, I want to be the best in college, in the country. And I never hit that goal. I guess technically I didn’t hit the best in the country in high school either, I almost, I was two points away from that. College I was like, I want to be an all American, I want to be a national champ, and I didn’t get those goals, but I always knew that’s the person I have to beat. I was aware of them, I looked at them and I watched their matches and I studied them and looked what they were doing and I understood them. I understood their moves and what drove them so that I could beat them.

And I was always aware of the people I had to beat. And that was just like, as an athlete, how I viewed the world and business, not business but things. I mean, for almost two decades of my life, that’s what it was. Here’s where I’m at, who’s above me, I gotta find those people, figure them out, and beat them. And that’s what I understood. And I always assume that that’s how everybody thought. But I guess, back at the playground, I’m guessing the band kids didn’t do that. They hung out and played music together, they had a good time.

The drama kids, they made plays together and had a good time. And then the skaters, they skated. You know, I don’t know all the different cliques and stuff, but everybody did their thing. I always assumed that everyone thought the way that I did. Because that was the only world I knew. And it’s been interesting as I’ve come into business, because for me business was the next sport. I got into business, I mean I was learning about it in college when I was wrestling. My senior year, I didn’t hit my goals. I fell short, and in fact I didn’t even qualify for the national tournament, which destroyed me. And it would have destroyed me if I didn’t have the next thing. For me, business I was dabbling in and that became my next sport.

It was like, here’s the sport, I got to figure out. And it’s interesting, the concepts of funnel hacking and the stuff that I share with people, you know how I always talk about I look at people successful and I model them, and I did, but it was different from that. For me it was a sport, I came in and this is the….I’m on a new playground looking around. Who are the kids that are winning? And the people I saw at the time were Armand Morin, Alex Mandossian, Mark Joyner, David Frey, these are all the guys I saw who were successful. So for me it was like, okay what are those guys doing? It was just like wrestling. I would look at them, scout them, watch them, study and learn and figure out what makes them tick. And then when I understand that, then I go and compete against them.

In wrestling I have a match, and someday I’m going to come face to face, we’re going to walk out on the mat under the lights. I’m going to put my shoes on and it’s going to be me and them and that’s it. And if I haven’t done my homework, I’m going to look like an idiot. But in business it was weird because I would study these guys and try to figure out how to compete with them and be successful like they were and that was my whole thing, and I was racing towards that. But what’s weird in business, we never got that moment where we step on the mat and shake hands and go and find out who prepared more.

It was weird, I became friends with people and our businesses were together and I learned this cooperation stuff that I’m guessing they probably taught at the playground with the kids in the band, and the kids, the other groups that all played together. For business it was fun because I collaborated and I had that, but in my mind, I don’t know about you, but I always had from day one….I remember actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever publicly said this out loud, but for me, I’ve always been very aware of where I visualize myself in the totem pole in my market, where are people at? Where up and down, that’s just how my brain works.

And when I pass somebody, I’m aware of that. And when I know who’s ahead of me, I’m aware of that. When I know that, I study those people, I figure them out and I try to beat them. That’s just how I’m wired. It’s been interesting, as I’ve gotten into, as our business has been growing, I would say in our market, I don’t think there’s any businesses that are really bigger than us right now. Outside of a couple of companies that have taken on venture capitalists. They’ve got millions of dollars dumped into them, which is the equivalent of steroids. Honestly, in sports that cheating, but business it’s like, “Aww yes, someone gave us 14 million dollars, now we can cheat.” It’s just ridiculous.

For me, I’m looking out and we’ve got these dudes that got steroids, they’re cheating, but I got to compete against the, but I’m very aware. In my mind it’s very clear, the companies I’m going after. And it shouldn’t be too hard for you guys that follow me to know, because we make fun of them a lot. But I’m aware of it, I study and figure out what they’re doing right and wrong, what the weaknesses are and then we’re attacking them.

It’s been interesting because as I’ve been doing that, the kids at the playground who grew up in band class, and that grew up in drama and as skaters and all these other things, they’re not used to it. And those are the guys I’m competing against. And it’s interesting because they don’t handle the heat well. We got in a……

For me this is a sport. Business is nothing but a sport for me. It’s like, who do I need to beat? We’re going and attacking and we’re going to beat them. Otherwise, what’s the point of this whole thing? Yes, we’re helping people and that part is amazing on this journey. But there’s not, that’s who I need to beat, what’s the point of it? It’s hard for me otherwise.

Anyway, someone that I kind of ruffled their feathers, I actually thought through this podcast, interestingly enough. But they messaged me and kind of told me off, because they didn’t like what I’m doing. Because I’m aggressive and I’m not playing like they’re used to playing. What they told me, they said my dad taught me never to burn bridges. And I didn’t send this back, but I wanted to. I thought, that’s interesting because my dad taught me how to win and that’s all that matters to me, is winning.

Anyway, I told that story at the FHAT event, and people thought I was pretty, everyone was laughing. But that’s how I feel. I’m very aware of who I am going after. And I don’t publicly. In fact, Dan Usher is here making some videos for us and I was showing the offer we’re creating, there’s one other person who’s had more success in this, I’m not going to say their name. But there’s one person who’s had more success than me in this field where this book is. And I was showing Dan those videos and I was like, “That’s who I’m going against. That’s who I’m competing against. That’s who we have to beat.” He’s like, “I thought you guys were friends.” And I’m like, “We are friends, but it doesn’t matter.” I was friends with people on the wrestling mat, but when it comes to sports I have to win. I’m going after them. I’m not sitting around and trying to be nice. My goal is to win. Flat out. And I want to make sure that everybody understands that.

What’s cool, is during this process I’m making friends and all these kinds of things, but it’s a sport for me. Very clear cut. This is a sport. And I have people I’m competing against and I’m going to win. And it’s interesting, because these other people aren’t used to that, and they are used to that, they’ve never been under the lights, with your shoes tied up and it’s you and them and no one else going head to head. And I am, I’m used to it. I love it, I thrive off it. I need it, I desire it. I crave for that.

So it makes this game interesting because the way that people are beating us right now is through the most part, venture capitalists, steroids. So it just drives me more. Yes, okay. You’re going to cheat with steroids, that’s fine. I’m still going to win, I’m going to take you down and we’re going to choke you out and we’re going to turn you to your back and you’re going to get pinned. And that’s how I view business.

I just want, I don’t know, I want to instill that into you guys. A lot of you guys out there were athletes, you were the kids on the playground who went through that and experienced it, and that’s your drive. For some of you guys it’s not. You have to understand when you step in the business world, that’s who you’re playing against. You’re playing against athletes. People who that’s their goal.

So when I come, when you come into your business and look at your market, you need to be fully aware. Where do you sit on the totem pole? Are you JV or Varsity? First team or second team? Where in the state or country? Because if you’re not aware of that, how do you win if you don’t know who you’re playing against? Somebody told me the other day, after the FHAT event, “One thing I discovered after being around you for the last three days is how aware you are of all the competitors in your market.” And I thought it was interesting, because I am very, very aware. I know what they’re all doing. I’m watching them.

And the things that I like, we use. And the things we don’t, we counter attack against them. You’ll see more and more of that throughout this year as we are aggressively going after our competitors and we’re going to surpass them through raw talent and skill instead of venture capitalists cash, which is amazing.

You know, I wrestled kids that were on steroids before and it’s interesting, they come out and have big muscles. They huff and puff and usually the first 30 seconds to a minute they are really strong, but what I’ve found with the big dudes on steroids, when you choke them, you snap their head down and block the blood, there’s a carotid artery in their neck, if you squeeze that and block the blood to their carotid artery, instantly in the second they go down. Their muscles become weak and they become soft like jelly. And the stronger they were, the weaker they become. That’s what I’ve found.

Not that you guys care, but when I wrestled big people. I count out muscles first, and if I can’t take them down, I have to get their head below me and do a front headlock; we’re going for a choke, cut the blood off from the brain, not long term but just for a second or two. But as soon as you do that, all your muscles lose energy, they stop, you fall and then we attack and we win. It’s similar.

Anyway, that’s just….there’s some…what’s the book, The Art of War? This is the Art of War by Russell Brunson. That’s the strategy, how it works. We’ve talked before in a podcast, how you know when your opponents break. When you’re out there wrestling someone, you push them and you feel, physically feel them break. Their energy stops, their posture, their whole body stops. That’s when you attack harder and faster and bigger, that’s how you beat people that are bigger and stronger than you.

That’s what happening and I hope you guys are enjoying watching it. I’m having so much fun competing. I don’t know about you but I love seeing the underdogs win. I love seeing the dude who’s got better technique beat out the guy on steroids, every single time. I’m calling my shot, that’s the plan, that’s what’s happening. I hope you guys do the same thing. Become aware of who your competitors are. You don’t have to be jerks about it, I’m probably too jerky sometimes, I apologize for that in advance. But be aware of it and understand that, and run this like a sport. If you do that, that’s how you’re going to win.

Because this playground, nobody cares. Nobody cares, I grew up in band, I grew up in drama, I grew up in whatever. Okay, well you’re still competing against the athletes. And if the athletes want to win, they’re going to win. So be very aware of that, going into it. When you’re inside of it, start shifting your mindset to understand that and it’ll become fun. It becomes a game, becomes a sport.

I always tell people, this is one of the greatest sports ever. It’s exciting. That’s all I got for tonight. With that said, I’m done. It’s freezing cold out here, I’m going to go inside and get warm. And for those of you guys going to Funnel Hacking Live in a week, I will see you soon. I cannot wait. Appreciate you all, and I will talk to you soon.

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A glimpse behind the scenes at what happened at this week’s FHAT event.

On this episode Russell tells his epiphany bridge story during a Facebook Live video at the FHAT (Funnel Hack-A-Thon) event.

During his epiphany bridge story you will hear:

What inspired Russell to try to make money online in the first place.
How Russell and his partners first came up with an idea for Clickfunnels and it was really a way to get Russell to be able to design his own sites.
And how Clickfunnels had made it possible for Russell to support his family, while also being able to spend more time with them.

So listen below to hear Russell’s epiphany bridge story and let it inspire you.

---Transcript---

Hey Everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I’m at the office right now and it’s been a crazy week. We had our first ever FHAT event here in our office the last 3 days. We were here all night every night and it was amazing. But I also haven’t talked to you guys in a while, and I want to do something really quick because one of the big things we talked about at the FHAT event, well it was kind of 3 things.

Day number one was cult building, I mean culture building. Day number two was story. And then Day three was webinars and webinar hacks and product launch sequences and Actionetics sequences and a whole bunch of other ninja, amazing stuff.

But day two was story day, so we did this cool thing where we talked about the hero’s two journeys and a bunch of other things. And I can’t give you everything right now, but I want to give you one cool. So it’s in the book that’s coming out soon, to a funnel near you. After I talked about the Hero’s two journeys, I showed them how we transition that script into the epiphany bridge script, and if you look at it, I wish I could show you, I wish the podcast could show pictures. Looking at it right now, the way this script works is basically, there’s 8 sections.

There’s the back story, your desires, the wall, the epiphany, the plan, the conflict, achievement and transformation. So the back story, what is your back story that give us a vested interest in your journey? Number two is your desires, what is it that you want to accomplish? And inside of that, what are the external struggles you are dealing with and what are the internal struggles you are dealing with.

From there you hit a wall. The wall is the problem or the…what is the wall or problem that you hit within your current opportunity that started you on this new journey. Then you have the epiphany. So what was the epiphany experience and the new opportunity you discovered. Then the plan, what was the plan you created to achieve your desire? Then there’s conflict. What was the conflict you experienced along the way? Then there’s achievement, what was the end result you achieved. Then there’s transformation. What was the transformation you experienced?

So those are the process of telling a good epiphany bridge story. So anyway, I know it’s hard to visualize that, but when you get the Expert Secrets book you’ll see the graphs and images and it’ll be all explained and you’ll love it, I promise.

But when we were here yesterday, or two days ago, whenever it was, the event. I did an epiphany bridge story on Facebook Live, telling my Clickfunnels story. So I wanted you guys to hear that story because it’ll…..going through all these aspects, you’ll see them all weaved in. Everything from the back story, the desire, the wall, the epiphany, the plan, the conflict, the achievement and the transformation.

So I’m going to get the audio and I’ll plug it in here so you can listen to the audio of my epiphany bridge story, which is my Clickfunnels story, the origin story. The origin story of how I got excited about funnels and how Clickfunnels came to be. So I’m going to play that audio for you right now, and you guys will hear my epiphany bridge story. So let me connect to that right now.

Hey everyone, this is Russell, I hope you guys are all doing awesome. So I’m here right now in the room of 48 or 49 amazing entrepreneurs, and we’ve been talking about storytelling and how to tell your story, the origin story of wehre you got started and what got you into what you’re doing. So I’ve been challenging all of them to go and do that, and I thought it would be kind of cool if I just told you guys my story. Some of you guys have heard pieces or parts of this, but probably not the whole thing.

So what I wanted to do is share with you guys the story about Clickfunnels and why this, for me, became my new opportunity, the thing that I’m so excited about and why I have so much passion. Some of you will say, “Russell you’ve been talking about Clickfunnels everyday for the last two years.” And I’m like, “I know, because I’m so excited every day.”

So some of the back story, if you don’t know, I got started in this business, I guess it’s almost 13 or 14 years ago now, and when I did, I was a college kid, I was going to Boise State University, which is just down the road from where I’m at right now. I was a wrestler which means I wrestled and I had to go to school. So I barely graduated. It was barely. I think my accumulative was a 2.1, which means I got a whole bunch of C’s and one B over 5 years, so it’s kind of painful. But I graduated which made my mom happy, which is pretty cool.

But during school, while I was wrestling I started learning about that internet marketing stuff. And you guys remember this is 12 years ago, before Facebook, before Instagram and all these kind of things. We had Google, kind of. In fact, I don’t even remember how we were driving traffic. We didn’t have a website, or anything. I was using Front Page, some of the old timers remember Front Page. I would create these things in Front Page and it was pretty bad. So I was doing that, but I believed that it was possible. I saw people, some of my mentors, like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian and some of these guys who were making money online.

I was like, if these guys can do it, I’m pretty sure I could do it. So that was my goal that I wanted to accomplish. The other side of that that I don’t share a lot of times, it wasn’t just that I wanted to make money, that was just a desire I had. The bigger desire, I had just gotten married to my beautiful wife, we’re still married today. It’s been almost 15 years this year, which is amazing. I married here, she was working full time to support me, her jobless wrestling husband and I don’t know about you, but I always envisioned that when I got married, I would be the man, the supporter, but it was honestly pretty tough for me. That she was supporting me and I didn’t have anything to contribute other than going to school and wrestling, and it was hard for me.

I remember I was like I got to figure out a way to contribute. I don’t want her doing everything. So that was the real driving factor. In fact, my goal was, if I can make $1000 a month, that would match what she was making, we weren’t making very much money at the time. Then I’ll feel like I’m contributing as well. So that was my goal, to figure out a way to do this. I tried all sorts of stuff.

I was trying Ebay, I was trying Craigslist, I was doing this stuff. I had a $20 a month, which was a big deal for me, I was excited, but none of the things really hit big. About that time I started learning about information marketing. In fact, I was at a post office mailing something I had bought from Ebay in this huge awkward box, I thought it was going to sell huge, and it ended up selling for $1.50 and I lost a ton of money. Then postage, it was a nightmare. I’m sitting in the line at the post office next to this dude, who had a big box full of CD’s, thousands of them. I was like, “Dude, what are you selling?” and he was like, “I have one CD that I sell and I burn it.” And I’m like, “These are your orders for the month.” And he’s like, “These are my orders for this week.” I was doing the math, “how much do you sell them for?” He’s like, “$67” I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And I had this…..I need to sell information, that is the future.

So I started to try to figure out information. I started doing stuff and my very first product I ever created was a DVD on how to create potato guns, I’m sure some of you guys have heard this story before. So I started making potato guns and it was working really good, but then what I was doing was going to Google and buying ads on Google and making some money back and forth, but eventually I probably had 4 or 5 months of success and then Google changed their algorithm and it got really hard.

And the hardest thing for me during this time, it was me building things in Front Page, and I had to figure out how to FTP pages and images and how to go to Paypal to get the order, it was super techy and I’m not a techy person at all. But after Google changed their algorithm we tried some stuff. I remember one of my friends called me, it was Mike Filsaime, some of you may know Mike, he said, “Russell, I figured out how to make this whole internet marketing game work again.” I’m like “What do you mean?” he’s like, “Is your potato gun thing still making money?” I’m like, “No, I can’t break even, I can’t make a profit.”

And he’s like, “well I went back to all my sites and added these things.” He called them OTO’s and I’m like, “What’s an OTO” and he’s like, “It’s an upsell, a onetime offer.” I’m like, “Oh.” And he’s like, “I added these upsells and people started buying the upsells and suddenly I’m making two or three times as much money from everything I sold. And I was like, “I could actually do that.”

So I remember jumping online I was Googling potato guns, trying to figure out what my upsell would be, I don’t know. All I had was a potato gun DVD, and I met this dude up in northern Idaho who actually made potato guns and drop shipped them. I was like, “Dude, if I sell those, would you drop ship them for me?” and he was like, “Yeah, I’d love to not have to sell these things.” So I partnered with him and I started selling the DVD’s and people started buying this upsell. And it was the first thing I’d made a funnel. I was like, this is a funnel.

And that was this new thing and I was so excited. So I had this epiphany, this is the future. If I can make more funnels, this funnels been making me 20-30 bucks a day, but what if I had 2 funnels, or 3 or 5 or 10? So I started going a little bit crazy and I created funnels in the couponing market, which by the way, is a horrible market. People in that market do not like to spend money. Don’t do that. We did couponing, we did dating, we did weight loss, we did network marketing, I’ve done diabetic supplements. That’s the ones on the top of my head, there’s…..I could show you guys, there’s a trail of thousands of offers, some that worked, a lot more that didn’t work.

But we were doing these things over and over and my plan was if I had ten of them that are each making a hundred bucks a day, or 20 or 30. So I was doing this, and at first it was working but the problem I kept running into was, Front page isn’t…. for people like me it was hard. I would do these pages and mine looked ugly and other people’s looked awesome. So then I had a designer and he would design these things. I would make a front page ugly, send it to him and he would design it and make it look cool. I’m like, put it up.

But then it was up and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t touch it again. I had one shot. Then I had to bug him. Then I hired a web guy to do edits for me. Then I was using Paypal and I couldn’t do anything else. So then someone invented a one click upsell. I was like, “Dude, I need that.” So I hired a programmer to connect that into the next….it kept getting more and more complicated to the point where soon I wasn’t able to do anything.

I would look at it and be like, “Change that.” And they’d try to change it, but they didn’t. I’d be like, “Move it over here.” And they’d put it in the wrong spot. It would take days, sometimes weeks of going back and forth with the guys in Romania and India and everywhere to try to get them to move an image or make it a little bit bigger. Things that were so common sense and I couldn’t actually do it, and it drove me nuts.

About that time, one of my friends and partners, in fact, he might be in the room right now. Is Todd in here still? He’s already eating lunch, he’s already gone. Todd was one of my partners doing these things with me. He saw my frustration and he’s like, “What if we build something that…” and the joke was, “Russell could edit the website and actually move things and quit bugging us all the time.” I was like, “That would be awesome.” And he’s like, “That’s what we’re going to create.”

And that day we sat in front of a whiteboard and started mapping out what it would look like and how it would work. So we mapped out this vision of what became Clickfunnels, and he went home and actually built it. It was funny, him and another partner we brought in, Dylan Jones were working, he did the editor. They would build part of it and be like, “We need to make this so simple that Russell could do it.” So they’d do it and be like, “Russell, test this.” And I‘d login and be like, “How do I do it?” And they’d be like, “We’re not going to tell you. You gotta figure it out on your own.” I’m like, “Okay.”

So I’d do some stuff, and if I could figure it out, then good. We got it. If I got stuck, I’m like, I don’t know what to do. So they’re like, we didn’t do it intuitively enough. We went back and forth and back and forth for 6 or 7 months and finally I got it. I was like, if I can do this, anyone can. At first it was a tool for me, that was the initial goal of Clickfunnels. I think it was Todd and Dylan like, “This way Russell will quit bugging and I don’t have to design his sites anymore or redo his headers.” All this stuff that was happening. And then after I started using it and I was having success, I was like, “We have to make this a tool for everyone, it will free all entrepreneurs like it freed me.”

So because of that I was able to create funnels quickly. I went from having 5 or 6 guys, and it would take on average almost 2-3 months every time to create a funnel to where I was able to do it by myself in an hour, hour and a half. Sometimes less, which was cool. The cool thing was I was able to achieve that and have success. We started rolling out funnels like crazy. Some of you probably remember seeing a lot of them.

I still do a lot of them because they’re so much fun to do. But the cooler thing for me was the other side. I was able to make money to support my wife and support my kids because I didn’t no longer have to spend three months doing something, my time to be with my kids completely freed up. I have a chance, I go home everyday and play with my kids. I’m not stressing out trying to talk to programmers in India at 3 in the morning and stressing all this stuff. It just works.

That was really the biggest thing for me. And it’s been an amazing thing. In fact, now my kids are using Clickfunnels, they’re building stuff with Clickfunnels. It’s not just, for me it’s not just a product. It’s a mission. I’m seeing people’s lives change. I’m seeing other people who had messages but they couldn’t get them out because they couldn’t move things around on the stupid page, but now the power is back in their hand. And that’s the power of it. That’s what fires me up, to be able to help entrepreneurs with that kind of thing.

So that’s my Clickfunnels Story. So if you guys haven’t heard it before, I wanted to share that with you guys and share why I’m so passionate about this. For me, it’s not just, I talk about this all the time, it’s not a matter of if you’re going to become a Clickfunnels member, it’s when. Because it’s the only way to do what we’re talking about. The only alternative is to do what I used to do ten years ago. Hire guys in Romania and India and the Philippians and have teams of 30 people to move an image. Or you can just use Clickfunnels. It gives you and me, the entrepreneurs the power back, which is awesome.

I hope that helps you guys. I hope you guys see why I’m so passionate about Clickfunnels. With that said, I’m going to check out. If you like this, comment down below. If you have any friends that are like, “What is that Clickfunnels thing.” Share this with them. Tag them down below so they can see why me and why I’m so passionate and probably why you’re so passionate too. Thanks you guys. Talk to you all soon. Bye.

Alright so there’s the example of an epiphany bridge origin story. I hope that was cool for you guys. Again, I wish I could show you the book today, but it’s coming soon. So look for that in the very, very near future and that’s about it for today you guys. Thanks everybody. I’ll talk to you all again soon.

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The only thing you can change about the situation is your attitude.

On today’s episode Russell talks about his crazy busy week and taking a moment between storms to get a haircut. He also shares a story from his wrestling days that taught him to have a positive attitude.

Here are some interesting things you’ll hear in this episode:

How Russell was able to get rid of the echo in the conference room, how he planned a Superbowl party, and how he was able to get a manual done for the FHAT event, all on short notice.
Why even when stressful things happen, Russell always tries to have a positive attitude.
And why cutting weight in wrestling didn’t seem so bad, as long as Russell had a smile on his face.

So listen below to find out why even if you can’t change your circumstances, changing your attitude will make it better.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson again. I hope you guys are doing awesome. I’m driving to go get my hair cut and this is kind of like the climax, well it’s the end when you slide down. Almost the end, I guess it’s not even though. Anyway, the end of a very crazy week. It’s now Friday. In about an hour we have Boise State does a really cool thing once a year called the Beauty and the Beast tournament. Where they have the wrestlers and the gymnasts all competing on the same floor. And it’s the one time of the year that people actually show up to wrestling matches, which is cool.

I convinced my wife and kids to come and some of my friends and all that kind of stuff, so we’re heading to that tonight. I competed in it for four years and it’s just a super fun thing to do. So I’m going to that tonight which is exciting. I’m getting my hair cut because this is the little calm, that’s what it is, it’s not the climax or apex, it’s the calm before the storm. Because for the second storm. There was a big storm first. This last week has been insane.

Let me explain to you, lest you think you had a busy week. Maybe it was busier than mine, but I’m game for comparing and seeing because this week was crazy. Monday we moved into a new office and then Tuesday I had to submit my book to the publishers, which sounds like you just email your book to the publisher. But no, you have to freaking write a book first and then edit it and edit it, change things, tweak things, and then you submit it and its final, can never change it’s the end. So you can never tweak it, ever. So that was stressful.

And then Steven Larsen, who is working with this even starting Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday called the FHAT Event. Funnel Hack A Thon, FHAT Event. We needed a manual for that, which the manual is based on the book. So he was home sick, puking in bed while he’s helping me create this whole manual. Bless him for doing that while he’s puking his guts out. Making the manual and puking and making the manual because we had these printing deadlines to get it done. So we’re racing on that, got that all figured out as good as we possibly could.

Now I’m going through getting my power point slides and then I walked into the conference room that we’re doing the conference, and the echo is so loud, it’s going to destroy all the films, it won’t even be good. So I’m freaking out there, so we have to go and I’m searching all night until 2 or 3 in the morning trying to find sound things you can put up to make echoes disappear. The only place I can find, the fastest I can get them here is 2 to 4 weeks. I’m not going to have them for Monday and I’m stressing out. Then Brandon Fisher on our team, he’s like, “I got a buddy who does events and stuff and he’s got these sound dampering curtains, we should use those.” So I’m like, “Alright.” So he comes and shows up and wraps our entire room in these huge curtains, throws these lights on them, brings a stage and a pulpit, and it becomes the coolest event center on planet earth.

And then they’re trying to rent us stuff, it will look so cool. I’m begging them to let me buy it all. I never want this to change ever because it’s so cool now. It turned into a good thing. I was stressing out about that. This whole week they’ve been working on that and getting the lighting and the systems and things, and I’m just trying to get my power points done. Then on top of that, there’s other business things, it’s been nuts.

So today I got my power points probably half way done for the event that starts on Monday. I’m just out today, going to get my haircut and then Beauty and the Beast and then tonight keep working on power points, I’m guessing if I’m going to get done in time, which is crazy. Steven had drill so he’s out driving to go do Army drill stuff, and he’s got to work on stuff for the presentation as well. So he’s going to be working on those tonight form the hotel and sending those to me.

And then, I didn’t realize, stupid me, that the Funnel Hack A Thon was the day after the Superbowl, so everyone that’s coming, we have 48 people that are coming. Everyone’s like, “Do you know it’s the Superbowl? Why did you book it on Superbowl Sunday?” I’m like, “I don’t watch the Superbowl.” And they’re like, “We need a party.” And I’m like, “Okay fine, we’ll throw a party.” So now I’m throwing a party at the office Sunday for the Superbowl, which means to get TV in the office, I say yes and then I’m like, “Okay we’re going to watch the Superbowl on this screen and they’re like, “that’s not easy, you have to have cable.” So now they’re scrambling to get cable in our office to be able to show the game.

And then, it’s just thing after thing. We had this nice fridge and we’ve stacked it full of waters and Redbulls and drinks and all sorts of stuff, and then the whole thing collapsed this fridge because the bolts weren’t strong enough and we had to buy new bolts and string them in to get the water to stay. It’s seriously been insane. I just wanted to thank, if anyone on my team is listening, everyone with everything that’s gone into this, because it’s been nuts. But somehow, not only are we surviving, it’s been fun and everyone’s happy. We’re excited and energy levels are really high.

It’s one of those things where maybe it’s me and I know people have ADD like me, the more things that are happening, the better we function. A lot of times if you have one thing going on, you stress out like crazy. So maybe it’s that and that’s why I’m enjoying it and thriving in this. Because there’s so much chaos I can’t not do it. But maybe it’s just a fact that just smiling, keep moving forward, maybe that’s the message for today is, if you keep moving forward, you can’t change anything. I can’t change the fact that the event is happening in two days. I made that decision and it was probably a dumb decision. Especially since we have Funnel Hacking Live two weeks later and I haven’t started on my presentations for that yet.

But besides the point of stupidly planning like I often do, things can’t change. You’re going to do it anyway. I think I’ve shared this story with you before. I had a wrestling coach named Mark James when I was growing up. I remember this one practice, it was tough. At the time I was cutting about 30 pounds a week, it was painful, horrible and hard. We’re all cutting weight and I remember one day after practice, I was dead. Imagine wrestling in plastics and sweats and not eating for three or four days and not drinking for three or four and just being to the point where you felt like you wished you could die.

And I remember we finished practice and he pulls us all into this, our wrestling room, we called it the rubber room. It was underneath the basketball court. It was dark and damp and stinky and it was kind of nasty. So he pulled us out of the rubber room into this hallway, that was again underneath the building. It was dark. And he sat on the stairs and we all sat around and talked. And I remember him saying, “You know what, we have a match and you have to lose weight.” And he’s telling everyone this, and he’s like, “You can’t change that, the only thing you can change is your attitude about it. You’re going to miserable going through this experience or you can be happy going through this experience, but you can’t change it. The experience is happening.”

“The only thing we can effect is the attitude we have going through it. So you might as well have a good attitude, because you’re going to do it anyway.” And it really, I was like, “Dang.” So I remember the next day I came down and I put on my plastics and sweats on and came out and started jumping ropes. And I started smiling.

And one of the other guys on my team came down and was like, “Why are you smiling?” And I was like, “Have you ever seen someone lose with a smile on their face?” and he was like, “No.” And I’m like, “Neither have I.” and I kept smiling. And then I smiled the whole practice while I was cutting weight, I smiled while I was doing it. And it was weird because this process that legitimately painful. If you’ve ever tried to not drink for three days while sucking water weight out in plastic suits. Where you’re losing, on average, 25 to 30 pounds a week in water weight. That’s painful. That’s probably some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life. But I did it with a smile on my face and it became a thing, and it became fun and it became a part of the experience I actually enjoyed.

In fact, tonight going to the wrestling match, I can feel myself right now, feeling guilty. I always feel guilty sitting there drinking something. I shouldn’t be watching wrestling with liquid. This is a really awkward feeling, you know what I mean? But that’s the reality. I’m not wrestling, I’m not competing so I can. Take that wrestlers that are cutting weight. But going through the experience, it became fun.

So I think for you guys, there’s a lot of stress out there, I get it. But as you approach it, do it with a smile on your face. Because you can’t lose with a smile on your face. No one can, it’s impossible. So you might as well smile as you go through it. Remember, you’re going to go through it anyway, so the only thing you can change is your attitude, so have a good attitude and make it more fun and pleasant for you and for everyone.

So that’s what I got today you guys. I’m here, getting my haircut, my head will shrink by about half, which is a good sign. Because I got a huge fat head, if you’ve ever noticed. I can’t wear hats, because my head is so…….if you guys remember the movie so I married an Axe Murderer. And that kid’s sitting in front of the TV with his dad, Michael Meyers. He’s like, “Hey, get out of the way. Man, did you see that kid’s head? It’s like an orange on a toothpick.” That’s totally how I am right now. So if you’re envisioning what I look like, I got an orange on a toothpick, so they’re going to shave this thing down to be normal size, which I’m really looking forward to.

Alright guys, before I tell you anymore random weird things about me, I’m going to leave. I appreciate you all, have an amazing day. Keep a smile on, and remember you can only change your attitude. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.

Ps…Don’t forget, you’re just one funnel away, thanks everybody.

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My cliffnotes from Earl Nightengale’s speech, The Strangest Secret.

On this episode Russell talks about the book, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale. He goes into detail what the book is about and what it means to him.

Here are some of the strange things you will hear in this episode:

Why the opposite of courage isn’t cowardice, it’s conformity.
Why conformity has caused the majority of the population to not be financially independent.
And how we become what we think about.

So listen below to find out what the Strangest Secret is and why.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Behind Your Desk. My commute from my house to my office is like 10 seconds now so I don’t know how to keep Marketing In Your Car, we may have to change the title or something. But I’m here and I’ve got something cool for you guys.

So when we moved from the office, we moved our books all onto one really cool bookshelf. As I was putting up all the books I was like, “I want to read this book and this book.” So as I’ve been coming in I’ve been grabbing different books. So today I grabbed, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale. And I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of this book but it’s the beginning, the foundation of the personal development industry. I’m pretty sure he wrote this book, I think it was a record back in the day, and then that’s what sprouted out all personal development. So it’s kind of like the beginning.

I just heard a beep in the office, do you think it’s the fire alarm. Oh crap, good thing Steven is packing heat, my body guards here packing heat. He’s literally on his elbows crawling out to go kill somebody and protect us from imminent danger and doom.

Anyway, while he’s trying to kill these people I’m going to give you guys a message about the Strangest Secret. First off, if you haven’t read this, the book is like 15 pages, so you can read it in a very short period of time or you can try to find the record. I wonder if I can find the record on Ebay, that’d be cool.

Anyway, in this book he’s talking about the fact that….well he’s talking about, and this is written way back in the day, this is a long time ago. But he’s talking about how if you look at people that are over 65 that at the time, there were 14 million people. Of that 14 million, 13 million were broke and relying on other people. He said it’s amazing that by the time that you’re seven you learn how to read, you can make a living by the time you’re 25, but the majority of people by the age of 65 had not learned to be financially independent.

That’s crazy, how is that not happening? And then he talked about what’s the definition of success? And he said the definition of success is not that you achieve something, but the definition is the pursuit of that. So the pursuit of something is success. So it says the only man who succeeds is the man who is progressing, realizing a worthy ideal. So if you’re pursuing something, that’s the definition of success. It’s not so much that you have it, it’s that you’re going forward.

I should almost just read you guys the whole book, it’d only take 15 minutes. Probably less than that actually. But I don’t want to spoil the surprise. I want you guys to go and find it on Ebay or Amazon or whatever and get it. It’ll be worth it.

Anyway, he’s talking about, the next chapter is all about goals. He says, the key here is goals, setting goals and moving towards those goals. He talked about how if you take a boat with the crew and captain and they say, this is where we’re going, 99.99% of the time, they get there. If you took a boat, took the crew off and the captain and just set it on the harbor and pushed it out, 0% of the time, would it ever get there. Yet, that’s how most people function their life.

They wake up and they’re walking and stumbling and things like that. One thing, I don’t know if I can find it real quick in here. He said, it was super cool….This is what he said, that society was not set up to keep people from winning. Society was set up to keep people from losing. It’s like, if you look at the American society it doesn’t really care if people are winning or whatever, it’s trying to set it up so people don’t lose. So it becomes super simple. It’s easy to get a job. It’s easy to make enough money to survive.

And he says why do people not succeed? The reason why people don’t succeed is because they conform. The conforming is the opposite of success, which is so interesting. So it’s not, I wonder if I can find the quote right here where he said it? “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, a lot of people think that the opposite of being encouraging and going forward is being a coward. No, it’s not. The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, its conformity.”

So it’s conforming to the world around us. Conforming to that and then, he said, the government, the world way it’s structured is to protect people from failing, that’s why everything is so easy. Because of that we have to conform to do that. So then 99% of the population conforms. People get jobs so they cannot fail, so they can get a steady paycheck or whatever that means. It’s not just for money, but for anything in life.

I think about wrestling, let’s say you’re doing sports. It’s way easier to kind of go through the motions than it is to try and win. So there’s conforming and doing the normal whatever anyone is doing is the lowest thing. Anyway, it’s hard to tell a book that you just barely read.

Anyway, it kind of goes on from there. Success and goals and he said this is the key to success. The key to success, we become what we think about. Let me say that again, we become what we think about. And then he goes through and starts talking about all these different quotes from different people. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” William James “A great discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their life by altering the attitudes of their mind.”

He’s got quote after quote after quote all these people. Shakespeare, “Our doubts are traitors that make us lose the good we oft win by fearing to attempt.” On and on. All these things come down to, we are what we think about all day long. And that is the Strangest Secret. That’s kind of the key.

So at the very end it says, “We become what we think about. That is the strangest secret in the world. Now why do I say it’s strange and why do I say it’s a secret? Actually it isn’t a secret at all, it the first..” there’s a big word that not in our vocabulary now a days, “ the first ‘something’ by some of the earliest wise men and it appears again and again throughout the bible, but every few people who have learned it, understand it and that’s why it’s a secret and for some equally strange reason, it virtually remains a secret.”

So kind of the message of this book and hopefully this podcast for today, is a couple of things. First off, it’s what are you thinking about? What’s the goal? What’s the thing you’re driving towards every single day? And if you don’t have that you’re just like the boat that’s wandering and going to crash.

And the second part of this is understanding that just conforming to the standard is the reason why the majority of the population by the time they’re 65 have not learned financial independence. 65 years is not how long, it shouldn’t take that long to learn and master financial independence. You should learn that earlier in life, but because it’s easier just to conform and just to slip back to doing the status quo. And just doing what it takes to not lose, which is what our whole society is built upon. Most people go that way.

So for you guys here listening to this podcast, I know that’s not what any of you guys want. So it comes back down to setting a goal. What do you want? Where are you going? Having a very clear path and thinking about it, visualizing and figuring out how to get there. If you, man, low and behold you get there.

Like I said, it’s weird that 99.99% of the boats that set a destination get there, same with airplanes. There’s a tiny fraction that crash and burn, but mostly if they’ve got a direction and a destination they’re going, they get there. And I think it’s the same thing for you guys, if you’ve got that.

What’s your destination? Where are you going? If you’ve got that and you’re thinking about it and it becomes the thing you’re looking for, you’ll get there. And it’s not that hard, you just gotta think about it and then work to make that thing become a reality. So that’s what I got for today you guys.

The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale, I think they said that this where the secret, the movie The Secret, came from. Which, that movie is a little cheesy, not going to lie. Conceptually it’s pretty cool. But then it’s like, I just remember the one scene when the guys like, “Yeah, I thought about, I wanted a coffee and someone brought me some coffee.” That’s not what this is talking about, that’s stupid.

This is talking about what do I want in my life? And I want to be able to see it visually and then I go and chase it. For me, I remember when I got started in this business, 13, 14 years ago now, I saw people ahead of me. For me, my first mentors were like, Armand Morin and John Reese, Marlon Sanders, Jonathon Mizel. These are the guys that I saw initially and I saw what they were doing and I was like, that’s what I want. I need that. I gotta figure that out.

And it wasn’t easy. Conformity is easy. And it’s not what they say. I mean it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. That’s definitely the thing. Same thing, that was my goal. So I started looking what Armand was doing. I was modeling him. If you look at my first 3 or 4 sites, they were identical to Armand’s. I funnel hacked him as close as humanly possible. My sites, Armand always had a picture of his head on the header, so I always had a picture of my head on the header. I just modeled him identical because it was Armand. That’s who I wanted to be like.

I had a vision and that’s where I was going. And then at my very first big seminar, that’s the first time I saw people speak and sell from stage and I was like, “holy crap.” I remember seeing this dude get on stage and he does his pitch and people run to the back of the room and I was doing the math, he made 50 thousand dollars in 90 minutes. I saw the next guy and the next guy. They did 130 thousand dollars in sales. Thing after thing after thing. I was like, “I don’t know how to speak. I’m scared to death of people and getting on stage. But that thing, that skill, I gotta learn that.” So that became the destination. For the next three years of my life I learned how to speak and sell from stage.

It was hard. It was not easy. It was embarrassing. The first ten or fifteen times I got on stage I did my pitch and nobody would move. That’s humiliating. It sucked, it was so embarrassing. But I knew where I was going, so I’m like, “I gotta get there because that skill, if I can get that skill, holy crap that’d be cool.” So I stood up in front of 100 people, 500 people, 600 people and I did the thing. And then I crashed and burned. I was so embarrassed.

I remember, I think I told you this before. The first time I was so embarrassed because usually when you speak all the other speakers that are selling from the stage will be like, “Hey, how did you do? What were your numbers? How many did you close?” So I did my pitch and nobody bought. It was like the walk of shame to the back of the room. Everyone was waiting, just not running to the back and buying. I was so embarrassed and I didn’t want to talk to the other speakers, the promoter, the other attendees, I was humiliated.

So I went to my room and I still remember, I had never before rented a movie on TV in a hotel room before, so I went to the movie section and I started movies. And I watched movies for 3 days. Every movie that was there that I felt comfortable watching, I watched. I remember ordering coconut shrimp and Haagan Dazs ice cream every hour on the hour. I was like, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving this place. I want to eat.” Because it was so humiliating. But I knew where I wanted to go. I knew the destiny. I gotta figure this thing out because people are doing it and they can’t be that much smarter than me. I’m sure they’re more talented than me, but they can’t be that much smarter than me. I just gotta figure it out. So I kept doing it and doing it and eventually I got to that destination.

So for you guys, find the destination, set the goals, think about it all the time, go read the Strangest Secret. It’s literally a 5 minute read. It’ll take you less time to read than it was to listen to this podcast. That’s all I got you guys. With that said, I appreciate you all, have a great day and we’ll talk soon.

View Details

A quick glimpse behind the WHY of this funnel…

On today’s episode Russell goes on a mini tour of his new office and podcasts from two conference rooms and the kitchen. He talks about how you need to watch a magician’s hands to figure out what he’s doing, and how that relates to being a marketer.

Here are some of the cool things to listen for in this episode:

What it means to be a magician in marketing.
Why Russell buys other people’s products that he doesn’t need, and why you should buy his Marketing In Your Car MP3 player, even if you don’t need it.
And why it’s good to grow a business organically, but it’s better to push it along faster by buying ads.

So listen below to find out why you need to be looking at a magicians hands instead of getting distracted by what he wants you to see.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Now this is a special episode because I’m not in my car. In fact, I’m at the brand new office. We moved in this week and it’s insanely cool and I’m not only in the office, I’m in an actual conference room, which is the first thing I’ve done in this conference room is actually talk on this podcast. I’m looking out and everybody is working. We all have standing and sitting desks. So everybody out here working standing and sitting. So exciting.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen yet, I’ve been Snapchatting and I’ll probably Facebook Live Friday. Friday we get the big Clickfunnels sign in the office, which looks so cool. So as soon as that’s here I’ll Facebook Live this whole place so you guys can see it. You can see the bookshelf and everything.

What’s cool, Monday and Tuesday we had a certification event here in Boise. We were supposed to do it here in the office initially, but we didn’t think we were going to get the office done in time, so we moved it back to a hotel. Then Tuesday, at certification I make everyone do a hack-a-thon, which they stay up all night building funnels. Part of the cult-ture that we’re trying to do is you need to get crap done, you just pull an all nighter and just get it done. So we taught them that and they did it.

And then on Tuesday they went and presented all their funnels and everything and we gave away awards and it was cool. Tuesday morning I woke up like, man these guys have been killing themselves. How cool would be if they actually got to come to the office. So we chartered a bus, had the bus drive to downtown Boise, pick them up and bring them back. And now they’re…….

Anyway, they came to the office last night and it was so much fun to have everyone here and showing off the new stuff. People were like, “Is that really your bookshelf? Are those all your books?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m kind of a nerd. Sorry about that.”

Anyway, it was so much fun. So now, today we’re here. This is the first day we’ll actually work the whole day. Everybody’s here and it’s exciting. One big fear I have is we have our FHAT event coming up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday next week in the big conference room which is amazing. But it’s got echo. I don’t know if you hear echo in here. This is the conference room and it’s kind of echo in here as well. We have a sound engineer coming to try to figure out how to put up paneling and stuff so we won’t have those issues. But the problem is it’s like 2 to 4 weeks to get those things fixed. So that kind of stresses me out a little bit on that side. Hopefully we get some of it figured out. We’ve got people coming and they’re going to be hanging up sound panels and things like that in the conference room.

Anyway, someone just came in the conference room so I’m going to walk out here. Now I’m going into the kitchen. The kitchen also has got a lot of echo in here as well. But we designed this because we do a lot of videos in the kitchen, so we made it a really nice kitchen so we can do videos and stuff in here. So it should be pretty office.

So now I’m wandering. So fun to wander around the office, now I’m in the conference room. So anyway, I wish you guys could see what I’m doing, probably more interesting than hearing me talk about it. But it’s so exciting.

So what I want to talk about today, yesterday the Marketing In Your Car free MP3 player offer, we were paying affiliates $20 to give away a free MP3 player, and I think it ended last night at midnight. It’s been fun watching a lot of our affiliates promote it and then seeing people’s feedback. Tim Castleman, one of my buddies, he’s been promoting it. He’s like, “Just go buy it, you guys. Why are you not buying it?” and people are commenting why they’re not buying it. It made me laugh so hard. These are all people trying to learn marketing. And they’re trying to figure this whole thing out. They’re studying, learning, following Tim, following me, following people and they’re like, “that offer didn’t make sense to me. I don’t really want an MP3 player. I need to subscribe for free on iTunes.” All these things, all these reasons why they wouldn’t buy.

It made me laugh because we’ve sold a lot of them. I think we’ve sold, we’re almost at 4 thousand sold, which is cool. What we’re finding is for every single person who’s buying an MP3 player, probably 5 or 6 people are subscribing to the podcast, even if they’re not buying. So if you watch, I don’t know if you guys are watching, but if you go to iTunes right now, and you go to the business section, we’ve been in the top ten ever since this thing has launched. The business section is hard to get in the top ten.

Tony Robins is not in the top ten. Eric Ward is not in the top ten. All these legends are not in the top ten. Neil Patel is not in the top ten, we’ve been in the top ten for the last 2 or 3 weeks now. And it’s like, I want, since you guys are my best people. You’re hanging out, you’re here listening, I want to reveal, show the curtain, behind the scenes of what’s happening.

You know how they say, magicians are doing a trick, but he’s distracting you with stuff so you don’t see what’s actually happening, so you don’t see his hands move when he’s doing whatever that thing is that makes the trick possible. So he’s doing misdirection stuff and leading you places and stuff like that. With marketing, it’s kind of fun, my job. Most businesses is, it’s like you’re doing marketing, selling your product. Whereas, I’m doing marketing, selling my stuff. But for those who are watching, I’m hoping you are watching. Watching my hands, watching what the magician is actually doing because that’s the most valuable lesson.

Me giving my MP3 player, pre-loaded episodes is kind of a cool little thing, but why did I do that. Why am I doing that? What’s the magician actually doing and watching that. I always tell people, I buy everybody’s products. Usually I do not go through most of the products, but I’m buying because I want to see what the magicians are doing. What do they learn? If you saw the stuff I’m buying. You’d be like, “Russell, why are you buying another weight loss course?” and I’m like, “Because the weight loss dudes are really good at funnels.”

“Why are you buying a thing on stocks? You don’t even know what the stock market is?” I’m like, “I know, I have no idea how to do stocks. I don’t even want to know how to do stocks. But the stock guys are really good at funnels, so I want to watch what they’re doing.” I want to see what the magician is doing. So for those who are listening and those who are paying attention, and I hope you guys are paying attention, is watch these processes. Don’t say, “I didn’t buy Russell’s MP3 player because I don’t want an MP3 player. I’d never listen to it anyway.” Dude there’s a lesson here.

I’m not just doing these things for fun. I’m creating things and testing things and if they’re working, you’ll see me keep pushing them and keep pushing them. I look at right now, our podcast has grown insanely over the last little bit. We’re in the top ten, we’re consistently in the top ten, which is amazing. We’re getting tons of, I mean tens of thousands of downloads a day, which is amazing. And it’s because these things we’re doing, if you’re not watching, if you’re not looking you will miss it.

It was kind of cool, I did a podcast interview last week with Paul Colligan, who’s the podcasting guy and he’ll be, I think it goes live to day. And Paul is someone who’s watching the magician. He messaged me like, “Dude, I’ve seen your podcast funnel, I gotta know what and why.” It was really cool. A really cool podcast with him, kind of explaining. All of his followers are podcasters. Podcasters are out there and they’re trying to create good content to organically grow.

And I’m like, “Organic growth is good, but it’s hard.” I did a podcast every day for 3 years. We had 300+ episodes while I was organically growing it, it was good, we got followers, we got traction, but it wasn’t until I created something that I could stimulate with paid ads that it grew dramatically.

So for you guys, looking at that, look I can go on a blog all day long, but if I can’t stimulate with paid ads, man that’s a long time. Same with podcasting or whatever it is for you. But for this funnel, for the one you guys went through, a lot of you guys to get here. That was the vehicle, was the podcasting funnel. And it was a way for me to be able to pay for ads. And he, Paul basically was like, “There’s nobody that can do this. You’re the only person that can pay for subscribers profitably.”

I’m like, “Yeah, because of the model.” Anyway, I hoping you guys again, are watching the magician’s hand. Because prior to that we’d try to grow Marketing In Your Car and what we were doing is we were buying Facebook ads, trying to get people to subscribe. I’d ask John, “How many subscribers did we get from the Facebook ads?” And he’s like, “I have no idea. There’s no way to track it through iTunes.” He was like, “I’m basically just crossing my fingers and hoping that somebody subscribes.” We have no way to track it and test it. We’re just dumping money at it and crossing our fingers. That’s a horrible way to do business, stupidest thing in the world. That’s what branding guys do. That’s what companies that are backed by VC cash do. They just burn cash and they’re stupid.

Funnel hackers like us, we’re smarter. We’re looking at the ROI and it’s like, I had to create this thing to be able to create the ROI. So what’s cool about it, right now we’re driving traffic through these funnels. We’re paying affiliates $20 to give away a free MP3 player. But we know our metrics and we’re profitable on the front end. I think we’re close to about $30, might be a little lower than that. Somewhere around $30 we’re making. And we’re spending $20 to affiliates, but our ads are making about $10 – 15 to sell an MP3 player.

If you look at that, we pay for the ads, we pay affiliates, get the MP3 player, we’re profitable so we actually make a little money there. Not a lot, but enough to cover our costs. Then after we’ve covered those costs, like I said, a big percentage of people come to the page, never buy the MP3 player, but then subscribe to the podcast.

And everyone who’s, again iTunes doesn’t give us the best numbers possible. But based on my guestimations, for every single person that’s subscribing to, or that’s buying the MP3 player, we’re getting 4 or 5 people that are subscribing to the podcast as well. So I’m paying for that growth profitably. It doesn’t cost me anything.

So anyway, I just wanted to kind of lay that out for the guys who are paying attention and just thinking through that. Because organic is good, but if I could stimulate that with paid and be profitable with it, that’s great. That’s how I build a company fast. That’s how I do it without VC cash and all the other crap we’ve been told you need to do to build a company. You don’t if you’re smart, the market will back you. They’ll cover for you. That’s the magic of funnel hacking, what we all do.

With that said, you guys. I appreciate you. I’m going to bounce. Get back to work and probably do some more podcasts from the office, find different cool locations and go from there. Thanks everybody. Talk to you guys soon.

View Details

When you master this piece, it actually becomes really simple.

On today’s episode Russell talks about moving into his new office, and finishing up his book. He also goes into great detail of his backwards strategy for understanding if a funnel is going to work.

Here are some interesting things you will hear in this episode:

Some of the cool things his new office will feature that he’s never had in an office before.
Why you should be a Certified Partner and the kinds of things you are missing out on if you’re not.
And what does Russell do to figure out if a funnel is going to work.

So listen below to find out how you can know what kind of funnel will work for your business.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. Guess what today is? Today is moving day. I am so excited. Today is the day we are finally moving into our new office, which there’s probably a few of you guys like, “Who cares, Russell. It’s not a big deal.” But this is a big deal for a lot of reasons.

Number one, we’re moving to a new office and every times there’s change, a pattern interrupt from your day is a good opportunity, a good chance to radically shift everything about yourself. So I’m excited because this is like a new beginning, a new birth, I don’t even know, but it’s pretty cool. Number one.

Number two, I’ve been in a lot of offices in my days since we started this whole internet marketing game, and all of them have been rented from people. This office I bought, so I own it. Well not yet, I guess I got like a thousand more payments, but someday I will own it. But what’s about it is it’s our own. And then we bought this building and it was horrible inside so we gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it to be exactly what we want and how we want it.

I’m sure you guys will see if you follow me on Facebook or anywhere else. We’ll do some videos and kind of show the whole thing, but it’s so cool. On the outside we got this big old sign that says Clickfunnels. The inside, you walk in, the sign’s not there yet, the sign should be there by tomorrow, I think. But a big old sign that says Clickfunnels. And then there’s the TV, when we’re doing events and stuff we’re going to play video or audio, looping what’s happening. And then on the right hand side you walk in, there’s this huge seminar room that will hold up to, I mean we could have about 100 people in there, but comfortably it’s about 70 or so people that it’s set up.

It’s big. And basically we’re going to be able to do workshops there. What we’re trying to do….actually, let me step back. I’m driving right now to downtown Boise because we got a certified partner event. So I’m going to be hanging out with 40 or 50 of our certified partners today while everybody else is moving stuff.

So our goal was to get it done last weekend, so we could do the first certified partner event in there, but we didn’t quite make it. I guess technically we could’ve but it would have been weird today because everyone would’ve been moving and they would have all been there and it would have been just, you know. You know when you first move into your house and you don’t want guests coming right away, because you don’t even know where you’re going to sleep yet. So that’s kind of how it is.

So anyway, next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday we have our first ever FHAT event. It stands for Funnel Hack A Thon. Funnel hack a thon, I think I mentioned this before, but it a new, I’m really excited, it’s a new type of event we’re going to do in our office. If it works, we’re going to start doing them throughout the year and start bringing people to them. But I’m doing a test run with our inner circle members. So that’s happening next week.

So we’re getting everything set up and ready and prepared for the first ever FHAT event, which is exciting. So that’s going to be happening at the workshop room in there. Then we’ve got a big old kitchen. I think the kitchen will hold like 38 chairs. 38 people can eat at the same time, which is crazy. I guess that’s a lot for normal days, but I guess when we have events there, we’ll probably need a little more. People can eat in the conference room as well. So we got places for people to eat, which is cool.

Also, we always rent these kitchens and stuff, to film different products, when we did the weight shake video we’d rent this person’s kitchen. We’ve done that once. So I wanted a kitchen that was nice, so we could actually film in it. We’ve got a nice backdrop a nice countertop. So it’s set up so we can actually film in it.

That’s one of the cool things about this office. Our old office, if you ever saw it on the videos, it’s totally embarrassing. It was so trashy and I’m not the cleanest person ever, especially when I’m in the zone working and creating, I’ve got stuff everywhere. But it always looked ugly, it’s kind of embarrassing. There was no where to film videos, so we always had to go somewhere. But in the new offices, we’ve got probably 15 or 20 spots that we created specifically to look cool, to be awesome on video, which is going to be really, really cool.

You should see a lot more new cool video stuff coming from us. When we’re streaming stuff it won’t look lame, it’ll actually look awesome. So I’m excited for that on top of everything else. We have our own little recording studio, it’s going to have all sound proofing, that foam stuff so there’s no echoes or revirb so you can record webinars or audiobooks or whatever in there, podcasts. It’s going to be really, really cool. I don’t know, just ton’s of cool stuff is happening.

So I, as you can tell, am very excited for today. The move is happening, but first I got to get to downtown Boise, through all of this traffic and go give a presentation to our certified partners, then get back to have some fun.

Also, the new office has got a lot of book shelf space, but not as much as the old office. So some of you guys knew this, if you watched me on Snapchat, it was kind of a sad day in my life. But we went through and threw away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of marketing courses, things that were no longer relevant, or I knew I’d never listen to, things like that. So because of that I threw away most of my courses. And I put the courses that are still relevant, we burned them all onto audiobook files, so now they’re all in my phone and laptop and everywhere else. But they’re no longer on the bookshelf.

Now it’s just going to be books there. So today we’re bringing all the books over. I’m going to organize all those, get them on the wall and hopefully there’ll be some room for new books. Because I love books, books are the coolest.

And speaking of books, Saturday I finished it. I finished the last edit, the last everything. I sent it to…… I printed, actually printed out 6 physically copies of the book and handed them out to 5 of my friends and one for me. And they’re all doing a really quick read through to see any last misspellings or typos or anything, but after that It’s done. And it was the weirdest thing. Saturday I went in and spent about two hours just doing the last, last thing. Making sure everything was in there. Making sure all the images were correct, making sure all that stuff. And I remember, when I got done I was like, “I’m done.” I think I snapchatted, “I’m done.”

But it was the weirdest, I literally felt like I had this 300 pound kid sitting on my shoulders, and then he fell off. And I was like, “I feel so light.” It was really interesting. I felt so light and fluffy and good and So it’s nice to have that big old gorilla off my back, because that’s been one of those things that needed to be done.

In fact, my initial due date from the publisher was December 1st, and then I missed that date. Then it was December 31st, I missed that date. Then we had to move our launch date, so we moved our launch date for the book to April 18th. I was basically like, “Okay, you have this done by the end of January, it’s physically impossible to have it done by your launch date. I was like, “Okay.” So that’s where we’re at. So the last two months, was like a nightmare. But now it’s done and books, I don’t know if you ever written a book, it’s so much more permanent. I can, I’m not, what’s the right word, I was going to say cheat my way through.

I can freestyle my way through power point slides, presentations and sales videos and all those other things. They don’t have to be perfect or finite, there’s, I’ve done them enough that I don’t need them to be perfect. But a book has to be perfect. Because they don’t have you being able to cover up the mistakes through a good story or through whatever. It is what it is. It has to stand alone. You can’t touch it when it’s done. So there you go. I’m excited, the book’s going to be so, so cool.

Alright, with that said, I’m driving down to the certified partner’s event so I thought a good thing to talk about would be the other side of the funnel business. So I know we talk a lot about our own funnels. How you’re one funnel away and that part of it, but I thought it would be fun to talk about what our certified partners talk about. And if you’re not a certified partner yet, but you’d like to be, you should become one. I think everybody, whether you want to sell funnels or not, should go through a certified partner training. It’ll help you become a better funnel builder for yourself or if you did have clients. Whatever that is. But I think it’s good.

So if you’re interested in going, go to cfcertified.com, and there’s a webinar there explaining how the whole thing works. I just think everybody should go through it. It’s worth it. A few groups are coming in today. So the way it works, you sign up for it and it’s like, I think it’s 12 modules, but you have to complete the first 8 before you’re able to come to the certification events. The certification events, we do every quarter here in Boise. So everyone who’s got the first 8 modules done is allowed to come to it.

At the certified events we actually bring in a bunch of business owners and you have a chance to go and build funnels for them. There’s a contest at the end, whoever builds the best funnel wins the prize, it’s really cool. But it kind of gives you the ability to do the whole thing for a client, which is like taking the intake and finding what they want, from there figuring out the strategy, figuring out how to build it and going through the whole process. I would typically make people stay up all night, this is an all nighter type of thing, to work hard and get these things done. It trains you and teaches you how to actually get the project done, which is cool.

It’s interesting that even if you’re not doing these for other clients, you’re doing them for yourself, the process is still the same. A lot of people start with the funnel by jumping into Clickfunnels and start building, which is cool. But there’s stuff you gotta be thinking through ahead of time. And if you were working for a client, you would. What’s the goal, what’s the strategy? Here’s all the funnel types we have, what should I do? What should I not do? And it gives you a chance to really think through it at a different level.

So it’s kind of cool, but it’s been fun watching our certified partners, some of these guys are making crazy, crazy amounts of money and it’s interesting what it comes down to. What you’re doing is taking your business owner off the street. And the business in the past probably had a website, they’ve probably got all these things they’ve been doing, but none of them are making them any money.

You’re saying, “Look, the old things you have don’t work. There’s a new way, a better way to do it and it’s through this process with what we call a funnel.” And if you think about funnels, this was so interesting to me, most businesses have a funnel. Yesterday at church I was talking to a guy who’s a chiropractor and he was asking me about what I do with funnels. And he’s like, “So it’s kind of like a website?” I was like, “Well, I guess.” That’s like if I’m like a basketball player, saying “Oh, so you’re kind of like Michael Jordan?” it’s like, “Well, technically. He’s a lot better than me, but I’ll take that I guess.”

I’m like, “Yeah, it’s kind of like a website, but it’s a process we take someone through. A website is kind of dead thing that’s like, bleh.” And I’m like, “How much money did you’re website make you last year?” and he’s like, ”We don’t know.” I’m like, “Exactly. Nobody knows because it doesn’t do anything, you guys think it’s useful and it’s not. But if you shift it a little bit, you shift your thinking, and you’re like ‘websites are dead, this is the new future, the new opportunity is these things called funnels.”

And you start looking; in fact, this is what I do with any client I’m working with, especially offline clients. “What’s the funnel you’re taking people through right now?” And they’re like, “I don’t know what that means.” I’m like, “How do you get clients right now?” They’re like, “okay, well first thing I do is this, then I do this, then I do this, then I do this, then I do this.”

So I’ll draw out a picture of a funnel, like, “That’s what you did.” So we know that model, and I’m not going to try to re-invent the wheel. How do we replicate that? If you’re doing this, this and this. How do we replicate that online. Let’s look at that because the funnel you have is working now. My chiropractic buddy, when we first started, when he started his practice, he struggled forever to get leads. And the first thing I think that really took off for him was, he put a, what do they call them, fish bowls in a restaurant. So people put their business cards in for a free lunch. Then he’d call them up and be like “Congratulations, you won a free lunch.” To everybody who dropped a card in.

The way it works is I’m going to come to your office for free, I’ll bring lunch but I get to give you a thirty minute presentation. So he’d show up with lunch, feed everyone, do a thirty minute presentation, close a bunch of people and rinse and repeat. That was his funnel that he was bringing people in. And it’s like, hey that works. So now we know that model works, how do we replicate that online. You need to get lunch appointments for people locally that you can give them free lunch or whatever. Let’s make that same offer, let’s make a fishbowl funnel. “Put your name and email address in here and you can win a chance to get me to bring lunch.” And then go buy Facebook ads that go to that fishbowl funnel, get their contact, call them up and be like, “congratulation, you won.” And then go do the same thing.

People seem to think it’s this magic trick, it’s not. It’s just looking at the customer process. I’ve talked about this before with you guys. But I don’t know if it was episode 1 or 250 so I apologize, they kind of blur together. But I remember reading the book the Emyth, for the first time and he talking about how every business has a system and if you don’t have a system, it means you do but it’s a really bad system probably. And he was talking about how what’s a system for a retail business, when a customer comes through the door. What do they say first? What do they say second? And looking at that process.

I remember reading that book ten years ago and thinking about the stores I go into. How am I being, what’s the funnel people are taking when they walk into the store? It’s funny, my favorite store to this day is GNC. But I rarely go, even when I see a GNC, I’ll avoid it like the plague, because I know their system sucks when people walk in. I walk in, the first thing is, “Hey what can I help you with?” and I’m like, “Gah, I just walked in. I want to look at the bottle and read the back.” And they always ask me that, and so I always say what everybody says, “Oh no thanks. I’m just looking.” And then they, and then it ruins that first interaction.

It’s like having a sales funnel where the headline is, “Hey what can I help you with today?” and you’re like, “I don’t know, I just landed on your landing page. I don’t know. I’m going to leave. You’re freaking me out.” And then they leave. That’s the equivalent of it.

So it’s like, okay how do we make this process right? If I were the GNC dude, I’d come in and be like, “Welcome to GNC, looks like you’re looking for some cool supplements. Have you tried the new whatever power bars? I can give you free sample if you want to try them because they are freaking amazing.” I’d be like, “Heck yeah, I’ll try a power bar.” I eat and I’d be like, “Dude that is amazing. What’s the secret?” and they’d be like, “Oh there’s this kind of protein instead of this. This is the big thing behind.” Maybe he’d be like, “Are you looking for proteins or what kind of supplements are you typically looking for?”

Boom, he’s opened his question. First off, he built rapport, second off, he opened up a question. I’d be like, “I like all sorts of supplements.” And be like, “Sweet, let’s get a cart and let’s make a shopping list.” I’d be like, “Alright.” And I’d spend like $800 instead of the opposite when I’m like, “I’m just looking.” And awkwardly looking around and you can tell they’re looking at you.

Every time you’re looking at something, “Hey so do you have any questions about supplements?” and I’m like, “No I’m just looking.” And then walk to the next section, “Oh do you have a question about those?” “No! GAH! I’ll kill you.” That’s what normally happens when I go to GNC. So if I was the consultant for GNC, I’d be looking at the funnel, that process, every single interaction. What’s weird, what’s not weird? What’s awesome? And I’d be looking at those kinds of things and figure out how to tweak it and make it smoother.

And the same thing is true with websites and funnels. For five years I used to do all the Glazier Kennedy website reviews. Go to this website and every single time it was this brick wall, “Can I help you with that?” and there’d be 8 thousand links on their page. I’d be like, “I’ve been reviewing these things for 5 years, how are all your pages still horrific?”

When someone comes to your page, that’s why you have a headline. What am I going to say in my headline that gets them to want to give me their email. You have to think through the process, that’s the key. It’s not, “okay I’m going to use the book funnel for this one. I’m going to use….” No, think through the process. If you were coming here for the first time. What would be the path? What would they say to you that would not shut you down but would open you up? And that’s what I’m thinking. When I’m building my own funnels, that’s all I’m thinking about.

Someone’s coming here, what’s happening? Where am I feeling resistance? Where am I feeling good? What’s creating curiosity so I can proceed through this process? What’s giving me too much so I want to step back? Where am I being annoying? Where am I helping? That’s what I’m looking at when I’m building a funnel. That’s what you should be doing if you’re working for other people. Is looking at that process. And that’s what you’re thinking through and if it’s for yourself, it’s the same thing.

I have a friend that said that every month you should secret shop yourself. I haven’t really done that, but I think it’s smart. Secret shop yourself and see what resistance you’re hitting into. In fact, Dean Graziosi, I think it was, told me that when he had his big seminar business they were 200 million dollars a year and he hired a bunch of people whose full time job was to go and consume everything.

They went to the live event, they signed up, they went to the next thing, just do the whole thing and spend all the money to go through everything in the process and then come back and be like, what things were awesome? What things were horrible? He said what he found from secret shopping himself, was that people signed up they’re all excited and then they didn’t hear from people on average, about 6 days after the event. He said that was what bothered him. It took six days to hear back. They’re like, “Wow, we need to get back to people immediately.”

So they shifted the whole business to where as soon as someone would sign up for an event, the next day they got an email. When they did that their cancelation rate dropped by half, like crazy. So it’s like, coming back to the process, the funnel is just the process. The system that your taking somebody through. The magic of online funnels is the fact that we can perfect that.

You know, with offline funnels, you gotta train the sales dude, you gotta train the person in every single store, in every single GNC to not be an idiot and ask a good question instead of a bad question. And then when they want to slip back to their bad questions, it’s hard. It’s hard, right?

The cool thing about funnels is you can tweak that, perfect that and everybody comes through the same path. What’s cool, just think about GNC, if they were to go to every one of their stores around the whole country and make that one shift, what would that do for their revenue? If they were able to instantly get every single person to follow the same script, I mean, I would not be shocked if it doubled their revenue. That may seem crazy, but let’s just, I don’t think that’s that hard.

But the hard part is getting ten thousand reps to actually do it and do it right and do it correctly. That’s the opportunity that they’ve got to figure out, which is not that easy. Whereas with a funnel, there’s one point that everybody’s coming through, therefore you tweak it in one spot and it works across everything.

It’s not hard to double companies business when you fix that piece. And that’s the opportunity you guys. That’s what certified partner program is all about. That’s what these funnels are all about for yourself and for other people. That you’re just perfecting the message and each step along the funnel. And when you do that, it’s what do they say? Small hinges swing big doors. Or the butterfly effect. Wjatever you want to call it. Those teeny tiny tweaks have dramatic impact on everything else you do on your business.

I think it’s pretty exciting. I geek out on this stuff, as you can probably tell. But it’s all about thinking through it. How would you feel if you’re going through this process? Where would your resistance come from? What would you be excited by? And the more you think about, and then watch as other people go through it, and watch what they’re doing and make tweaks and changes based on that, the more success you’ll have in your funnels.

So, I hope that helps everybody. I’m almost to the certified partner event, so if you’re there today I’ll see you guys. If you’re not there yet, it means it’s time to get certified. You or someone on your team should be certified. Everyone should have one in their office. Go to cfcertified.com and go get certified. And I will see you guys here in a little bit. Thanks everybody.

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After finishing book #2, these are my thoughts on weather or not you should actually write a book.

On this episode Russell talks about finally completing his Expert Secrets book as he’s about to send it off to the publisher. He also gives some advice on whether or not others who have asked him, should write a book as well.

Here is some of the gold you will hear in this episode:

Why Russell bought a domain name and paid a publisher 10 years prior to actually writing a book.
What some things Russell thinks you need to do in order to write a book.
And why taking the time to make sure that you wrote a good book is so important.

So listen below to hear Russell’s advice and find out why it’s worth it to write a book.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell again. I hope you guys are doing awesome today. So I apologize that I have not been here for you guys the last three days. I’ve been here in spirit. Hopefully you had a chance to listen to the last 3 episodes. I’ve got some of you guys freaking out in the Facebook group about the last 3 episodes. They’re like, “I cannot believe you actually gave this.” In fact, if you guys aren’t on the Facebook group yet, if you go to projectclickfunnels.com it’ll redirect you to the Facebook group. But we’ve got 40,000 funnel hackers like you hanging out, talking about stuff all day long. So go to projectclickfunnels.com and come join us.

But some of you guys are freaking out there like, “Dude, I can’t believe Russell shared that.” So for those of you guys who are paying attention, I’m trying to drop gold bombs all the time. Hopefully the last 3 days have been inspiring for you. If that did anything for you, you’re going to love the Expert Secrets book. Because it’s taking that and going into a lot of depth and it’s so exciting.

Anyway, I wanted to let you guys know that I’m pretty much done with the book. What? It’s been every night, so Monday night I was up til 4:30 and then I had to get up at 7, and then Tuesday night I was up til I think about 3, and that night I remember Dylan Jones, we’re racing, I’m trying to get the book done and he’s trying to get the survey element done, which I think it’s done. I think he’s going live today, which is amazing. But we’ve been racing and I told him, “I have this weird feeling, I’ve been drinking a lot of caffeine so I can stay awake. I have this thing where I’m wide awake, but I feel like I don’t have a soul, because I think my body is a asleep, but my brain and my eyes are awake. It’s this weird zombie feeling.”

Anyway, I told him that at 2:30 Tuesday night, and at 3 o’clock I hit a wall. So I had to be done after that. And then Wednesday was the next day. Each night I’m getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep, so Wednesday started, luckily I had the day pretty much open so I worked on the book all day, and came home at night and I think I done about, all the days are blending together, I think it was about 2:30 when I went to bed on Wednesday. I pretty much got it for the most part done.

And then yesterday I had a bunch of stuff happening. And today’s Friday and I’ve got 2 of these Funnel Fridays which is starting in 15 minutes. If you’re not watching Funnel Fridays go to funnelfriday.com we archive them there, but again, I’m dropping these little gold bombs, gold nuggets for you guys in different places, and if you’re not watching you’re missing out on cool stuff.

Each week we build a funnel. We’re building one in 15 minutes from now, which is cool. And then I’ve got decade in a day, so those who join my inner circle, when they first come in we do a thing called Decade in a Day. Basically I spend an hour with you on the phone and we look at your model, figure out what you need to do and point you in the right direction. So I’ve got 5 or 6 of those today in a row, we let everyone who’s in it, listen in. So they listen and hear what everyone else is saying, which is kind of fun.

So that’s what’s happening. So today is a full day too. I’ve got probably, I would say 2 hours left on the book just ot put all the final images in and I’ve got two new chapters I added that are just mini chapters. They’re two pages just to show how this stuff works in different funnels, so I have to write those as well. Then at that point, I have my editor do one last run and my goal is Monday to submit it to the publisher. So Monday I submit it to the publisher, then I’m done. I can’t touch it. I’m not allowed to ever touch it again, which is stressing me out.

Then I have to record the audiobook version, which will be happening in a couple of weeks. And then Monday we have our certification event. So we have Certified people coming out Monday. So I’ll be speaking at that. And Monday we’re actually moving to the new office. It’s crazy. The next thirty days are insane. I have three events in the next thirty days.

So Monday we move in the office, plus certification, that’s Monday, Tuesday. Then I got Wednesday, Thursday, Friday to plan for the FHAT event, which then we have our FHAT event. Which FHAT is F H A T which stands for Funnel Hack A Thon. So this is a new event we’re going to rolling out, and hopefully it goes well. But we’re taking 30 of our inner circle members through that. So that’s happening the next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Then Thursday and Friday I’m supposed to have the 100k meeting, but I’m going to have to miss it because I can’t get it all done.

So I’m missing the 100k meeting, during those two days we’ll be filming the book launch video’s and also the FHAT event videos, to launch those two projects. Then I’ve got a week where I’m trying to do all my presentations for Funnel Hacking Live, and after that we go to Funnel Hacking Live. It’s crazy. And then I have a break for a couple of weeks, then we launch the book. So It’s insane. If I survive the next thirty days it’s going to be pretty amazing.

It’s funny because I have people that are like, “Oh, I wrote a book.” I had a guy I was talking to the other day and he’s like, “I have a presentation in March I’m preparing for.” I’m like, a presentation. I was like, “In the next 30 days, I have 17 or 18 presentations that I haven’t started on yet.” I have to get that done in the next 30 days, plus I’m writing a book, plus moving offices, plus there’s a lot of other stuff happening behind the scenes of well.

Next week, we’re launching, obviously we launched the podcast funnel last week, which was cool and brought a lot of you guys to our podcast. Next week we’re launching Funnel Graffiti, the week after that we’re launching Funnel Manifesto, and we have all these cool things we’re rolling out. There’s so many fun things happening, I love it. I love Clickfunnels, it makes it so fun and cool to do cool stuff.

Anyway, all those things are happening. On top of that trying to be a scout master and a parent and husband and everything else. It’s crazy, but it’s so fun. I’m having the time of my life. This is, I love it.

Alright, today I wanted to share one thing, because people keep asking me about the book. “Russell, should I write a book? Should I not write a book?” So what I wanted to share with you guys is my thoughts on that because this is now book number two. I’ve written others, I mean this is my second published book. We’ve got 108 Split tests, which is an awesome book. We’ve got Funnel Stacking, which is an awesome book we’ve done. But this is the second real book. And for me it’s been stressful. The Dotcom Secrets book took me a year and a half to write. And Expert Secrets book turned into that as well, I thought it was gonna be faster. I was like, I will prepare better this time. But no, it still took almost 18 months from beginning to end.

It’s funny, my accountant was, which I finally have a good accountant. It’s awesome to have someone who’s awesome. So he’s going through all our stuff and numbers and the end of the year he sent us this report and it’s funny because if you look at the book funnel, we’ve sold almost 100 thousand copies of the Dotcom Secrets book last year. Or maybe since it started, I don’t know, whatever it is.

But you look at that and it’s like how much money we make on those funnels. And it’s not a lot. If you look at it, if that was my business was the book, you’d be like, “Oh, wow you made….” I think we netted maybe 100 grand from book sales last year, which depending on who you are could be good or bad. But we sold a lot of books. I averaged a dollar a book, which is horrible. But you look at that, and what was the, from looking at it, was that profitable? No it probably wasn’t. But if you look at it like because of that book, what was created? It became the guidebook, the playbook for people to understand funnels, which got people into Clickfunnels, which got people building, which got people into the certification, which got people to go to live events. It became this tool for so many other things.

And the Expert Secrets book is the same thing. My goal is to sell 100 thousand copies during the launch month. I want to sell a million copies. In fact, I’m launching a blog documenting how we sold a million copies of this book because I want to show the process and share with everybody. So the question is, is writing a book worth it?

A couple of things, first off I’d say at first it’s not. But there’s a transition point. In fact, I still remember when I actually wrote the book, or decided to write the book, I’d always wanted to. In fact, the reason I bought the domain name Dotcomsecrets originally was because I wanted to buy a book called that. So that was 10 years ago. But I didn’t write a book for 10 years. I think you have to earn a book. Some people write a book really quick. And I don’t think it’s the right timing.

But for me, I was sitting at a Carl’s Jr with Chad Woolner, my buddy. We were watching our kids play in a playground and he said to me, “Do you know the difference between you and Brendan Burchard and Tony Robins? There’s only one thing that I really noticed. I feel like your content is as good, if not better. I feel like all these things, the one thing that they have that you don’t have is a book. That’s it.” And I was like, huh. That’s weird because I don’t feel like, there’s some weird perception about a book, whatever that is.

So that night I was like, I don’t know how you are, but I financially commit if I’m going to do something. So I went out there and I was like, I need to find someone to help me with this book. So I found a whole bunch of people and I interviewed a bunch, and spent a whole bunch of money the next day for somebody to be the person. It was Julie Easton, who’s my…..helps me write the book. So I gave her a whole bunch of the money and she became….Now I had, I paid someone, this has to happen. And she was writing every single day. It was like “What’s next? What’s next?” and a year and a half later we had a book.

But it was just one of those things. So people always ask me, “Should I write a book? Should I not write a book?” And when all is said and done, I think that you should. I don’t think it should, it shouldn’t be the first thing you do. But it’s something you should do because it is dramatically transformed our positioning, our business, our brand. So I do think it’s worth doing, but not at first, but there’s a time.

So I would say to all you guys to do what I did. 10 years before I wrote my book, “I’m going to write a book.” Just declare, “I’m going to write a book. And this is what the title’s going to be and I don’t know what it’s going to be yet.” Because as soon as I had this, I knew the book, I knew….it’s weird because my mind started doing stuff that became the book later. I had to become something to write the book. We had to have stories and stuff. I don’t know if subconsciously I declared, “I’m going to write a book.” In fact, I even paid Morgan James who did our publishing; I paid him for the book 10 years ago. You could ask him. Every time I saw him for the next year he was like, “So when’s the book coming?” I was like, “It’s coming soon.”

But I paid it 10 years prior, I paid the bill for the book. So when the book came out he was li,,e “I never thought you were actually going to write this.” But I had put it out there. I paid money to start it, and then I was doing life but because of that it made me create the book. It made me create the stuff to have that I think that it should be the goal for all you guys to write a book. Because I think it’s important. I think if I was you guys, I would make sure you write a good book. I’ve had some friends write books that were like, they did this thing where they busted out a book in a weekend and it became a bad book and it didn’t help them, it actually hurt them a lot of times.

In fact, I had a guy who I respected a lot, and then I read his book and I lost all respect for him because I was like, “That book made me think you have no idea what you’re talking about.” So I think it’s worth writing a good book. So I’d say if I was you guys, depending on where you’re at in your path say, “I’m going to write a book.” Just make that a thing and even buy a domain name, get the e-cover designed. Be like, “I have a book now, I’m an author. I’m writing a book.” Tell people that, “I’m writing a book.” “What’s it about?” “I don’t know yet, but I’m writing it.” Just to kind of put it out there. And then start becoming who you gotta become to write the book. You have to earn the book.

Go out there and if you’re writing a book on weight loss, go get a hundred clients and help them lose a lot of weight so you can understand intimately the process so you when you do write the book, you will a different perspective. When I had the idea for Dotcom Secrets, I had like 4 funnels in the internet marketing niche and the potato gun niche and a couple little things, but I didn’t, I wasn’t worthy of writing that book yet. But because I did that, I started coaching people and started learning and I started to launch my own.

We did supplement funnels and weight loss funnels and from that learning and education I learned all the stuff and then I was able to write this book. But if I didn’t have that, this thing out there, who knows if I would have ever written it. And now, the Expert Secrets book is out there and it’s been written out and it’s the next piece. What we’re trying to do with our company and our mission and how we’re trying to effect people, it is a book, it is the thing if I do it right, if I execute it correctly, which I hope I will, it’s going to expand our market and bring us out to the masses and get this main stream. That’s why I feel called to write this book and I’m so proud of it.

I said on Snapchat the other day, “After writing this book I almost hate the Dotcom Secrets book.” It was an amazing book, I’m proud of it. But compared to what’s been created here….I’m so excited for people to have this. It’s going to change people and it’s going to cause movements and it’s going to be awesome.

With that said, I’ve got Funnel Fridays in 7 minutes. I’ve got to get in here and get started. That’s my thoughts on writing a book. It’s worth the journey and when you’re ready for it, you’ll know and then it will become a transforming piece in your positioning and in your brand and in you as person. That’s what I got for you. Alright guys, I’m out of here. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye everybody.

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The real secret to converting with funnels…

Today’s episode is part 3 of a 3 part series of Russell speaking at a $100k event where he taught about the psychology of funnels.

Here are some of the things you will hear in part 3:

Some tips and tricks when it comes to building funnels.
What the cardinal rule of upsells is and some of the things that will help convert an upsell.
He also gives some cool tips for using Facebook Live.

So listen below to find out how to make your funnels awesome and successful.

---Transcript---

Russell Brunson: All right, so now we’re going to … Cause now, like everyone … I’m the funnel guy, so let’s talk about funnels, right? Now that we’ve got the foundation stuff out of the way, so then it comes to how do we build the funnel? I lost … There’s the lid. For me, the funnel … Everyone thinks there’s some magic. I have people all the time like, “Hey Russell. Do you have an MLM funnel you can give me, so I can grow my MLM?” I have a funnel that’s worked for someone I can give you. “Hey, I’m doing this.” I give them the book funnel. I was snickering yesterday. Everyone’s like, “I need your book funnel. [inaudible 00:46:27] book funnel to work.” It’s like, well kind of. Y’all have the funnel now. That’s the framework. What makes it work is this stuff we talked about, right? The pieces don’t change.

My funnels are not complicated If you look at my funnels versus, I have friends who like to brag about the complexity of their funnels. They’re insane. My funnels are so simple. They’re usually four or five pages and that’s it. It’s, very simple. My thing, I think … In fact, I was at a Infusion Soft thingy and I was watching these guys and they had all of their … These guys were building all of these funnels that had like a billion different segments and all this stuff. You know those Infusion Soft charts, that show all the thing … I was just sick to my stomach. I’m like, “Guh.”

They’re like, “Yeah, well if they click here, then it takes them this sequence. If they don’t, they take them to here and then if they’ve done this thing for three days and they haven’t done this and then they go here and …” All this stuff and I was just like … They have a billion different branches. I’m looking at that, I’m like, “You know the problem with that, is I have no idea what the crap to fix if something’s broken. There’s so may things. I want five or six variables max I want my cost per ad, I want my landing page conversion, I want my sales thingy. I want four or five things and I’m going to go and spend a thousand bucks driving ads. I’m going to stop and look at it and be like, “Okay, cool. It’s one of these five things that’s broken. Maybe two of them. Let’s fix just those.” You’ve got a thing that’s got 8,000 sequences. I can not make it better.

What’s more important, is become better at selling. Me getting better at telling a story is better than 8.000 segmentations of lists. I’ll make way more money by becoming better at telling my story, than I ever will from the third, the guy that didn’t click on email 13, send him this one instead and then send this one at two in the morning and then. Holy crap. Just sell yourself better and that’s worth a million times more than that, right? I make them simple. All my … Everyone’s cheering back here, “Yay, simple funnels.” My stuff’s all very, very, very simple, but I’ve become a master at understanding this. The opportunity switch to the opportunity stack.

I’m just going to talk about a book funnel, but this could be any funnel. Does not matter. The first thing I’m looking at is that is, what is the opportunity switch. There’s going to be a video of me telling a story about the opportunity switch. With my book funnel, I’m telling a story about my book, my epiphany story about how I had an opportunity switch and how this book is going to give you that same thing as well. Right? That’s the key. That’s the magic. If I’m doing a webinar, what am I doing? Telling a story about my opportunity switch, tell the epiphany story. They have the same epiphany, they’re sold. I don’t have to sell them anymore. If I’m selling supplements, same thing. Tell them the story, how did my epiphany pitch. It doesn’t matter what it is. That’s the key, is I’m telling a really good story about how I had my epiphany, and if I do the job right, they’ll have the same epiphany and then they’ll buy the first product.

From there, it’s coming and the biggest thing most marketers do, when they start creating their upsale, downsale sequences is like, “Okay, what else do we have on the shelf we can sell them? Okay, they bought my book. Let’s sell them, I don’t know, some other random thing.” Or, they bought the book. Let me sell them more of that same kind of thing. Now, in supplement world, this is like the default. E-commerce/supplements, it’s kind of like remember A-E-I-O-U and sometimes I and W, or E and W or whatever that is. There’s two times this rule breaks.

In supplements and e-commerce, whatever I sell on the first phase, if I sell supplements, I sell three bottles, my upsell’s always six bottles of the exact same crap. If I sell e-commerce, we just did a campaign for Fiber Fix. Three Fiber Fix, I’m upselling a crap ton more Fiber Fix. It’s e-commerce and supplements, you sell more of the same thing on the next page. Only time you do that. In information products, that will kill you. First time I really got this, it was when we launched our 108 Split Test book, which was kind of ironic, because the whole book’s about split test. We launched this book and the landing page converted and non of the upsells did and I was so pissed. I’m like. “Why is this not working?” I retweaked this offer probably 12 times. I changed the video, changed the pitch, changed the offer, changed the thing, the thing, the thing. I’m like, “Why is nobody buying this crap?”

The main thing I was selling was, they bought a book on split tests, and my upsell was this whole course on split testing. I’m like, “This is all the cool stuff you need. You told me you wanted split testing. I’m selling you more split testing. Why are you not buying that?” I had one of my friends, who went to my funnel and bought it and he texted me. He’s like, he said, “Hey man. Cool book. Thanks for the book.” Then he’s like, “I bet your upsell is not converting.” I was like … I didn’t tell anyone, cause the conversion, that’s my thing. Like, “Why would you say that?” He’s like, “Ah, I can just tell.” I’m like, “Well, I’m just curious. Why would you assume that?” Anyway, he shot … it’s Tim Erway, if any of you guys who know him.

He shot me this message, he’s like, “Dude, cause you did the cardinal fail of upsales.” I was like, “All right. Yeah. What was the cardinal rule again?” He told me, he said, “When somebody buys your first product …” Think about it. Let’s say it’s My Gear, The Truth About Abs, right? I want abs so bad, right. I buy Truth About Abs. My mind, as a consumer, I’m like, “I’ve got abs. That itch has been scratched.” And I’m like, “Ah sweet, I got abs. Whew.” Then here it’s like, “Hey, I’m going to give you workout videos, so you can get abs.” Like, “Dude, I already got abs. I just bought them. They’re … It’s done. My itch has been scratched.” He’s like, “When people buy your split test book, in their mind, that itch has been scratched. It’s done. Nothing you do will get people to buy more of that.” I was like, “But they raised their hand as people interested in split tests.” Nope, that itch has been scratched.

He’s like, “You’ve got to look at, you just did an opportunity switch. What is the next thing they need to be more successful with that? What’s the stack? What’s the next logical thing?” I was like, for me I was like, “Well, if they scratched their itch on conversion, conversion’s awesome, but they’re only coming to the website and then they’re kind of screwed, right?’ For me, it was traffic was the next thing. We shifted that to a what’s the opportunity stack. Now you know how to make your pages convert, now let’s get people to actually show up. Switched it and stacked the next opportunity. Boom. I was like, “Crap, that was so easy.” Now everyone in my funnel’s [inaudible 00:52:17] the psychology of, okay. First lead is the switch.

Now we’ve got them believing … This is why I love free book offers. Why I like low end things, because the lower the barriers initially … All I have to get them to do is to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I’m going to buy your book.” By saying that, they’ve subconsciously sold themselves on like, “I have now switched off on the opportunity. This is now my future. I’m a guy who has six pack abs.” They’ve made that switch. You know, as soon as you pull a credit card out of your wallet, you are voting. That’s why, we don’t do customer service and crap, cause I don’t care. We get people to vote with their credit card, cause that’s the only thing I actually believe.

Every time we do focus groups and all that kind of crap, people give you whatever … I only care about people voting with their credit card. As soon as they pull a credit card out of their wallet, they have voted that this is the opportunity that they are buying in to. They’re done. The next thing is just like, “Okay, you’ve already bought in to this now.” That’s why I like making this first opportunity as low barrier, as easy, because as soon as I get them to sell, subconsciously they’re 100% in. Now the stacks become easy. Like, “Hey, you got this. Now you need this.”

People always ask me, “Well how many upsells should I have? What should be the price points on it? Duh, duh, duh, duh.” It has nothing to do with price points, it has nothing to do … None of that crap matters. People are like, “Well, should I go from free to 97 to 290. What’s the …” Everyone worries about that. It has nothing to do with that. It has 100% to do with, what’s the next logical thing this customer needs to have success in the new opportunity I just gave them? This might be a $25,000 offer, if it makes sense. If that’s the next logical thing that they need, or it might be $37. Price point does not matter. It’s the logical sequencing of the offers that is the key. That’s what makes any funnel work, is the logical sequencing of offers.

Speaker 10: May I ask a question?

Russell Brunson: Yes.

Speaker 10: With the opportunity switch, is that more emotional and then the opportunity stack is more logical?

Russell Brunson: I don’t think anything logical sells. [inaudible 00:54:11] why I think logically, there’s still emotion.

Speaker 10: Well you know, you’ve got this … You’ve got emotion and logic here. Is that [inaudible 00:54:18] the epiphany bridge?

Russell Brunson: Yes. Yes, sorry. Yeah, so the emotional part’s the [inaudible 00:54:28], the logical part … Logical’s like that how they explain to their wife [inaudible 00:54:33] buy something for 25,000, $100,000. How do I explain to my wife like, “Yeah. I spent a hundred grand to go on this thing, because it’s going to be really good for my … No, I just want to hang out with me and Joe and everyone.” Right? We emotionally get bought in, but I’m still always selling from emotion. I’ll talk about logical, the logical justifications in the videos and stuff like that. It’s still emotional.

Speaker 10: [inaudible 00:54:54] emotional [inaudible 00:54:55] stack.

Russell Brunson: Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 10: How do you extend that story, that epiphany story [crosstalk 00:54:59].

Russell Brunson: New story. New story.

Speaker 10: It’s a new story?

Russell Brunson: Yeah, so it’s like here’s split testing. Like, cool. Let me tell you a story. After I got … I’m sending this book out to you in the mail. You guys are going to go crazy for it, cause it’s going to show you split testing. For me, when I started to get in to split testing, I was really excited, but the problem was, I didn’t really have traffic coming to my website. I was doing a split test, like three people come. You can’t actually … It doesn’t help.” I start going in to the whole story.

Speaker 10: A new epiphany.

Russell Brunson: Yes.

Speaker 10: You’re sharing.

Russell Brunson: Yeah.

Speaker 10: Okay. Gotcha.

Russell Brunson: Sometimes multiple epiphanies. I’m telling as many stories as I need, to get that idea across.

Speaker 10: Okay.

Russell Brunson: How many stories do you think I’ve told in the last hour, so far?

Speaker 10: A lot.

Russell Brunson: Anyway. The more, the merrier. It’s not like, what’s my one epiphany bridge story. Usually, it can be multiple. Any time I explain something that’s confusing, I’ve got to step back again, “Well, it’s kind of like millions of motivational speakers running through your blood. That’s what ketones are.” Okay, and I keep moving forward. Okay, so like I said, some upsells, there’s one thing, cause that’s the only logical thing they have. Some upsells, there’s two. Some upsells, I have one thing and I have a downsell. It matters less to me what it is and more tome just, what makes sense for this customer that’s on this path?

I remember reading the Emyth 12 years ago, and one of the initial things he talked about is the process of somebody walks in to a store. Last week, my wife wanted to go to the mall, cause we were going on a cruise in two days and she wanted to get some new clothes. I hate going to the mall, but I love GNC. That’s my … I love supplements. I take more supplements than I should, every day. I love it, right? I go to GNC and, the thing I hate about GNC though … How many of you has been in to a GNC? What happens as soon as you walk in? They just pounce on you, it’s like, “Ahh [inaudible 00:56:30]”

I hate it, so I take a breath like, “Okay.” I walk through the door and within like one step, the girl comes out, “oh, blah blah.” I’m just like going through this pain like, “What are you looking for? What do you want? What do you need?” I’m like, “I just want to look at supplements. Leave me alone.” Then it’s like finally, that horrible pain’s gone and she leaves me. Okay. I can start looking, right? I’m remembering the E-myth and thinking about, I love GNC but I always have this pain going in, because the process is so weird.

I start looking at … I became obsessed with this. Everywhere I go, it drives my wife nuts. We’re going through anything and the way a waiter pitches me, depends on what I’ll buy and what I’ll tip them. I want to get sold. I’m obsessed with the process of everything, from offline funnels to online funnels to everything that’s happening. For me, I’m just looking at that like, “Imagine that you’re your customer, okay, and they come here. What’s going to capture them, like a really good video. You’re going to cut out the techno babble. You’re going to tell a really good story, that’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be visually good, it’s not going to be me against a white wall, trying to be boring. I’m going to find a good background and make it look visually stimulating, so it’s cool. I’m going to tell a story that captivates them and make then=m an offer that’s so irresistible. It’s a new opportunity that’s going to change their life, and that’s what we do here.”

Then I’m like, “Okay, they bought the book.” How can I serve them the best? What’s the next thing I can do to serve this person the most? It should be this. Do I have a product that does that? No, and that’s what I need to make them. I need to make a product that does that, cause it’s all about, how do we serve our people at the highest level. That’s more important than “I’ve got a whole bunch of products. What do I plug in and where do they go and should this be the upsell?” No, think about the process.

If you’re walking in to GNC, if was walking in to GNC, I would change the whole process to like, “Hey, welcome to GNC. Here’s a free power bar. Let me know if you need anything.” I’d have been like “Huh.” Eating a power bar, I’d buy four times as much stuff. I’d be going through things. I would just be focusing on that customer journey, what’s happening through the process. For you guys, that’s the way to think through this. Think like, someone buys this like, “Oh man. It’s kind of expensive and we ship them out DVDs and all this stuff.” Maybe some people don’t want DVDs. Maybe they don’t have a DVD player. Maybe I’ll downsell them. Maybe they just want a digital version. Maybe that would be my downsell, is a digital version, cause that’s probably what they’d want.

I’m looking logically, like what makes the most sense to them. If you can craft that, that’s the magic. That’s how you get a funnel that converts and how you make it work awesome.

Speaker 10: On that first page, how long generally … Do you have a time frame of the ideal video length? Three minutes, 45 minutes.

Russell Brunson: This is what …

Speaker 10: Or does size really matter?

Russell Brunson: One of my professors told me one time, he’s like, “It needs to be … it’s like a girl’s skirt. It needs to be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to still be interesting.” That’s my gauge I my mind, always. If it’s getting boring and long, then I … But I don’t have a timeline. How long does it take me, take the story, where it’s still engaging? It might be three minutes, it might be 20 minutes. If I tell a good story, people will sit there. That’s more important. Yeah. There is a duration to the price of the thing I’m selling and how long it is. If it’s a free book offer, I don’t have to do a lot to get people to take that, but still need to get them to buy in to this, or else the upsells won’t convert. A lot of times you see people book offers, “Get my free book. It’s amazing. You’re going to love it. It’s free. Ahh.” That may work good for getting people to buy initially, but it kills you everything back here, cause they’re not bought in to the opportunity switch. If you can get them to buy the opportunity switch, then everything else increases, from the rest of it on. Any other questions about that stuff at all?

Cool. Then the last piece of this … Oh yeah.

Speaker 11: Where does the traffic primarily come from?

Russell Brunson: Cool. All right. The last piece of this. Traffic all over the place, but I want to show you guys what’s working the best for us right now. On the last page right here. This is Anthony DeClemente. He is one of my buddies. He owns this company, biohacking stuff. We started, we’re starting an online reality show called Funnel Hacker TV, just cause we want to … Without people … I wish we had like five hours, I could talk about more of this. For our customers, to build the whole culture, the biggest thing that we got to do is believe. Get these guys to believe in this right here. What I do, I do a lot of stuff to show belief. Friday we do a show called the Friday Funnel show, where I’m building an entire funnel in 30 minutes and I show them over and over and over again that I drink my own Kool-Aid. That I’m actually doing this. It’s like the biggest thing for sales we’ve ever done.

We do, we built this reality show, where basically each week, we pick an entrepreneur that’s got a really cool product and we take them, figure out the product, the offers, build the thing and launch it. He’s episode number one that’s coming out. He had no list, no following, switching markets to a whole completely different thing, but he’s just really good at what he did. We had him write a book. This whole campaign went from zero. I’m saying, you don’t have to have a big following for this to work. This went from zero. In the last six weeks, we sold 8,000 copies of his book. He just finished his very first biohacking week in Chicago, had a whole bunch of people pay a crap ton of money to come out there and go through the experience and this whole business went from zero to it’ll do a couple million bucks, yeah number one. All just from this. No other traffic source except for this.

As you start going further down the cold, it’s different, but for most people, you can build really good off of this. Facebook live, Facebook loves us right now. They are wanting all of us to do it, so what we do, and I’ll kind of give you Anthony for example. He’s got a book funnel. Some questions like what’s the message? What’s the best Facebook ad? I don’t know. I have no idea what message is going to be right. Everyone responds to different things. What, Anthony I said, “First thing he has to do is, every single day you have to do a Facebook live video on a different topic. Every single day, for the rest of your life.” He’s like, “But I don’t know if I have enough ideas.” I don’t care. Every single day for the rest of your life. That’s your only job, is to make a Facebook live video. What he did was he made a first Facebook live video and I was like, “It’s biohacking. Do the weird crap. Get things with lasers up your nose and all sorts of weird stuff and that’ll be your Facebook live.”

Then he did that and nobody cared. We did another one, and nobody cared. Then we did another one. We found out that about one out of 10 does what we call force virals. One out of 10, and what’s weird is, it’s usually the message that I think is the stupidest message ever. The first video we had that went force viral, the title of it was How to Biohack Your Vegetables. It was like, “Hey.” He’s cooking, he’s like, “What you do is you put butter in your vegetables and it’s biohacked now.” It got like two or three million views and sold hundreds and hundreds of copies of the book. I was like, I thought the cools ones with the lasers in his eyes and ears would be the cool thing, but no. It’s never what you think. We build a marketing campaign, we focus on one thing and it’s the wrong one, it’s like no. Do a Facebook live every single day for the rest of your life, on a different message and you’ll find what the market actually cares about. What things they do. It’s a consistency thing. Over and over and over again.

Here’s a couple things on Anthony’s, just printed out a guide to help you guys, cause there was a lot of questions on it yesterday. The main thing is again, profile picture has a huge thing to do with people actually being part of it. The name should not be a company. People do not want to engage in companies and they do not want to share things from companies, they want to engage with you, the attractive character. The ult leader. All the headlines are super easy. They’re things that are shareable, so it’s not too complex. It’s like, ,”Hey cool, how to biohack your vegetable. How to …” What was this one? “How to biohack, detox and get a flatter midsection.” There’s a simple call to action with the URL that’s not clickfunnels.com/1234/ … It’s something that’s also benefit driven, like biohackers guide. It’s like, “Oh cool. There’s the guide.

Speaker 12: Do you boost these or no?

Russell Brunson: Yeah, I’ll talk about that in a sec.

Speaker 12: And you can boost with a URL? You can do that? Okay

Russell Brunson: Yep. I’ll talk about kind of that strategy here in a second. Can the video structure, typically this is the structure. They’re usually three to five minute videos. The first 15 seconds is like, “Hey. I’m Anthony DeClemente.” Then, if you have a cold like me, so I’m, “Hey, I’m Russell Brunson. My fellow funnel hackers, I want to talk to you about whatever.” Calling them out. Then the next thing is, this is … We ask people to share like, “Hey, if you like this video, at the end of it if you can please share it, that way I know if you like this content, and I’ll make more like this. If you don’t like it, don’t share it and I just won’t make any more like this.” Some people are like, that’s how they’re voting if they like it, by sharing. Which is huge. The first 15 seconds, we tell them to share it if they like it, we ask them to do a favor like, “Hey, if you thought this was awesome, share it. That way I know.” Huge thing. Then, four minutes of teaching. I would say teaching/telling epiphany bridge stories is more important. Telling a good story. The end of it, a call to action to whatever it is your front end things is. “Go get my free books.” Anthony, every single day, he’s showing one biohack, and then “Hey, go get my book Biohackersguide. Com.”

Then down here, the very first post … As soon as he starts a video … When you first do a video , first it goes out to your fan page, right? Anthony has zero people on his fan page, the first probably hundred videos, right? Nobody was there. He just did it, and then as soon as it’s done, then what our guys will do, they’ll come in the very first post. We try to post the link to the actual offer, so that everyone sees that initially. It’s pulls in a picture of the product, stuff like that. Somebody manually is adding that in. Now, because he’s got more of a following, as soon as he starts a thing, someone goes in and posts it really quick as the first comment, so it sticks there, then it goes live.

What we do is typically, for each of these videos it goes live, we put about five bucks behind it, just to see what’s going to happen. If you’ve got more of an audience initially, you don’t put money behind it. If you have zero audience initially, you put about five to 10 bucks behind it, just to see which ones get some traction. Then as soon as one thing gets traction, the way that we judge traction is right here, is the ration. It’s the 1% share to view ratio. How many people viewed it and how many people shared it? As soon as you get 1% share/view, we call that internally it’s a force to viral video, which means I can spend as much money as I want and it’s going to go viral and it’s going to make us a bunch of money.

About one out of 10 hit that number, and then we dump as much money as we want or can or need to behind that and it’ll just kind of blow up. For me, this is … the biggest thing I can give you guys is this.

Speaker 12: Is the 1% based off of views?

Russell Brunson: It’s the ratio of views to shares.

Speaker 12: Views to shares.

Russell Brunson: This video’s got 1.4 million views. Its got 10,000 shares, so it’s 1%.

Speaker 12: [inaudible 01:06:19]

Russell Brunson: Huh?

Speaker 12: [inaudible 01:06:23]

Russell Brunson: We’re not mathematicians, we’re marketers. You are definitely way smarter than me. It looks like one to me. It’s a ball park. If it’s close, we’re going to blow it up. That’s kind of about what we’re looking at. Then we can promote it. What’s cool about this, if you think about everything we talked about earlier, right? We talked about traffic temperature up here, right? What’s cool about these videos is that, every video, you’re learning what people respond to and what they don’t respond to. We realize like, “Wow, they actually care about biohacking vegetables. Let’s do more things like that, cause they shared it.” You’re able to speak to different times. You can speak sometimes in techno babble and you’re going to boost … It may not do as good, but you’re going to boost it to different audience. For me, I might do a Facebook live talking about funnels for network marketers and I do it and nobody on my page cares, but now that video, that ad’s done and my guy will blow up all the network marketing companies, and then boom. We get all the network marketers to come underneath us.

I might do one, funnels for real estate agents. Funnels for … I’m just, it’s like carving out little pieces of the market you can then target differently. It also helps you figure out what people actually care about, what they’re listening to, what they click on, what they share. As of right now, this is such a big piece of our strategies, because we’re learning so much so fast. I mean, I could write a thousand surveys and not get the same data we get from just doing a daily video, every single day, consistently, consistently, consistently doing it.

Russell Brunson: From the funnel side, those are the keys you guys, and hopefully that helps a lot.

Speaker 16: [inaudible 01:10:05]

Russell Brunson: Am I allowed to celebrate something? Just kidding. We do an event once a year, that’s … Tony Robbins is our key note this year and it’s basically me on stage, with a bunch of our … [inaudible 01:10:18] difference. Me on stage and then we’ve got people that are click funnels members who are doing it in different markets. We got a really cool couple, Brandon and Kayla. They’re in the fitness industry. They sell $149 product. All they do is Facebook lives. In fact, they do an entire webinar pitch on Facebook live and they’ll do … During a live Facebook live, they do 150,000, 200,000 dollars live on it, and they boost it afterwards and do five, six, seven hundred thousand dollars. I’ve done … Jason talks about webinars later today.

Speaker 17: That’s incredible.

Russell Brunson: Doing, if you do a whole bunch of these viral videos like this on your Facebook live, and you’re building an audience and stuff’s coming that’s really, really good, then you come in and you do your entire webinar. I’ve done three Facebook lives that were me doing my entire webinar live and in front of everyone, just talking. Al of it over a quarter million dollars in sales, cause it’s just engagement and live and it’s really fun. A lot of cool ways you can use that. Anyway. I hope that helps you guys and …

Speaker 18: That’s awesome. That was good. Thank you.

View Details

The 3 steps to build a cult…

Today’s episode is part 2 of a 3 part series of Russell speaking at a $100k event where he taught about the psychology of funnels.

Here are some of the things you will hear in part 2:

The three things you need to build a culture or a following.
Why having a new opportunity is the most important part of building a culture.
And what the difference is between an Opportunity Switch and an Opportunity Stack.

So listen below to find out how to build a cult following.

---Transcript---

Russell Brunson: My next book I’m working on now, it’s called Expert Secrets and it’s really about building a cult, to be completely honest. I don’t … Well, we call it cult-ure. If you get through my inner circle [inaudible 00:29:13], we have big things about, “Hey, we’ve got to build a cult.” Sure. As I was preparing for this book, I started studying, I got super deep in to cults. I wanted to understand how they work and why they work and so I was reading all the amazing books on cult dynamics and you know, just totally geeked out on it. After looking at a whole bunch of things, I’m like, “What’s the pattern?” The pattern I found for every single cult is this. Three things. Number one, every single cult has an attractive character. A charismatic leader. Whatever you want to call it, right? Typically, for most of you guys, that’s you in the business. There’s somebody who’s like leading the march, right?

What’s interesting is, I’ll go through these … This is true for negative cults and positive cults. It’s the exact same for Hitler as it was for Christ. It’s the exact same for Hillary as Trump. It’s fascinating, you start looking at it. Every mass movement across time, follows this exact same pattern. One is the attractive character. Number two, in to bring their people in to a future cause mission. This is where we’re going. This is the plan. This is what’s happening. That’s number two.

The thing I want to spend the most time on, because this is the key to everything, is they always offer people a new opportunity. Okay? When Christ came, what was the new opportunity he offered? He said, “Look, we’ve been doing a lot. Moses is doing all these kind of things. That’s gone away. No longer do you have to do animal sacrifices. Now we’re switching over to, you come to me with a broken heart and contrite spirit. It’s different.” Hitler came. World War One, Germany got all this oppression, all these kind of things and said, “Look, we’re not going to try that. I’m not going to help you guys to solve this issue and pay our debts off. We’re going to freaking take this thing over and we’re going to get this new opportunity, new Germany. It is a new opportunity.”

What most of us are doing, is we create products, we call these in our, in my world they call them urb products. Products that will make you better, smarter, happier, faster. That’s the worst possible thing you could do. Okay? We also have these improvement offers. Improvement. Same thing. Improvement offers or ER offers. If you were selling an improvement offer to somebody, I’m going to help you to improve. What are the things that they have to admit before they give you money?

[inaudible 00:31:31]

Speaker 4: That they suck at what they’re doing. For me to give you money, I have to admit that I failed. That’s it, okay? Improvement offers are the worst possible things on earth and if your product’s like, “Yeah, my product makes you smarter, it makes you stronger, it makes you faster, it makes you better, it makes you happier, it makes you sadder, it makes you …” If you can tie an er to it, that’s why your business sucks. To be completely honest. Okay? This is the biggest problem most people have, is that … How many of you guys are looking and you’re like, “Crap, I have an improvement offer, to help you become better,”? Right?

Russell Brunson: That’s the biggest problem. People do not want to get better. Perry [Beltzer 00:32:03] was telling me this. He said, “2% of the world has ambition.” 2% of the world wants to become better. 98% of the world do not want to become better. As soon as you position what you’re selling as an improvement offer, 98% of the world just left. You’ve lost 98% of your market instantly. Now you’re selling to 2% who actually want to become better. Way harder to do. Okay? If you want to get a mass movement and you want to build a cult share of people that give you money, it comes down to this. It’s creating a new opportunity. That’s what people want. Everyone wants a new opportunity.

The question comes back, how do I create a new opportunity. I was looking at all the different opportunities that we looked at. New opportunity. They are basically all new opportunities can be broken down in to one of two things. Number one, we call it opportunity switch. Number two is an opportunity stack. Most of your offers … The good news is, typically you don’t have to change your whole product, you have to change the positioning of that product. If I come to people and say, “Look, this is the current opportunity that you are living your world under. I’m not going to help you make that better, because it sucks and it’s painful.”

The other thing about improvement offers is, most people have been doing that their whole life and they’ve tried to get better, they’ve tried to get better, tried to get better. In their mind, they associate pain with becoming better at that thing. As soon as I offer a new opportunity, they have no idea what that means. There’s no preconceived notions, there’s no idea of pain It’s just like, “Wow, this is a new thing.” It’s the reason why this did so well. I didn’t say, “Hey, this is a way to lose more weight.” I said, “Look, this is a whole new opportunity. No longer do you have to work out hard to get your body in the state to burn fat. You take this thing, it tastes like candy. You mix it in water, you stir it up, you drink it, and your body is in a fat burning state instantly. This is a whole new opportunity.” Boom, a hundred million bucks, right?

It’s all about that opportunity switching, or opportunity stacking. Some people … I always look at this as like, an opportunity switch is like, “Hey, you’re driving a Volvo. I’m going to put you in a Ferrari.” I’m switching your opportunity. Here is like, “Okay, you’ve got a Volvo. You love it, but on the weekends you need a nice car, so I’m going to stack … It’s an opportunity stack, I’m going to sell you a Ferrari, so now you’ve got both of those.” Then the opposite of all these is obviously the improvement offer. This is … Do you guys know Perry Beltzer? If you want to hear how Perry explains this … Perry was explaining, the first time I heard him talk about this was, he was talking about from like a marriage standpoint, right?

You’re in your marriage, you’re not happy, you’ve got three options. Number one, you can improve, you can go to counseling. Yay, that would be so much fun, right? So much pain, right? Number two, you get a new wife. Number three, you sleep with the secretary and you just have an opportunity, right? That’s like, these are easy things for people to go to. This is pain, this is hard, this is why people do not want this. If you’re structuring like this, you’ve got to say, “Look, let me step back. How do I change what I’m selling to this?” If I can figure out how am I taking … What’s the opportunity they’re currently in, that I’m trying to move them to? If you look at the good offers, if you look at … I was in weight loss, now I eat probiotics. This is a whole new opportunity. You didn’t even understand this, but as your gut’s all jacked up. This is the new opportunity. Holy crap, I don’t have to run and lose weight. All these things I’ve tried in the past, I could try this new thing. That’s the key.

How do you structure what you sell as a new opportunity? That’s the key. To really understand that, is to really get clear. What are they currently doing, cause people have this desire, that’s why they came to you, right? They have something they’re currently doing and that, to get that need met. You’re looking at, here’s the need they’re trying to get met through some vehicle. What’s the vehicle they’re currently using. I need to get them out of that vehicle, in to my vehicle that’s going to help them meet that same desire. I’ve got to become crystal clear like, this is how they’re trying to meet their desire, this is the vehicle or the option they’re currently in. I’m getting them to switch out of that to this one. That’s what we have to rethink through your brain, of how to structure what you’re doing. Does that make sense?

You see that there’s going to be an opportunity switch, like you’re getting out of this vehicle, moving to this one, or “Hey, you’re currently doing something that’s good, I’m not going to make it better, but I’m going to stack a different opportunity on top of it. This might be, you’ve got a gym right now. I’ve got a buddy that does, he comes in to gyms and adds on a whole new [inaudible 00:36:31] and he says, “You already have a gym, you’re already doing [inaudible 00:36:33], you’re already doing your stuff. I’m going to come in and I’m going to stack a whole new opportunity on top of it, maybe it’s a yoga studio inside your gym, or it’s going be a different marketing business stack as opposed to an improvement.” Okay?

I’m curious if you guys, you’re looking at this within what you offer right now, how many of you guys think that what you’re offering is probably an, is How going to be an opportunity stack to your market? How many is it going to be an opportunity switch?

[inaudible 00:37:02]

Speaker 5: Many of you guys, it’s going to be both, yes.

Russell Brunson: You know what I think that opportunity stack by doing 100k.

Speaker 6: Stack it. Stack it. Thank you for setting this up. If you think about this, typically when somebody is first coming in to my universe, the first time they meet me, my first job typically is an opportunity switch. How many of you guys, when you came in to 25k, it was an opportunity switch? Like, “I’ve been trying to get these things met in NEO or YEO or through this or that.” It’s like, “Crap, none of that stuff works. I’m going to try this.” How many of you guys it was an opportunity switch, when you came in to that? Now you switched to get in there, and then typically, the back end stuff are more stacks. Now you’re sold on this opportunity, now how do we stack things? Okay? Any questions about that?

Russell Brunson: [inaudible 00:37:45] Improvement off of this. I mean, he’s offering basically like [inaudible 00:37:54].

Speaker 7: It’s how you sell it. You do it that way. I got in to Bulletproof, and I don’t drink coffee, but I was like, he was like, “Hey man. I was hiking this Himalayan mountain and I met some dudes with yaks and they gave me some hot chocolate, some coffee, with yak butter in it. I drank it and I felt amazing, and it turns out I lost a whole bunch of weight, and I have way more energy after drinking yak butter. Have you guys read that story? That’s his initial opportunity switch, should I wait? I’m going to put butter in my coffee, to lose weight? That’s a switch. Then you’re going to feel better and healthier, you’re going to get those things they want, but … It’s like, even …

Russell Brunson: I remember when Biggest Loser, the last Biggest Loser episode was on and I watched. Dave posted something, it cracked me up. He was like, making fun of this, right? Like, “Here’s Biggest Loser. They’re going to eat healthy, they’re going to lose weight, they’re going to do all of these kind of things.” He’s like, “I want to make my own version of Biggest Loser, but it’d be really boring. It would be a bunch of guys, sitting around drinking coffee, working our computers, losing weight doing nothing.” That’s an opportunity. That sounds way better than this, right? I want to switch … I need to switch opportunities. He could’ve positioned it as something different, the positioning is how you get the switch. [inaudible 00:39:01], most of these, you don’t have to change your offer. You just change how you’re positioning that offer. Did you have something D?

Yeah, I was just going … I was just telling him to turn my mic on for a second. It’s funny. Dude, I hope everybody knows the value of how he’s breaking this down, because this is stuff … What you’ve done better than me is, you articulate what you do in a better way than I know how to. What I had internally for years, and I would teach my team too, in the same opportunity switch or stack, compared to improvement is, I’d watch people and the difference of, when it’s somebody new, in my head, the way I was … I like this better. This analogy’s better, but I used to look at opportunities, like the switch was, when you’re going to a new prospect, you have to prove there’s gold in those hills. You have to tell them that there’s gold in California, and you should get your ass on a ricking horse or car and get to California, cause there’s gold in those hills.

D: It’s a switch. It’s like, I’m working my ass off. I don’t know what I’m doing, but there’s gold, where you can just dig and you find it. Then once they get there and you prove that there’s gold in those hills, then you got to sell them sharper picks, shovels and tools and better maps. That’s the opportunity stack. I see so many people flop it. They’ll be on a front end offer, offering improvements. “Here’s a better pick, here’s a better shovel.” You didn’t prove that there’s gold in the hills yet. They’re not digging yet. When you think about, I first have to prove that probiotics are the fucking answer, not a better probiotic or an improved probiotic. Anyway. This is so brilliant, the way you explain this dude. I love it.

Thank you.

Russell Brunson: Really impressed. I mean, I always love what you do, but I love the science behind your art.[crosstalk 00:40:41] I like the science behind your art.

D: I’m totally geeking out on this right now, cause it’s like, my new book’s all on this stuff. It’s so fun. One thing cool, how many of you guys have read the book Red Ocean, Blue Ocean?

Russell Brunson: Yes.

Speaker 9: I never read it, but I saw the cover. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” I got the gist, right. I think, I haven’t read the book, but I think the gist was this. It’s like there’s this red ocean over here of improvement offers, where we’re all fighting over trying to like, “Oh, mine’s better. I have a little better mouse trap. Mines a little. No mine.” You’re fighting over features and benefits and all this crap. Everyone’s over here and there’s all these sharks and there’s blood in the water. If you have an improvement offer, you are in a red ocean and you are fighting against every single other person out there. It sucks. You become a blue ocean, make an opportunity switch, now you’re the only ones there. Price goes out the door, resistance goes out the door. All those things magically disappear, because you’re a new opportunity. What do you have to compare it to? It’s different. It’s a whole different thing.

Russell Brunson: Eventually after you, like Bulletproof, right. Dave’s done that, now there’s people coming in to that ocean, but he created this blue ocean. That’s why that’s such a huge influx initially, cause it’s such a different conversation. It’s a whole different opportunity, went crazy, now everyone’s jumping in to that pool and it’ll get more and more bloody. I think for Dave to keep reinventing himself, it’s going to be that. Like, what’s the new opportunity? What’s the next opportunity switch. I need to give them to you. That’s what I’m always thinking in my business. What’s the next thing and where am I coming back at it?

If you look at the [inaudible 00:42:01], any mass movements, that’s the key. For me, it’s like, I’m not trying to sell products. Selling products is like transactional. It’s one offer. I’m trying o build a cult. If you come to my event, you will see it’s a cult. People are insane. We all wear the same tshirts. If you go to any marketing even in the country right now, half the audience is wearing my tshirts. We are a tribe, we are a cult, we are people who have a vision. My people know where we’re going. We know what we’re doing. People are bought in to it. It’s insane. Now, when I’m stacking opportunities, I don’t have to even try and they just buy the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, because it’s like, they’re bought in to this mission.

If you start looking at your businesses and your companies less like, “What’s my transactional thing and I’m going to get a lead and I’m going to sell them.” All those kind of things. “How do I build an experience, where they come in and they get these things. They’re attached to a charismatic leader. Okay, we’ve got something bigger than, that we’re going towards collectively as a whole, and we offer new opportunity to them, that they can’t get anywhere else.” That’s how you build this thing, that’s so much bigger than what you could do. Right now it’s crazy. We get between five and six hundred people a day that sign up for click funnels and everyone’s like, “Where do those people come from?” I have no idea. No idea. No idea. My colt’s talking about it, everywhere.

Where … Where’d you go? Oh, he was telling me yesterday, he was in an airplane. Some kid from South Africa sitting next to him was like, “You’ve got to read this book. It’s the greatest thing in the world.” That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to get people who are like, your person at the thing, right? Your hairdresser or …

Florist.

Speaker 9: Florist, yeah. That’s what we’re trying to do, and I think that, f we’re looking at things more like that, that’s the key. I wanted to get in to that first, before we get in to kind of some funnel stuff, because that’s the key to it, right? Understanding the strategy, understanding like, “Look. If you’re selling from here, nobody’s buying your stuff.” Your warm audience is buying it, they’ll give you money, but you can not grow beyond that, because of your own language patterns. Language is the key, right? You’ve got to step back here, and this is the key, is mastering this.

Russell Brunson: Stay in control of the epiphany bridge is like, what is the story that brings people in to the new opportunity. For me, I’m thinking … The one thing I’m thinking about is, what’s the story that got me in to this opportunity? If I was Dave Ashbury, I’d be telling his yak butter story way more often than he does. I had to find it on his blog and I was like, “Holy crap.” If I was him, I’d be telling that story every single day, three or four times. Over and over and over again, cause that epiphany story is what got people in to the new opportunity. Have any of you here ever heard my potato gun story? I am so sick of that story, I’ve probably told it a thousand or more times, but it’s my story about how I understood funnels. That was it, so I tell that story over and over and over and over again. That’s what gets people in to the opportunity.

Mastering the story, because I think, for most businesses, most of us aren’t going to have someone amazing like Craig, who can write copy. It’s going to be hard, it’s expensive to outsource something, but you as the … Like you said earlier. I can sell the crap out of my own stuff, right? You don’t need a copywriter then. You need to get super good at telling your story from here, that’s your VSL. That’s your upsell. Everything is tied to that. It’s not going to be as efficient as what Craig, or a really good copywriter can do, but it’s faster, it’s better.

We put out so much stuff so quickly, because I don’t have to sit down and a pad of paper every single time. I get myself in front of a video, I click record and I’m doing this. What’s the story I’ve got tell people to give them the epiphany, so they understand that this is the new opportunity. What’s the story I’ve got to tell people to get them the epiphany, so they want to stack on this opportunity to what they’re currently doing. If I just get good at story telling, that process, it gives you the ability to do things very, very quickly, without having to guess and tweak and [inaudible 00:45:29], all those kind of things.

View Details

The Epiphany Bridge, State Control, Kinda Like Bridges

Today’s episode is part 1 of a 3 part series of Russell speaking at a $100k event where he taught about the psychology of funnels.

Here are some of the things you will hear in part 1:

How if you have something you are geeking out over or passionate about, it is the perfect thing to sell others on.
How the epiphany bridge works including how to get your audience to have the same epiphany you had in order to get them to buy into you.
And how to tell a story to make your audience feel how you felt.

So listen below to hear the first part of Russell’s presentation about the epiphany bridge.

---Transcript---

Speaker 1: How many of you have this thing called a website? Okay.

Speaker 2: What’s that?

Speaker 1: Now, yeah it’s this thing on this thing called the internet, that came out a couple decades ago. I look at anything online as real estate. Back in my direct mail days, when there was no internet, I always loved the line, “The difference between a one dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill is the message on the paper.” Same paper, same ink, different message. One change in the message could make that same piece of paper worth a hundred times more. The same thing goes with any of the virtual space. It’s what you say, how you say it, how you compel people. Someone that actually knows how to print virtual money, would be Russell Brunson, and he has a whole process and a whole company and a whole software that can do this for you, and so he’s going to take you through something that I’m sure could be potentially worth millions, if not tens of millions of dollars to all of you. Give it up for Mr. Russell Brunson.

Russell Brunson: Well, I’m excited to be here. Excited to share some cool stuff. I didn’t do my presentation until last night, cause I wanted to see what you guys, what I think would be the most help for everyone. That’s kind of where I came up with some handouts. Do you guys all have these?

Okay, so what I want to do is, I’m not going to show you guys anything about click funnels, cause that doesn’t matter. I want to bridge some gaps, hopefully help you guys understand the psychology of funnels, cause if you understand that, then everything else becomes easier. I think that’s the most essential part for us as the entrepreneurs in the business, to really understand. Hopefully this will kind of bridge some of the things from the copywriting and other things we’ve been talking about.

Okay, a couple things. Craig yesterday was talking about Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, which was like, I was totally geeking out and loving it. I look at things very similar. I just flip it on the side kind of. I want to kind of reshow this, cause it’ll help my next thing I’m going to explain make more sense. I look at the world where there’s like, there’s cold traffic, there’s warm traffic and then there’s hot traffic, right? I got the picture there in my little handouts. If you’ve ever read my book, Dot Com Secrets, I sketch out everything I do, cause I’m a visual person, so this is the sketch.

I learned this originally from Jean Schwartz. He talked about, if you look at any market, there’s this awareness, this cycle of awareness, right? Where we hear people are unaware of what’s happening. After they’re unaware, eventually they become problem aware. From problem, they become solution aware. From solution, they become product aware. Then they’re most aware. Just kind of noticing, the peoples companies here who are doing well, but not where they want to be, it’s almost … The biggest thing I see everyone doing, is that you’ve become masters at selling here. This is the warm market, right? You become really good at that, but to scale, you’ve got to step back. You’ve got to come back to here. This is like your existing audience, who loves you. This is like Facebook, they love the market, but they don’t understand you. This is like the cold, hard masses and in my mind, the only way to drill past 10 million or so … I think most businesses can be really successful here, you have to master this to get to about 10 and beyond 10, you’ve got to become a master of this.

This is like, how do you create your offer in a way that it goes to the masses, which is very similar to what Craig was talking about. That’s kind of how I look at things, and it kind of leads me to the first important thing I want to talk about here. It’s called the Epiphany Bridge. Anybody here ever done network marketing?

Speaker 1: We’re very [inaudible 00:07:36]

Russell Brunson: [inaudible 00:07:36], they’ve done network marketing. Okay, so I’m going to grab something real quick, cause it’ll help illustrate this. I have a buddy who started a network marketing company and he wanted me to join in and to market. I said no a million times, but eventually he sent me some of the product. I loved it, it was really, really good. This is a company called Prove It. Anybody here ever heard of Prove It? No one here? Okay. If you’ve studied Dave Ashbury’s stuff about high fat diet, skinnier body [inaudible 00:08:03], this is the product they made. You drink it, outs your body immediately in ketosis. Tastes like candy, and it’s awesome.

I helped them write a pitch and wrote this pitch for them. They took it out and in the first six months, the company had $20 million dollars this pitch. This year’ll be over a hundred million dollars, and it’s just growing like crazy, because of the pitch. Now, I want to explain. After the pitch, they wanted me to come out to the leadership team and explain to these network marketers how to use this [inaudible 00:08:30] that I created for them, right? I’m like, I love network marketers, but I’m also scared to death of them, cause they’re like … They just pounce on you. You know, that feeling where you’re just like, I was getting pounced by everyone. I come in this room, and I walk in, it’s this room, probably about three times as many people as this, and they want me to show them how to use this new message to sell more stuff.

I’m looking out in the audience, and I’m trying to think, “What am I going to talk about to these guys. They don’t understand funnels or marketing. They’re a bunch of people who are selling stuff. As I’m looking out at this audience, of these network marketers, and prior to me coming in the room, I was watching them as they were pouncing on hotel employees and other people, and I had this thing just popped in to my head. I want to share this, cause it’s the key now to everything we do. This is a typical person, right? I’m going to make fun of network marketers, but this is you, right? In your business. We were born, we went to school, things were going well, and all of a sudden, something happened in your life that got you excited about what you’re excited about, right? Dean probably, initially he sold a car and was like, “Holy crap. I can sell cars and make money.” Right? Then he sold a house.

Every one of you guys, something happened. You were just normal humans. Something happened and all of a sudden, you had an epiphany, where you were like, “Holy crap, real estate’s the greatest thing in the world. Holy crap, financial stuff.” Something happened, where you had this big epiphany, and it changed your whole life, right? Do you guys all remember that moment, when it happened for you? He got his epiphany and then he went over here and then all of a sudden, the worst thing possible happened. You started like, “This is the coolest thing in the world.” You start geeking out on it, right? I’ll draw this dude with glasses. You start geeking out, and you’re like, “Oh this is so cool.” You start studying, and you just start doing the research, and you start going deep. I was looking at these network marketers, and I was like, “This product …”

I was watching these guys in the hallway and people walking by, and they’re pouncing on people, and they’re like, “Dude, you’ve got to quit burning glucose. That’s why you’re so fat. You got to switch your fuel from glucose to ketones. If you do that, you won’t be fat anymore.” It’s like, “Man, if you had beta hydroxy blueberry salt in your drinks and in your coffee …” All this stuff. I’m watching this, right? What happens is we come in to this world, we get excited, and we start geeking out, and the worst thing possible happens to us. We learn this thing we call techno babble. In every one of your businesses, you’ve got a crap ton of techno babble, right? IT’s these words that you use to describe things.

What happens is, you meet this prospect, and they’re so cool, and you grab them, and you’re like, “Okay, this is my prospect. I’ve got my shot at him.” You’re about to, like, “I’m going to tell him everything I know, and they’re going to buy my crap, and it’s going to be amazing.” Then it’s “blugh,” and you spew out all this techno babble on the person, right? I’m watching these network marketers just spew out this stuff out at people and they’re freaking out and they run away. For most of your businesses, how many of you guys know that you use techno babble? There’s words for your industry that you use, that you shouldn’t probably be using, okay? The reason why … What happens, this warm market understands your techno babble. They’re excited and they’ll buy your crap over and over and over and over again. Okay? Everybody else? They haven’t geeked out yet.

They key, this is what I found, the key for me to sell anything, is I have to stop this right here. I’ve got to cross out techno babble and I’ve got to stop this, cause this is what kills sales. I’ve got to figure out what was it that gave me the experience that caused me to go on this journey? If I can figure out what gave me this epiphany, and if I can give somebody else that epiphany, I do not have to sell them anything, ever. They’ll have that epiphany in their mind and they’re going to geek out and then they will cause a revolution. They will go so crazy on it. I’ve got to step back here.

When I was talking to this network marketing group, and the pitch I wrote … I was telling Craig this yesterday. I got equity for the company for writing a pitch. It took me less than an hour to write the entire thing. The reason why, the [inaudible 00:12:11] wrote this pitch he sent to me, it was like the worst thing ever. I was dry heaving in my mouth, like “Ugh, that was such a bad …” It was all this. Thousands of pounds of techno babble, just spewing forth and I couldn’t even read the whole thing. I was like, “This is so bad.” He’s a friend, it was like two o’clock in the morning, I was sitting in bed. I was like, “I know he’s going to call me, wanting me to critique it and give him feedback, but it just sucks, the whole thing.” I just deleted the whole thing and I was like, “I’m just going to rewrite this for him.”

The first thing I did, is I was like … Cause I believe in this product. I believe in the concept. I was like, “This is really, really cool.” I was like, “What was it that gave me the epiphany, that got me excited? Why do I drink this crap every day now? What was it that gave me that epiphany?” I was thinking back and it took me a while to realize. I was thinking like, “When was it? Some time in my life, something happened where I was sold on that.” Then I was going back here, and all of a sudden, I remembered. I remembered the moment that I had the epiphany. I was at a seminar. I went out to eat with my buddy, his name’s Aaron Lily. Do you guys ever remember in Skymall Magazine, the cream that they would sell that you put on your mole and your mole would fall off? Have you ever seen that? He’s the inventor of that.

I’m out to dinner with the guy. Super cool, doing insane amounts of money with that business. We sit down to eat and he’s super ripped and healthy and everything and he … I order this amazing dinner, and he’s ordering chicken with a side of butter. I thought it was weird. Then he’s eating it, and he’s dipping his chicken in butter and eating it and I’m like, “Dude, you are a freak. What’s wrong?” He was like, “Oh, it’s this whole thing.” All of a sudden, he started giving me techno babble and so I started making fun of him more, cause it just that gave me fuel for my teasing, right? I’m making fun of him and he’s like, “No, no,” He said, “Okay, let me explain it like this.” He’s like, “Your body … ” Wow.

“Your body’s kind of like a campfire, right?” He said, “If you think about it, you have a campfire, you feed it kindling, right? You throw a bunch of kindling on it, what happens?” I was like, “It burns really fast, then it goes away.” He’s like, “Okay, cool. That’s like carbs. That’s why you wake up in the morning, you eat Cheerios and you get like Ahh and then like 10 minutes later, you’re starving. Your kids have ADD and they’re bouncing off the walls, cause it’s carbs. You just keep putting more carbs in, your body gets more hungry. That’s how that world works.”

I was like, “Okay, cool.” He’s like, “Proteins are kind of like getting a log and you throw a log on the fire and it’ll burn a little bit longer, but same thing. It burns up and then it eventually goes away.” He’s like, “Fats are like coal. It’s like throwing coal on. It’s harder to get the fats to catch on fire, but once they’re on fire, they burn warm and hard and dark. That’s the best energy source, cause as soon as they’re lit up, they’ll burn all through the night.” He said, “That’s like eating fat. If you can transition your body from needing carbs and proteins, to processing fat, then you’ve got this amazing thing where you lose weight, you feel more energy and everything.”

I was like, “Oh, so that’s why you’re dipping your chicken in butter. I get it.” It made sense to me, right? [inaudible 00:14:48] this pitch, I just wrote a little, it’s a three minute explainer video, about a dude and a campfire. I tell my epiphany and why it’s important to be in ketosis and how this product puts you in ketosis instantly and that was the pitch. Three minute video, took the company from zero to a hundred million dollars in 18 months. It’s because I figured that out, cause that speaks to everyone. I’m not dropping techno babble and all this other stuff. Does that make sense?

The biggest thing that I think I can share with all you guys, is this. Is figuring out how to get out of this state, cause this is where all you guys are stuck at. I’ve heard you guys talking about your business and you’re always throwing techno babble, assuming that any of us have any idea what you’re talking about and most of the times, I have no idea what any of you guys are talking about. It’s because this is so second nature, so you’re super power, this is what you’re good at and you understand. This is where you lead from. If you get rid of that and figure out this piece, this is the key.

I’m going to share some other things, because I have so much respect for what Craig does. I don’t think anyone’s ever studied him. It’s probably creepy for him to know how much I watch what he does, cause I have so much respect. What he does is like a sniper rifle, right? He spends so much time to craft his message, he’s just flawless. When he gets it right, it’s like a sniper rifle and blows up a company. I’m not nearly as skilled as him. What I’ve become a master at is this process, at telling these stories. I watch good copy like his, so I can get good at incorporating it in to my speech patterns. I think I’m kind of like a blend between these two. I’m kind of in the middle there, and I’m doing a lot of stuff to be able to figure out messaging. I’ll kind of show you guys that here in a minute.

This is the best copywriting, I think, is mastering this piece. Mastering the telling of stories, because the process that I’m going to show you guys here, you can do a lot of them, every single day you’re doing them, and you’re finding the ones that work and you’re pushing away the ones that don’t. You can move through things really, really quick. Okay? Any questions about epiphany bridge? One other thing, I had a big realization the other day, as I was kind of going through this. How many of you guys have ever had something amazing happen to you, and you go to tell your friend, like, “This cool thing happened.” You’re telling this whole story and they’re like, “Oh.” You’re like, “No, no, no, no.” You tell it to them again and they’re like, “No, that sounds really cool man.” You’re like, “No, dude. God, you had to be there. If you were there, you would have felt what I felt.” How many of you guys have ever done that before? Right?

That’s the biggest problem we have, is a lot of times when we tell these stories, this is why it’s so important to become good at this, is we just, we suck at telling the story and then they don’t have the epiphany. My job is not to tell them what epiphany they’re supposed to have. My job is to set up an environment and a story that causes them to have this epiphany. When Marcus Lemonis spoke at our last funnel hacking live event, I had a 30 minute window before the event started, where we could sit down and just kind of talk, right? First time I’d ever met him and he gets there and he walks in and he’s got this really confused look on his face.

He’s like, “I thought you guys were a website builder.” I’m like, “Yeah, we are.” He’s like, “Why is everyone so crazy outside?” You come to our events, it’s more like a Tony Robbins event than anything. People are going nuts and going crazy and I was like, “Well, it’s more than that. We’re building a culture of people that love what we do [inaudible 00:17:57]” He’s like, “What’s a funnel?” First thing I do, stupid me, I start trying to explain from here, and he’s like, “All right, so why’s everyone so excited? I don’t get why everyone’s excited. You build websites.” I was like, “Ugh.” All of a sudden I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to tell my story.”

I came back and I told him a story, the story that got me excited about funnels, and I explained that story to him and he was like, “Wait. You’re telling me that these can work for anyone, right?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Well, how would it work for Camping World?” I was like, “Well, this is what I would do.” He’s like, “Okay, well how would this work for Sweet Peas?” I’m like, “I would do this.” “How would this work for …” He starts going through his businesses and after three or four of me telling these stories, he stops and he goes, “Man, every business needs a funnel, right?” It’s like, “Yeah.” He goes, “I got to get you on the show, okay?” I didn’t tell him, “Hey man, Marcus, every business needs a funnel. You should have me on the show.” I took him on a journey, told him a story, then I put it up in the air and let him have the epiphany, right?

That’s the key. I want them to have the epiphany. I don’t want to tell it to them. You get them to that state by telling them about the epiphany you had. A couple things about the story telling process, that I’ve learned that work so good. How many of you guys have ever seen the movie, the X-men movie, where they were little kids, before they became the big X-men? You guys remember that? I can’t remember which one it was. There’s this scene when Magneto before he … He was a little kid and they’re taking him to a Nazi concentration camp and they start taking him in, he’s freaking out and they see the fences start kind of bending and they’re like, “There’s something with this kid. He’s got some magic powers.”

They pull him in this room and it’s this really tiny room, it’s got Magneto sitting here, it’s got the head of the Nazi party there and it’s got Magneto’s mom. She’s sitting there crying, standing there. The Nazi guy is telling him to move this coin, there’s a coin on the desk and little Magneto’s trying to move it and trying to move it and he can’t get the power to do it. He’s trying and he’s trying and he’s trying, nothing’s moving. Then the Nazi guy gets kind of frustrated and looks over, pulls out a gun, shoots his mom in the head, boom and the mom falls dead on the ground. Then you see this scene that’s like so powerful. You see this little kid’s face and you see the pain and the agony. You see his whole body convulse down, like “My mom just died.” Then it transforms from this pain, to this anger and then he comes back up with this just pure anger in his eyes and everything. You see him and he shoves the coin across, he starts crushing all the metal , crushing and everything starts falling around him and he just destroys this whole room. That’s how he found his power, right?

Now, when watching film, you see that, right? Now words were said, but you see all these things that were happening. You see the pain, you see the frustration, you see the anger, you see … Us, as an audience, as we’re watching that, we feel it. [inaudible 00:20:31] I was just explaining it, you kind of felt some of that. You felt that stuff, right? That’s the magic of film. We don’t … Most of us aren’t producing films to sell our stuff, and so we have to do that through our words. Imagine if Magneto came and he’s like, “Yeah, so when I was a kid, I was in a Nazi concentration camp. They wanted me to move a coin and I couldn’t do it, so they killed my mom. I was pissed, so I blew the whole thing up.” You’re like, “All right.” You wouldn’t have had the experience, right? Magneto came and he started talking about how he felt.

When I’m telling my stories, I go in to how I feel. I talk about, “Man, I was sitting there, I was so freaked out because my bills were due and I had this stuff and I had this pain in my stomach and it was almost like a heart attack, but it was lower, and I felt this pressure coming down and I literally felt like someone was sitting on my back. Everything was coming down on my. I looked down at hands and they were sweating, yet I was freezing cold. My whole body was shaking and shivering, because I was in so much pain and frustration, so much fear.” You notice as I’m telling that story, I’m walking you guys through what I’m feeling and you start feeling it your audience starts feeling those things as well, right? My goal, for me telling the story, is I have to get you in the exact same state that I was in when I had the epiphany, or else you will not have that epiphany.

If you look at a good author, I mean you’ll read books where an author will come in to the room and they’ll spend 30 pages explaining the room and the lights and the look and the feel and everything, to set up a scene. Deliver some line, cause they need you to feel that line, but you won’t feel it if they haven’t set it up correctly. If I want you to have this epiphany, I have to get you in the exact same state that I was in when I had it. Okay? Tony Robbins 101, stay in control. I have to control their state and I do that by telling the story in a way to get you to feel what I felt, so that when I explain how I had my epiphany, you have the exact same epiphany. Does that make sense? Is that the coolest thing? I realized that, I was just like, “This is like a whole nother level.” It’s so easy when you start understanding, this is how the pieces work and how they all kind of flow together. Any questions about that at all?

All right, so if you flip over to the next page. In my inner circle group, people always ask me, “Okay, I got that [inaudible 00:22:44]. What’s the process now?” I’m a big … What I do a lot of times, I go through and I look at patterns. I go through and dissect like a hundred sales videos like, “What’s the pattern?” Then I like sketching out patterns, based on that, so I can replicate it over and over again. I started going through all the stories I tell and I was looking at commonalities. Also, we had an event where we hired … Any of you guys know Michael Hauge? Michael Hauge, I write his name down, Michael Hauge, H-A-U-G-E? There’s an audio with him and, I think, Chris Volgler, on Itunes. It’s like a six hour story telling workshop they gave. It’s like the best thing in the world.

Michael Hauge is, he works in Hollywood and he … We had him come to one of our events and he was showing everybody, he was like, “Look at any movie that’s ever been successful from the beginning of time, like Batman, Spider man, Titanic, anything. They all follow the exact same script.” He’s like, “If you look at the screenplay that you get,” He’s like, “On page number three is when the hero does this. On page 13, they always do this. On page 26 … Every movie, it’s exactly the same.” He came and talked, but if you listen to that class, it’s a college class he’s teaching on story telling. It’s insane. In fact, have you guys ever seen the movie Hitch? When Will Smith wrote that movie, it was before him and Michael Hauge were like best friends. Will Smith said, “I was studying Michael Hauge’s stuff and I was writing Hitch, 100% trying to follow the keys that Michael Hauge taught.” Then when it was done, he met Michael Hauge and they became best friends, like super good friends. Now Will Smith, all these guys, Michael’s the dude they go to help map out the screenplay. Super fascinating stuff.

This became, as I started looking at it, the outlines for most of my stories, but also the outlines, very similar to what they teach in Hollywood. It’s kind of interesting, if you go in to it. If you’re looking at how I typically teach things, or how I tell my stories, they all start with the backstory. The big reason why is because it’s this, right? Coming back to here, people see you over here as this guru on the mountain, if you start your presentation from there. They have no faith r trust or hope in you, right? It’s like, “Ugh. That’s Dean. He can get there, but I can’t.” You’ve got to come down the mountain, come back to where they’re at and be like, “Hey man, this is where you’re at. I was here too. Come on, let’s go on a journey. I’m going to take you where we’re going.” You start with the backstory.

The backstory usually leads you to some kind of wall, which typically is the same wall that your audience is in right now, that’s listening to you. Then the first thing you talk about is the external struggle, cause this is what your audience is willing to admit. “Yeah, I needed more money,” or “Yeah, I needed to get in shape.” You talk about, that’s the first struggle. Then the second thing’s, you’ve got to get to the internal struggle, cause this is the only thing that actually matters. This is what Dean was talking about yesterday. Seven why’s. This is how I get to my internal struggle. External, I need more money. I ask five or six or seven why’s. Why, why, why, why, why? That’s the real reason why they care.

In your story, you don’t talk about … You mention the external, cause that’s where they’re at. Then you go in to the internal. You talk about the internal thing that you were struggling with, cause that’s where it gets them. You’re controlling state, right? That’s where you get in to the same state you were in, cause you’re actually talking to them on a level that they don’t ever share. When you’re willing and able to share that, then it causes the empathy you need. From there something happens, you had this epiphany. “Whoa, check out how cool this thing was.” Then, after the epiphany, you’re like, “Here’s the plan, what I’m going to do.” After you have the plan, usually you still freak out like, “Ugh, is it going to work? What if it fails?” We talk about the painted picture of failure. Then we have the call to action, and then, at the end of it, we have the result.

This is kind of an example. I have this on my desk, when I’m doing videos, doing stuff, I just look at this all the time. I make sure I don’t miss pieces of it. I probably tell, I don’t know, 40 or 50 stories a day. If you look at how much we’re publishing stuff, I’m just telling stories all day long, and I want to make sure that I’m following a process. This is there, and this little thing will help, these questions will help walk you through what’s your back story and what did you want? There’s a problem you encounter, how’d you make it feel? What was the external struggle? What was the internal struggle? What was the epiphany you had? What plan did you come up with after the epiphany? What would happen if you failed? How’d you take action? What was the end experience?

Some epiphany bridge stories I tell are a minute to two minutes. Some of them are 30 to 40 minutes. I tell a lot of them. Every one of my presentations … One of the presentations I did, one of the guys on my team was counting things and in a 56 minute presentation, I told like 30 something stories. I’m telling them a lot, consistently, over. If you guys ever watch my stuff, I can tell story after story after story after story, because that’s what gets people here. If you notice, any time I get to something where I come to some kind of technical thing, like when I did the pitch for this. I had to explain ketones, causes there’s a word called ketones. Ketones is techno babble, right?

As soon as I get to the word ketone, I say, “Ketone.” Then I stop and I say, “Ketones kind of like,” I step back, “It’s kind of like a million motivational speakers, running through your body.” Like, “Oh, cool.” Now they’ve got what ketones are and I keep moving on. Any time I introduce any kind of techno babble, I stop instantly, take a step back, I tell a really quick story to make it so that that word means something to them, and then I can keep moving on. Anyway, I’m doing that over and over. Does that help for like a tool for you guys, how to … People always say “How do you do your sales videos now?” It’s Really this. These are how, mostly everything we create is from that.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited that I survived the drive to the office today.

On this episode Russell talks about why he always gets excited about everything. He also talks about a friend of his using funnels in an offline business, and how it still works.

Here are some of the cool things you should listen for in this episode:

What kinds of work Russell gets done while he’s stuck in traffic because of snow.
Why we should get excited about life because miracles are happening all around us.
And how Russell’s buddy used funnels in an offline business and actually sold 50 people in one evening.

So listen below to get excited about life and find out how you can use funnels in every business, even offline ones.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, good morning. I hope you guys are doing awesome. I’m stuck in the snow right now and most people would be complaining, but guess what. I’m crazy effective right now. I can barely move, apparently in Boise when there’s a half a centimeter of snow it shuts the whole city down. So I’m stuck in the snow.

But while I’ve been stuck in the snow, listen to everything I’ve accomplished already. We’re sending out a letter to our Dream100, letting them know about the book launch on April 18th. By the way if you guys want to participate in that, mark it on your calendars today. April 18th is when the Expert Secrets book is going live. So I was going to write that today, but I was like I don’t have time to write it. So I have a guy on my team, and I think everyone needs a guy on their team that does this. His name is Levi and what he does is, I vox him stuff and he writes it out and cleans it up.

So when I want to send emails, I just vox him and then he puts the emails in Clickfunnels and Actionetics and types them all out. Then I look in there, tweak it and then send it out, which has been so great. And then today, for the sales letter I just voxed him, “Hey man, I’m stuck in the snow. Here’s the sales letter I want to send out.” So I sent it to him, he’s going to write it out, give it to me, I’ll edit it and then we’ll send out an actual physical sales letter from there.

The cool thing about that, I don’t know about most of you guys, but this is the hard thing about writing. This is why I think copywriting is typically so hard and everyone struggles with it. It’s because most of us are really good selling face to face. I can sell you on why you should go see this movie or why you should whatever. Those things are easy to do. But it’s like, if I have to write that to you, it’s so much harder and then you start writing, you’re creative brain that’s really good at selling, starts getting out and your analytical editing brain is like, “Wait, you have a typo there. You need a period. You forgot the comma. What about capitalization.” So you’re going back and forth and it’s painful.

I know for me, when I start writing emails, I log into Actionetics and start typing it out, I start stressing out because it doesn’t look good. I spend half the time editing and half the time to write. I’m going back and forth, and I know the story is really good, but it takes so long to type it out that I just shorten the story. I don’t even tell it. I don’t know, it’s just not as good as it could be. So what I do now is vox him the stuff, tell him the story and vox it and he writes it out. I’m like, “Dang, that looks actually really good.” He knows the format I like my emails in, so he puts it in 99% the way there and I go and clean it up and send it out.

Anyway, I think that’s cool. So I hope you guys think it’s cool too. Because it’ll be a shortcut. But it works for sales letters, works with emails, works with anything you’ve got to write. Even my book, that’s how I wrote my book initially. The first draft came from me dictating through my phone and then Julie on my team re-writing it and then me going back and doing deep edits from there. I think its magic because it pulls the editing side out of your body, or out of your brain and gets you to be creative when you’re just writing. So don’t actually write, just talk.

So I got that done, and then I thought that was going to take my whole drive to the office, but I’m halfway there. I’m stuck behind a big old, what’s it called? A tow truck. I guess it’s probably more efficient to have a tow truck behind you, so if you wreck he can pull you out. If I wreck, he’s going to be gone by the time anyone notices.

But yeah, I’m stuck. We’re going 1 mile an hour. I got my meeting in 4 minutes. Not going to make it in time. But I got time to hang out with you guys, which is even better. So thank the snow because that’s awesome.

So today’s message, what I wanted to talk about, is all about being excited. I think that the worst thing about most people nowadays, nobody is excited about anything. I’ll have the coolest thing and I share it with somebody and they’re like, “Wow.” I’m like, “What? Wow? That’s all I got from that. Dude, you should be going crazy.” If you notice one thing about me, I get so excited about everything. Even the little dumb things that shouldn’t matter. I just get excited by it.

It’s interesting what happens when you do this. So a couple of things, when you start getting excited by every single thing that happens, even things that normally aren’t that cool, but you’re like, “That was awesome.” First off, your brain starts going, “Wow that actually was awesome.” Right now I’m out in the snow and this is awesome. I have a chance to share with you guys and get a sales letter. I got two things done today in the snow. How awesome is that? Most people would be like, “I’m in the snow, I’m miserable. Life is crappy.” And that’s the reality most people live in. Where because I’m excited I’m like, “That is pretty cool. I could do this. What else can I do?” In fact, I was on slack. I downloaded the slack app, which we started using in our office. I’m messaging people and getting crap done while I’m sitting here doing nothing.

I also snapchatted a story about the new office. I’m getting a lot of crap done in the snow. And then when cool things do happen, again someone goes to see a movie, I’m like, “How was the movie?” and they’re like, “It was alright.” I’m like, “What? How was that alright? You just saw….”It could be anything, “You just saw Batman and Superman fight to the death. It was alright? Are you serious? That was awesome. I don’t care who you are or what you think, that was amazing.”

This weekend I saw Rogue One again for the second time. And what was cool was Chad Woolner, one of my buddies/chiropractor, he put this thing on, so this is cool. He, and you may think this is impossible, but he’s an offline business and guess what he did, he used a funnel to make a bunch of money this weekend. So this is what he did. He built a page in Clickfunnels, he recorded a video of him telling a story. He told his origin story about why he got into chiropractic, and at the end he invited people as a guest. He said, “Even if you’re a member of our clinic or not. I don’t really care if your part of a community. But we rented out a whole theater, we’re going to be showing Rogue One, if you want to come. If you want to bring your friends and family, bring them all. It’s my treat because I’m a chiropractor who cares.” And then he sent it out to his list of clients and friends, posted it on Facebook, drew up some ads and everything.

And from that he filled up a theater of 300 people, and so my kids and I all went and saw Rogue One with him. So he shows up to Rogue One and he had recorded a whole bunch of video testimonials of all his patients, so everyone is sitting in this movie before the movie starts, a captive audience of 300 people. And he’s playing on the huge screen all these testimonials talking about why he’s amazing, why his clinic is amazing, which is awesome.

Then after the movie’s done, as soon as the credits come in, boom he cuts the credits, the lights come up and he’s like, “Hey everyone, before you leave, we’ve got some prizes.” So he does a drawing and gives out Star Wars things and everyone’s excited and everyone’s sitting there listening to him, again captivated. He’s got 300 people sitting in the room and then he keeps talking about a special offer, “Hey if you guys want to come in and get adjusted by the chiropractor that everyone is talking about in the videos, and the one’s that served you and let you come to this cool movie. If you want this law of reciprocity to work both ways, we’re even going to do something better. We’re going to make a special offer.” What, are you kidding me? You can’t make a special offer if you’re a chiropractor. Everyone charges $40 for an adjustment. “No, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to make a special offer. If you come in for an initial exam, we’re going to give you a free massage and on top of your massage, we’ll give you a $50 amazon gift card, just for coming in and letting us check you out.”

So people are like, “Dude, that’s a good offer. I want a free massage and a $50 gift card. It’s worth it to come in. And my neck has been kind of hurt, my back, have him look at it. My insurance is going to pay the bill. I’m in for that.” Boom, all the sudden he gets this table rush, there’s a huge line of people outside, signing up for free chiropractic care. All because of a movie.

So first off, I’m sitting there as the marketer in the room freaking out, snapchatting the whole thing. “This is amazing. I’ll find funnels. Funnels work for offline business, are you kidding me?” How many chiropractors do you know that closed 50 people yesterday? He had a captive audience with 300 people and closed 50 of them on chiropractic care. Yeah, one. The only dude that’s actually using funnels. So there’s number one.

Number two is I’m watching this movie for the second time and I’m with my kids. I’m like, “This is so amazing.” And I’m looking at people, all my Facebook group are writing these reviews, “The movie is okay, wasn’t’ that funny.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? Did you not see that scene with Darth Vader at the end? He’s thrashing everybody. It was amazing.”

Anyway, I’m just saying, you guys need to be more excited. Everyone needs to be more excited. There are some amazing things, we live in this day and era and time when all this amazing stuff is happening around us and we’re missing it because we’re so bored. We’re so unimpressed with the remarkable that’s happening around us. There are literally miracles happening every single day all around us and we’ll look at it like, “Meh.” What? Dude, did you see what just happened? How are you guys just ‘meh-ing’ that? That’s a big freaking deal. That’s something we should all stop and be like, ‘wow.’

So anyway, I try to be excited all the time. I’m sure it drives some of you guys crazy. I’m sure I’ve got a lot of people who can’t stand me because of it, but the people I want to surround myself with are those who are seeing the miracles happening around us. Realizing that this stuff that kings would have paid everything they had, given up their entire fortune to watch the movies we get to watch for $10. And the fact that I’m in a car right now, it’s snowing outside, it’s freezing cold, and I’m able to say I want this to be 70 degrees and I want my seat to be warm. It is. I’m sitting in comfort right now.

This is better than having…..the Pharaoh’s back in the day would sit in one of those carts people would carry them around. I bet it was still hot. This is the miracle, I click a button, I push my foot down and it moves forward and it’s heated. This is exciting. Are you guys missing this? I may be going to the extreme here, but I want you guys to stop today and I want you to look around and start acknowledging this amazingness that’s happening and be like, “Dude, that was awesome. That, right there, that was amazing. That right there, that was amazing.” The fact that I walked, I just drove by a Jack in the Box, I could drive in there right now and for $5 have somebody make me the most amazing meal on earth. That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s not healthy, but it’s pretty amazing, you have to admit.

Anyway, there you go you guys. With that said, life is good. Sure, there’s some bad things happening around us, but look around at the miracles. We have it pretty dang, freaking amazing and I hope you’re all grateful for that, because I am and I hope you are as well. So count your many blessings, because they are there. You just gotta look for them.

With that said, I’m at the office. I haven’t died, which is like, I’m freaking out excited about that too. I could have wrecked multiple times. I’m a horrible driver right now. I’ve been snapchatting, writing sales letters, and voxing, and podcasting all on this ride and I’ve survived. That’s amazing. I’m pretty stoked about that. I don’t know about you guys, but I hope you are. Some of you are like, “Man, I wish he would have died and it would have ended the torture.” But for the rest of you guys, we survived it, that’s exciting. We should all have a party today or something. I don’t know. I think it calls for a party.

So alright, there you go you guys. I’m excited, hope you are as well. And for any of you guys wondering if offline funnels work. They do. You gotta think a little bit, you gotta be a little creative, but the key message is the same. Capture results, push people into a funnel, after you’ve done that, try to get a captive audience, create an irresistible offer. The game is the same. Doesn’t matter where you’re at, you’ve just gotta think through it.

I had someone the other day, “Yeah, that works for B to C, but it doesn’t work for B to B?” I’m like, “It depends, is the B to B, are they people? Because it only works on people.” So yeah, if they’re people that you’re going to be communicating with, this stuff works. If they’re not humans and you’re dealing with robots, I guess…..but b to b, B to C, as long as it’s not B to R, B to robot, business to robot, you’re screwed because robot’s have no emotion. But for everybody else, this crap works.

So there you go. We should get t-shirts, that say something about B to R. Okay, I’m pulling into a snow filled thing, and I have my flip……..oh I’m sliding, I’m sliding, but I’m stopped. And I’m officially at the office and we’re alive. I’m pretty stoked about that too. Alright you guys, talk to you soon. Have a great day and unless you sell B to R you should be smiling because funnels work. Talk to you soon, bye everybody.

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Stop being offended when people market to you and instead, do this…

On today’s episode Russell talks about clearing out his office to move to the new one and finding old courses that he learned from. He also explains why you shouldn’t be offended by other marketers marketing to you because you can learn from their process.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

How you can learn marketing techniques from other marketers by the kinds of marketing they do to you, so you shouldn’t be offended.
He also talks about taking advice and why you shouldn’t take advice from people who’s piles of cash are smaller than yours.

So listen below to find out how you can learn from other marketers techniques.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I feel bad, this is 3 podcasts, almost in a row, where I have actually been in my car. I feel like I’m a fraud or a sham or something. I don’t know. But I’m at the office right now and it’s kind of a bittersweet day. We are packing up the office. All of my books are no longer on the bookshelf. They’re in boxes. Most of my courses I threw away, or my brother Scott took them and is turning them into audiobook files so I can listen to them in my phone. And we threw away literally an entire dumpster full of CD’s and DVD’s and courses. It’s a little emotional, I’m not going to lie. But we’re going to survive.

A few minutes ago we drove over to the new office and we saw it and everything’s getting put together and it’s so exciting. We have a glass wall, which looks super cool. We have our own bathroom, which may seem lame to you guys, but it’s so exciting for us. Because this is, I’ve rented a lot of offices, this is the first we’ve actually owned, which is so exciting. So those bathrooms are actually my bathrooms. I guess they’re our bathrooms. No, I paid for it, they’re freaking my bathrooms. Just kidding.

Alright so as we’re packing stuff up, I’m putting things and I have to decide what goes in the garbage and what gets saved. So I’m throwing away things with tears in my eyes. Hoarder Russell, because I’m totally an info product hoarder, so I’m throwing away my piles of everything that’s built the foundation for our entire company. If it doesn’t matter, even though it does, we’re throwing these things away. Some of these I’m like, “Not throwing that away. That’s gotta stay.”

So I’ve got this binder here, sitting on the floor. I just looked at it. I looked at it and it made me smile for a couple of reasons. First off, it’s from Frank Kern. Frank’s stuff is always fun, I always love his stuff. It’s a binder and on the outside of the binder it says, 32,800,000 swipe file. So I grab it and opened it up and inside there is 1, 2, 3 4 booklets. There’s one booklet that says the Annihilation Method, one that says Stomper Net, one that says Pipeline Profits, one that says Serializer.

And when you open up these little booklets, guess what’s inside? The only thing inside is half a paragraph explaining what this is and then it’s the emails that he sent out during this product launch. So it’s just copy and pasted all the emails.

And I started laughing because this is part of a product that I don’t know what we spent on it, but you know it’s probably a $1000, or maybe a $2000 course. And this was a big piece, the swipe file books and swipe file from 4 campaigns that each of them made, well combined made 23.8 million dollars. But they’re the swipe files. What’s hilarious about this, if you think about it, is if you were on Frank’s or anyone’s list at the time during this thing happening. You got these emails for free. And they came in your inbox and they didn’t cost you anything and you already got them.

Yet, fast forward a year and all the sudden you say, these emails made 23.8 million dollars, and suddenly people pay you $1000 to read these emails. The same emails that were already in your inbox. In fact, they probably are in the inbox. That’s what’s so funny. So I started thinking about this because people join my list for what reason? They want to learn marketing, right. So they join my list because they want to learn marketing and they want to learn stuff, and they want to figure out how to sell their products and services better.

And they’re on there and getting the emails and then people unsubscribe and then I read the, I don’t do it often because it stresses me out and makes me whatever. So I look at it and there’s the comments that are like, “Why did you unsubscribe?” and they’re like, “Russell sends too many emails. All he does is try to sell me stuff.” “Russell always trying to get me to go to another webinar.” Or whatever. “He keeps talking about Clickfunnels.” And it makes me laugh because if I fast forward a year from now and take all those emails and put them in a binder, I could sell them to the same people for $1000. “Here’s the sequence that I sent out that made us a million bucks.” And they’re all excited because they want to buy it.

But the reality is like, you are joining my list or other marketers lists to learn how to market. Why are you getting offended about their marketing? That’s why you signed up for the first place. Yes, you can go and buy their products and you will learn from that, but I learn more from watching the process. That’s what we call, we talk about Funnel Hacking. Watch the process, what people are doing and that is worth its weight in gold. Usually that is worth more than the product.

I can’t tell you how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of products I bought and never went through the product. Yet, in my mind completely justified the entire cost because I got to see the sales videos on each page. I saw the upsells and the downsells and I saw those things. I saw the email sequences they sent to me later. And all those things came into my head and I started learning and understanding them. And my next email sequence I’m like, “remember when Frank did this on email 3? I’m going to do that in my next email.” “Remember when So and So did this?” we start looking at those things and tweaking them based on what we’re learning.

And so I just wanted to say for you guys who are trying to learn marketing. First off, step number one, do not be offended by marketing. Because that’s the whole point. You can’t be offended by what you’re doing. Second thing, those emails or Facebook Live’s or things that are bugging you where right now you’re like, “Man, they keep doing these things…” Those might be the same case studies that next year you’re buying for $1000. So you should watch the process, watch what’s working. And if somebody’s doing something consistently, it’s probably working really well. If they do it for a little bit and stop, it probably isn’t working.

So that was my message for today as I was looking through this, I was just kind of smiling and thinking about these emails. If I search my email inbox from whenever these campaigns were, 7 or 8 years ago, I guarantee they are all in my inbox still. Yet, I paid $1000 to get the booklet of them because of the result they got.

So this is kind of two tiers. So number one is, again, don’t get upset when people are marketing to you, take that and learn from it. Add it to your swipe files, funnel hacking files, whatever you want to call it. Then number two, think about the byproduct of what you guys are doing in your business. People will pay to see what’s working for the marketing of your business.

When we had our supplement company we had the info product, all the other stuff we were doing before we created the 108 Split tests book. That book was just, here’s all of the things we were doing, here’s the case studies, the ads we ran, what worked here, what didn’t. That’s what we showed people.

I was watching the other day, one of our Facebook ads, some of you guys probably saw it. There’s a video of me promoting the 108 Split tests book and I got two pictures. I got a picture of one webinar registration page and another one. And I was like, “Which webinar registration page do you think wins? One of them out converted the other one by whatever.” And the ugly one won.

And I was reading the comments from all these people who are posting, “That was not a true split test. You split tested wrong.” And yelling at me because I didn’t split test the right way, the way that they think split testing should happen is completely wrong. Because they are like, “You have to have the exact same copy, the exact same thing and only change one thing at a time.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s true on the second or third tier of a split test. But where are you at in business right now?” Anyway, I just wanted….

In fact, I was talking about this earlier with these guys here in the office, one of my friends Matt Bacak, I remember I used to hear him speak and he the rule, he called it the piles of cash rule. He’s like, “Whenever I am looking at someone and they give me advice, I look at the size of their pile of cash and if it’s bigger than my pile of cash I take their advice. If it’s smaller, I ignore them.” I want to go back to these guys and just be like, “Okay, so you’re telling me my split test process is wrong. I just want you to look at your pile of cash real quick and if it’s bigger than mine. Cool, I’m wrong. But if it’s not maybe you should learn and instead of complaining in the comments of my Facebook ad, maybe you should be like, ‘why would Russell do that? Why would he test two completely different layouts first before he gets into headline tweaks or little tiny tweaks that we typically do on our split testing.’”

Number one is because, and I talked about this before on the podcast. When we’re doing split testing, level number on is not headline tweaks and tests, its radical shifts, so it’s one page design versus a completely different page design. That’s the first thing I’m going. From there I figure out the right page design that’s going to have the highest conversion. Then we go deeper into the copy, the elements the images. All the other pieces we go deeper and deeper and deeper in. but it starts with two radically different looks and feel. That’s the key in my mind.

Because if I would have done, and that split test specifically, if I would have done it the way that they were suggesting, I would have picked the one that was the loser, and I would have started split testing headlines of the loser. And I don’t care how long I tried, what do they say? You can’t polish a turd. I could have kept polishing that thing forever and 15 years from now, I never would have had a winner. But instead I had two radically different things and found out, “Wow, this direction is dramatically better than that one. Now I’ve got this nice shiny diamond and now I start going in there and chiseling away and making it perfect.“

Not that the message of this podcast, was not to teach you guys split testing, but It’s teaching you don’t get offended by people marketing. Don’t leave comments about how you’re frustrated about something that you don’t understand because it’s not the way you would do it, because maybe you’re wrong. Maybe somebody else isn’t. I also wanted to drop the whole pile of cash rule because I think that it’s a good rule for everyone to live by. With that said, thank you Matt Bacak for that idea. I’m going to come back to that and start sharing that more often with people. Look at where and how you’re getting your advice from. Follow the piles of cash.

So that’s it you guys. Appreciate you all. Remember the big piles of cash. Look and take advice from those whose are bigger than yours and those who are smaller, don’t pay any attention right now, because it will save you a lot of time, frustration and headache. So there you go guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing days and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

View Details

Semi-deep thoughts after writing the back cover of the Expert Secrets book.

On this episode Russell talks about how we grow in business and family life and all aspects and how the only way to continue to grow is to help others grow as well.

Here are some of the enlightening things you will hear on today’s episode:

Why if you are reading Russell’s book, Expert Secrets, it means you have already been through the trenches, and now you need to figure out a way to continue to grow.
Why if you are only learning without ever moving on from that, eventually growth will stop and you will become stagnant.
And how you can contribute to other people’s growth, and that will actually help you continue to grow.

So listen below to find out how to avoid becoming stagnant in life and business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I hope you guys are doing awesome. I am so tired. I was up til 3 last night editing the book. It’s the final edit and guess what? It is finally getting really, really, really, really close. And it’s, I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty proud of it. So I’m just excited right now. But yeah, I was up til 3:00 editing and I woke up super early today because we got Funnel Friday starting in 11 minutes. So I’m racing to the office to go, I’ll probably be late. But that’s kind of like, you’re on Russell Brunson time, you’re going to be a little late sometimes.

But anyway, it’s funny how much, I don’t think pain is the right word, but how hard it is for me to get into the book, writing, editing process. Because I think this is the final edit. So everything I leave there is going to be in print in a physical book for forever. And it’s never going to go away. So it’s like it’s so final. Steven was like, in the Dotcom Secrets book, there’s probably like 10 things I want to change. So it’s just like, you can’t, it’s final and that’s it.

So it kind of stresses me out, but what can you do? It’s been good though. I started finally going through. I got about 50 pages of the 250 pages or so finished. So I’m hoping in the next day or so, I’ll be done. And then this thing we can send off to the publisher and get the formatting done and turn it into a book. So that’s exciting. It’s funny, I was Snapchatting me procrastinating last night and showing people stuff. You know how I have my little doodle drawings, which is kind of a cool thing I think. I feel like most people think it’s cool. But someone Snapchatted back, “Those drawings are cute but there childish and unprofessional.” Or something like that. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” People are amazing. Why would you tell someone that? I wish I could see who it was on snapchat so I could tell them off. But I’m too nice of a guy, so I won’t even though I want to.

Alright, so what I want to share with you. I was writing the back cover of the book last night. And that’s a hard thing to do too, because you’re just like, some people that’s all they’re going to read. So what do you say and how do you say it? I probably re-wrote ten times. That probably took 2 hours just to write that and get it. What’s interesting, when I did finally write it, I was kind of nervous because it’s, I don’t know, it almost goes a little deeper than….I don’t know. But I think it’s how I feel about this book, but it’s also how I feel about my mission in Clickfunnels.

I’m trying to think of which part I should tell you now. Actually, I’ll rewind. So it’s interesting, Liz Tennison who is now helping me run the Funnel Hacker community and certification program and stuff like that. She’s awesome. She came to our house and she was filming a testimonial last week and when we were filming it I was asking her story about how she became an entrepreneur. And she told a story about when she first joined Mary Kaye, and the founder of Mary Kaye before she passed away she had a chance to hear her speak. And once she heard her speak, she was talking about how Mary Kaye for her was more than just a job or a business, it was a spiritual thing. And she said, “You know, a lot of times we can’t get into people’s houses with the Bible or with God, and so this is another way we can do it. Get into their house and try to help and serve them through makeup.”

When Liz was telling me that she started to get emotional, and I started to get emotional. I was like, dang that’s such a cool thing because in a perfect world all of us, the way we serve each other is by bringing God and bringing things into people’s lives, you know it’s hard in today’s day and age. People don’t want that. People fight against their, it’s just like how else can we serve these people and get them to where they need to be? And it’s through other avenues we have to serve. So for me, and I think my entire team, we always talk about how Clickfunnels is more than a business or product. It’s a spiritual thing, we give people the ability to share their message and grow and help and serve as well. For me it’s bigger than a business, which I think I’m so passionate about it and why we’ve had so much success with it.

So anyway, the reason I told you that is because I was writing this book, I was realizing that some of you are going to read this book, Expert Secrets, they’re typically not at the beginning of their journey. Most of them, and I’m going to most of them, most of us, most of you, all of us, the time that you pick up this journey is not you’re doing nothing else and then like, “I want to wake up an expert.” It’s usually because some experience happened in your life that made you want more, so because of that you started reading and studying and learning.

And then after you learn things, you got excited, so you’re experimenting and tried it. Some things worked and some things didn’t work, and then You’re making up your own experiment. And it could be any avenue of life. Some of you guys, it was in fitness, some of you guys it was in relationships. Some of you guys it was in wealth, money, finances, or marketing. All of us have different things, but there’s something that happened. Some experience that made you go deep on the topic. And what happens is that we’ll typically go through a period of our life which is extreme growth. We’re learning, we’re learning and we become better and better at this thing and you’re growing.

When I started wrestling, I started getting excited by it and started geeking out and learning and growing. It was this phase of my life where I went through extreme growth, but then there comes this point where you can’t grow by learning anymore. You just keep learning and learning and eventually, me learning more marketing tactics is not going to, I’m not growing anymore. You start to plateau. And when you hit that plateau point, I don’ think there’s any way you can grow by continuing to grow, it’s impossible.

The only way to continue to grow is to transition from this growth into contribution. How do we share this growth with other people? And as you start helping them and sharing with them and you see them grow, That’s how you start to grow again. Your growth becomes dependent upon the growth that other people have. Does that make sense?

So it’s this interesting transition point. You know the back of the book said basically, you pick up this book, you’re probably half way through your journey. You’ve probably gone through that and you’re growing and you’re stuck, and the only way to really progress is to help people become like you, to get to the spot you’re in right now.” I just think that it’s fascinating. I look at other things around me that that’s true in. An industry that I joke about a lot, but it’s serious is network marketing. You can make money but you plateau quickly, and the only way you can really grow is by helping those around you grow. That’s how you get this leverage and growth and make insane amounts of money that some people do in network marketing.

If you think about your kids, half of your life is this growth phase where you’re selfish and you’re, most of us go through this phase of life and we’re kind of selfish and it’s all about us, then you find a spouse and then it’s all about you guys together. And then you get married hopefully, then you have kids and suddenly when you have your first kid, it transitions to, okay you’ve gone through this testing ground, the only way for you to progress now is to help these little people progress. And that’s how you start to grow. That’s how you become the next level of who you are supposed to become.

Business for me is like that. It’s like having kids, it’s like it gives you the ability then to continue to grow. And from the spiritual standpoint, well I don’t know how deep I should get into these kind of conversations through a marketing podcast, but in a spiritual sense I think that’s how God grows. It’s through the perfection in us as children becoming more and growing and serving each other and it’s just such a cool cycle when you look at it from that standpoint.

Anyway, without getting emotional or too much probably further than I’m supposed to on something like this, I just thought I’d share that with you guys because I think that what you and what I and what all of us are doing matters. And it matters a lot. Because it gives you the ability to affect other people’s lives. So this mission you’ve been on to grow and develop, the only way for you to continue that progress is by the transition where now you are becoming an expert. You’re helping other people, you’re serving them and bringing them up to your level. And when you do that, that’s where true fulfillment and happiness is. So I think it’s pretty cool.

So there’s my message for today. With that said, I’m going to be late for Funnel Friday. It’s starting in 2 minutes and I’m probably 5 minutes out. But that’s what happens when you pull all nighters trying to change the world. Anyway you guys, with that said, I appreciate you all. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast or any other Marketing In Your Car podcast, please go to iTunes and rate and review, that’d be sweet. Share it with people. Right now we’ve got a contest that’s happening for any of the MP3 players you give away at marketinginyourcar.com, we’re giving a $20 bounty. So you get $20 for every free MP3 player you’re giving away. But it only lasts for the next 10 days or so. If you want to participate in that, go to marketinginyourcar.com and tell the world about this podcast and we’ll pay you for it, so it’s kind of fun. Alright you guys, thanks so much for everything and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

View Details

Some dude snapchatted me and check out what happened next…

On today’s episode Russell talks about how having proof of the results you give people will help you gain more sells. He also talks about a new event that will be launching a practice run with inner circle members in two weeks.

Here are some interesting things on today’s episode:

Find out how a single Facebook post ended up bringing about a 43 person wait list to be in Russell’s Inner Circle group.
Find out what kind of event Russell is launching in two weeks.
And figure out how you can use proof to bring more people into your business.

So listen below to find out how proof is power.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, I think I’m going to change the name of our podcast to Marketing During Snow days. We just had Snow day number 6. I’m at the house in the snow and yes, I’m praying that the snow melts so our kids can go to school. Plus we’re supposed to have three trucks bringing all the stuff for the new Clickfunnels office today, and they all got stuck in the snow. So we’ve been delayed another day in getting our office finished and moved in which makes me want to cry a lot.

Some cool stuff, though, while we’re hanging out. Steven came over. He’s been reading the Expert Secrets book. He’s the first person to actually read the final, the almost final draft. I’m curious your thoughts so far.

Steven: it’s pretty much going to change everyone’s life again. You know how the first book changed your life. Get ready to change it again. You were seeing in color, it’s actually going to be more vibrant.

Russell: We’re going to color.

Steve: it’s really good though. This is fantastic. I sit next to Russell and I hear him say this stuff and now I’m actually reading it like, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! I’m not going to sleep tonight.

Russell: I’m so excited. This book has got twice as many pictures or more. And yes, we’re working right now. So we’re launching a new event called the Funnel Hackathon event, or FHAT for short. Our FHAT event. We’re going to be doing a test run, is it two weeks? Or three weeks? In two weeks for some of our inner circle members and it’s going to be amazing. It’s basically going to be a three day workshop style, where everything in the Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets books, we plug in and actually build it with you live.

Kind of a good example, most people, this is how I kind of learned as well. I’ll go through and read a book or course and I’ll immerse and go through all this stuff, and I learn so much of it and I’m like, “I gotta go implement it. Oh wait, I gotta get back to the real world.” And then you never do. It’s interesting, I was talking to Brandon and Kaylin, who are inner circle members who are crushing it. And what he’s said, the way he did it, which was different. I was like, it’s different but I think it’s right. He said that they sat down with the book and the audio and everything. We listened to part and paused it. And then we stopped and figured out that piece. Then we push play again. Listen to it, stop, paused it and figured out that piece. What we did, after we were done with the book and training, we had our attractive character built out, we had our soap opera sequence, all the pieces were done.

Most people don’t do it that way. Most people learn it and try to go back and implement. They forgot stuff, or don’t have time now, all sorts of things. We wanted to make an experience where people leave their environment. Actually we wanted to make it even cooler, we wanted to make this a pilgrimage. The Muslims do a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their life. They go and do their thing.

When I was wrestling in high school, we used to do a pilgrimage, called it the pilgrimage to Iowa, because Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in our sport ran wrestling camps in Iowa. So our whole high school career, everyone saved up money through a pilgrimage to Iowa so that I could be coached by Dan Gable. My junior year in high school I finally made. I saved up my money and went. We went to practice with the Iowa guys. We met Dan Gable, shook his hand. I was like, “I just shook Dan Gable’s hand. There’s no way I can’t win.” It’s done, it’s over.

So I want to make this a pilgrimage, people come to Boise to get their funnel done. We keep talking about how you’re one funnel away from whatever it is for you. We want that to be, “you’re one funnel away, come to Boise and we’ll build that out.” In this event. So we’re doing our first FHAT event for the inner circle members in two weeks. So Steven is working on the workbook right now for that. And then that’s kind of the initial game plan. And then if it goes well, as we think it will, we’ll start doing those more often here in Boise and have people come back. So that’s what we’re working on today, which is fun.

So anyway, hopefully all of you guys will want to come do your pilgrimage to Boise, because it will be amazing. With that said, I wanted to share with you guys something amazing. It’s been interesting, over the last month or so, we’ve been reworking some of our offers. Our certification program, for one. We launched it at the first funnel hacking live event. We brought a group through and then we closed it for an entire year. At the second Funnel Hacking Live event we reopened it up, brought in another group of people and then a couple of months later we opened it up, we’ve had people coming in more consistently. If you haven’t gone through the certification program, I don’t care if you’re a business owner or if you are someone looking for a new business opportunity, you should come through it. If you go to cfcertified.com you can see info about the certification program.

But as it’s been another year and we’re trying to rebuild the webinar and change things, we’re looking and all these success stories of people who have come through in the last year. We’re looking at all those things and we’re like, “Man, we could literally just have a webinar, here’s 50 people that have made their money back, plus more. Or have doubled their money or 3x’d their money. Or have built huge careers on the back of this now, because we have so much proof that this process works. It just works like magic.

So we’re like, “What if we just, instead of trying to sell this and work really hard at it, what if we just did a proof webinar.” Like, “Hey, if you’re thinking about getting certified, here’s 50 people who have done it. Here are their stories.” And that was the webinar, how interesting. It reminded me of rewind back in the day. John Reese, he launched the first internet marketing product, which made a million dollars in a day. It was called Traffic Secrets. He did the big launch, in fact, if you go to archive.org, they have this thing called the wayback machine. You can type in www.trafficsecrets.com into there. And then look at, I think it was in 2005, 2004, whenever the initial launch was. You’ll see this sales letter. It’s this big, huge long form sales letter with testimonials, it was amazing.

Then after the initial launch they shut it down and a year later they rrelaunched it. And when the relaunch happened the sales letter was completely different. All it was, was a big headline that said, “Proof.” And then it was 150 pages of testimonials of everybody who had success with the program. That’s all it was, then order button at the bottom. Then they relaunch it and made as much, if not more money the second time. It was like, “Here’s proof of the thing you heard about, actually is legit.

So anyway, I was thinking about that. What’s kind of cool is we tested this and it wasn’t on purpose. We didn’t mean to do this on purpose but, dang it worked really, really good.

So I’m going to share with you. So some of you guys know Dan Henrie, who is in the Clickfunnels group. He read the Dotom Secrets book. And then he did a perfect webinar. He just, how long ago was that? Do you remember?

Steven: Um, I think it was 5 or 6 months.

Russell: Yeah, 5 or 6 months ago. So he launched the perfect webinar and he just passed it, or is about to pass it?

Steven: Just passed a million.

Russell: So he just passed the million dollar mark. And this a guy who prior didn’t have any of those things happening. So reads a book, does a perfect webinar, makes a million bucks and it’s awesome. So we’ve been teasing him relentlessly. “Hey you should join the inner circle.” And the inner circle, a lot of you guys know, it’s usually full. There’s 100 spots, so for the most part we don’t advertize it at all anymore because it’s always full. People re-up year after year, which is really cool and kind of a testament of how good of a program it is. But every once in a while we get someone who doesn’t re-up for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s….whatever. Everyone’s got a reason. Some people feel like, they’re good now. Some people just don’t re-up because, honestly I have no idea. I can’t fathom why people wouldn’t. But there’s some people who don’t.

So usually it hover around anywhere from probably 95, 93, members that are in there. So we always have a couple of spots that are there. So we don’t do any active promoting, but people just kind of trickle in. They hear about it on the podcast and they apply and if there’s room we let them in. If not we say, “sorry.” And put them on a waiting list. Every once in a while we’ll open up a waiting list. For the most part, we don’t advertize anymore, it’s just there.

So right now, I don’t know how many spots we had left, I would say probably a handful, 5 or 6 spots were still left. I was like, “Do we turn ads back on to promote?” or whatever, I was thinking about it. Then Dan Snapchatted me and he was like, it was a picture of his Stripe account for the day and he made $25,380, something like that. He said something like, “Finally decided to join the inner circle and take the plunge, I’ll just use today’s earnings from my webinar to cover it.” Or something like that, it was really cool.

So I took a screen shot of it on Snapchat and posted in our Facebook group and just said, it had his picture from Snapchat and it said, “Step one, get the perfect webinar script for $4.99. Step number two, get Clickfunnels. Step number three, join Russell’s inner circle.” And it had a link to russellbrunson.com, which is where people apply. So I posted that to our Facebook group and that’s it. And what’s insane is can you guys guess, before I tell you the number, I want you to guess how many applications that we’ve got in the last, what is today? Thursday. So it’s been 2 ½ days. So in the last 2 ½ days, guess how many inner circle applications have come in from that one post? I just laugh because it’s so hilarious. What’s your guess? I don’t want to tell you yet, I want you to guess.

Okay, on the count of three, you’re going to say your number out loud. 1, 2, 3 blah. What did you say? Did you guess 5, did you guess 10, did you guess 20, 25, did you guess 30? Well if you guessed 30 you are way too low. We ended up from that one post in our Facebook group, with 43 new applications for inner circle, which is insane. Because we literally, I think we’ve got 3 or 4 spots, I don’t know the exact number. But 3 or 4 spots are open before our next set of meetings.

Isn’t that crazy? And it wasn’t me selling anything, it was just proof. Boom, here’s proof. So for you guys, I want you to start thinking more and more about that. Most of us are amazing at getting results for the people we serve, but we’re horrible at getting, capturing the stories of that. It doesn’t have to be this huge thing. It can be just capturing it. A good example is in December we launched our Funnel Immersion Fire Sale, Some of you guys may remember that. We sold a ton of them.

In our Facebook group everyone started commenting, “This is amazing. This is the greatest thing in the world.” People were like, “Shut up and take my money.” Everyone commenting about how good it was, so anyway, we ended up closing it down and what we did is made, we turned that into an upsell for one of our products. And it’s a $300 product, so normally for a $300 product I have to have a really good video to convince people to buy it. But we didn’t have time for that, so all I did was, we had a video of me like, “ hey, if you want this other course, it’s really cool. You should get it. It’s $300” then underneath the video we just had screenshots of other people’s Facebook things talking about how amazing it is. And right now that upsell is converting probably about 2 to 3 times higher than I thought it was going to for a $300 offer, which is insane.

Again, it’s just proof, tons and tons of proof. What I would say for you guys is start gathering proof. That’s the key. That is the key to this game. Gathering proof, gathering testimonials. People say something nice on Facebook, snap, screen shot it. Somebody Snapchats you nice things, screen shot it. Somebody does something amazing, pay for them to fly to you and capture it on video.

If yo look at how we sell the inner circle, initially I went and served and worked for Drew Canoli for free, gave him a huge result, built him a funnel which by the way, I just found out that funnel’s done over 25 million dollars since I hung out with him, isn’t that crazy? I should charge more for the inner circle, it’s insane.

But 25 million bucks he’s made with that funnel so far, and it’s still cranking. All he did was made a video and talked about the result we gave him and that video is what launched inner circle. A little while later someone named Liz Benney saw a good looking picture of Drew Canoli, applied for inner circle, came in and we gave her a good result. And when she came to Boise, we captured that result, posted that video online and that video has continued to fill inner circle. But it’s all come down to proof.

It’s funny, if you look at Liz’s testimony, go to russellbrunson.com and look at Liz’s testimonial. She never once talks about how money she made, no income claims, no nothing, just her talking about her experience with working with me. That’s it. And that has filled our inner circle and you can do the math. It’s $25 grand to join the inner circle, times 100 people. It’s a good program and it’s built off of proof. So become fanatical at getting results for people and then in return capture those results. Not only are they going to be okay with that, most of the time they are excited by that. It’s you talking about how great they did, and us as human beings, we happen to like that.

Remember a couple of episodes ago we talked about significance. We all like it, even if we hate it. It’s there, so don’t…..get people their significance. If they’re doing good stuff, they want to tell their story and most people would love to have you share it, so capture it in whatever format you can because that’s the future of sales. Someone asked me on a podcast interview a little while ago, “What’s the future of internet marketing as you see it.” I was like, “I think the future is a lot less selling and a lot more us showing results of people we got.” Because that’s believable.

People inherently believe Facebook posts, so those look good. People inherently believe videos that are emotionally connected. Those things are belief because they’re real. So focusing on that.

Anyway, that’s what I got, I gotta get back to the book because I have to finish this book this week or else it won’t be published in time for the launch date of April 18th. So I’m hustling. Hopefully this gave you guys some value. Go capture some proof and if you want to get in inner circle, there’s 43 people online, but if you hurry maybe you’ll be a better fit than one of the other people. So go to russellbrunson.com if you’re ready for that. That’s it you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you all again soon.

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Reflections on what happened today when Clickfunnels when down for a little bit.

On this episode Russell talks about a situation that happened with Clickfunnels shutting down for a few hours. He talks about how he and his team handled the problem and were able to get things up and running in a short amount of time.

Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

Find out what caused Clickfunnels to go down today and how Russell and his team handled angry customers.
Hear why a similar experience from a year and a half ago helped prepare the Clickfunnels team to solve this problem.
And find out the 3 core things that should help you if your business ever experiences a disaster like this.

So listen below to find out why Clickfunnels went down, but was able to recover in a relatively short amount of time.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell, I hope you guys are doing awesome today. Today’s Marketing In Your Car is actually happening in my office for a couple of reasons.

First off, I was getting ready this morning. I was planning on waking up at 5 to start working on the book. I got the last edits on the book going, I have to get it done by the end of the month if we’re going to get it published in time for our launch date of April 18th. But then I had only slept a couple hours that night, so I just every 9 minutes for 2 hours kept pushing snooze. Then finally it was 7:00 I’m like, “Oh crap, the kids gotta get up.” So my wife and I got up and started working on the kids, get everything ready and then check my phone to find out that Clickfunnels was down.

Some of you guys probably had the same sinking feeling in your chest this morning when you saw that, as I did. So I just wanted to kind of walk through what’s going on in my head. Because one, so you guys know, but more importantly because there are times when there’s going to be disasters and problems and issues with you business. And I’m just going to go through what I did and what our team did. Hopefully it’ll help some of you guys when disaster hits for you.

One good thing I have on my side, is I’ve got the most amazing development team on planet Earth. So by the time I’d noticed they’d already known and they were on it and working on it. What’s funny is the last time we had an issue, I’m pretty sure, I’m positive I did a podcast about this when I was in London. It was over a year and like 3 or 4 months ago. Almost a year and a half was the last time we had any issues.

It’s funny, because at the time Clickfunnels had been built on a database company called Clear DB was the name of it. And we were kind of outgrown them and we knew that and we were trying to move over to the other servers and we were trying to move and they wouldn’t let us, they basically had handcuffed us saying, “No, we don’t want you to move your data and if you do it’s going to have to go this other way and you’re going to have down time for 3 or 4 days.” Whatever.

So as we were getting closer and closer to what became the first day our servers crashed, things started working less and less and more issues and more hiccups. It was just their company couldn’t handle what we were putting through to them. And at that time we had about 10 thousand members so we wanted to shift over but couldn’t and couldn’t.

I was actually speaking at an event in London with my family, so I was in a plane flying to London, when I landed in London I figured out how to get international phone, which is not as easy as you’d think. Look at my phone and basically get there and realize Clickfunnels is down. Messaging my team and they’re freaking out, everyone’s freaking out and it was just like, “huh.”

We didn’t know the issue, but basically, luckily on my team Ryan Montgomery and Todd Dickerson kind of called an audible, “Hey look, we can either wait for Clear DB to rebuild or we’ve got to rebuild this whole structure over on Amazon, where we want to move things.” So they made the decision to start rebuilding. So they jumped into it and rebuilt, basically the whole database structure of Clickfunnels over here in Amazon. And then started restoring entire Clickfunnels database from an old backup. Not old backup, backup that had been, I think we back up every 20 minutes or 30 minutes or 10 minutes, whatever it is, and restored it from backup.

Ended up, I think we were down for 12 hours, which was insane. People were ready to kill me. Luckily I was in London, no one could find me. But it was tough. Luckily because our developers had the foresight to rebuild instead of waiting, it ended up taking 3 weeks to restore our servers. So we would have been down for 3 weeks if it hadn’t been for amazing people. I remember when I got there, Facebook was blowing up, my messages. Everything was blowing up and people were angry and I was like, “What do I do?”

I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been in this situation before when literally 10’s of thousands of people’s lives and livelihood depended on us and what we were doing. It was a scary, scary situation. At first I was like, well maybe I’ll make a video and kind of try to calm the storm. Make them feel good. But I was like, you know what? No. I’m pissed, they’re pissed. This is not a good situation, this is not acceptable for us, it’s not acceptable for our upstream providers. So instead in the hotel room I had my kids go in the bathroom and try to be quiet and I recorded, this is pre Facebook Live, so I recorded a video with my phone and I didn’t clean it up or polish it. I said, “Look, this is what’s happening.” And I was pissed and people felt it. And I posted that in our Facebook group.

And what came from that was amazing. We had hundreds of people come and comment on our site. Basically like, “Look, we’re here for you.” And they fought hard for us and our guys luckily got things up within 12 hours. We were back stable. And what was interesting was because of that we learned a bunch of things. And because of that we were able to move to a new server which was awesome. Things became more stable and then we spent the next 5 or 6 months just working on stability, which if you remember there wasn’t a lot of new features that came out in that time because we were focusing on building this back end structure making sure that never happened again.

And it didn’t for a year and 4 months. And then today it happened again. So the first thing is like, what in the world? Was it our infrastructure? We thought we had built things in a way, looking at server recourses, we had the ability to probably give out ten times where we’re at right now and still be fine. As of today, so this is a year and a half later, we’re at 30 thousand members right now. So we have 3 times as many people using the system, 3 times as many people’s lives are affected when we go down. So we go down and we’re looking on, from a server standpoint we were fine. We weren’t taxing the servers more than we should be, so we tried to figure that out and dig deeper.

Finally we figured out it was Amazon’s….something to do with them. They were the issue. So it was like this really weird thing where we were helpless. We can’t do anything, they have to fix it on their side. And their service isn’t typically the best, we actually just upgraded from the, I don’t know the $1000 a month service plan to $15000 a month service plan. So now we’ve got direct lines to all the backend developers. So we were able to upgrade that for the future. But we were kind of stuck. We don’t know what to do. What do you do?

So while we’re waiting for them to fix it, our guys were like, “Okay well let’s rebuild.” And they start going to work and it was just so cool to watch them in crisis mode. They didn’t sit there and do nothing. They said, “Okay, alright. What are our options? How many contingency plans do we have?” And they went and executed the first one and I watched as they tried and failed. Try the next one, failed. Try the next one, failed. And it kept going and going and finally they figured out something to get it live again. And this time we were down for 4 hours, which is the longest we’ve been down since the other one.

But they got it up and working again before the Amazon team was able to figure out the issues on their side. Now we’re communicating with them and they’re fixing the stuff on their side. And this time is kindo f the same thing. What do I do? I have all this fear. We’ve got 40 thousand people in our Facebook group, its our only means of communication I have with our audience. People in the Facebook group were like, “Why didn’t you email us.” I’m like, “We use Clickfunnels as well. We can’t log into our email. We’re in the same problem you are. We have status.clickfunnels.com page, we’ve got the Facebook group and most people on the Facebook group are like, that’s the only channel we have to communicate.”

So we decided to quickly do a Facebook live and let people know this was happening and be very aware. Again not trying to sugar coat things. In fact people messaged me, “Are you pissed or are you sick? I can’t tell.” I’m like, “A little bit of both right now, to be completely honest.” But we did that and then an hour later when we had more updates, we did another Facebook Live for updates. Then an hour later we were back live and kind of shared that as well. What’s interesting as you watch people that are, the message, the overwhelming thought was the fact that people appreciated our communications.

It was interesting, I remember about 6 months ago Lead Pages went down for about 18 or 19 hours if I remember right. We were watching their server logs and they were down for almost a full day. And they did the opposite. They went radio silent and didn’t say anything to anybody. Didn’t message, didn’t talk about it. It was the opposite and I know a lot of people left Lead Pages that day because of that. And I’m sure, unfortunately we’re going to lose people from Clickfunnels. But I had other people message me in the forum that said, “Hey I haven’t joined Clickfunnels yet, but after seeing your communication throughout the day, I’m now joining. “ So I think we’ll gain a lot of people as well.

It’s just one of those things. It’s kind of, for a lot of us, for me, it’s my first time being a real CEO and trying to figure out these things and I think what I’ve found from this experience is a couple of things. First one is over communication is key. People are okay if there’s problems happening as long as they know about them and you validate it. Number two I think that my initial response when people would complain on Facebook is I want to be very defensive.

I had people who were like, “Hey, Clickfunnels is down. I lost hundreds of dollars. Do I get a free month. I want you to pay that money back.” The defensive Russell, wrestler Russell wants to fight everybody he sees. You know what? Dude, the second you start paying me, right now you’re paying $97 a month to use our entire platform. The same thing that in the past was costing me 20 to 30 thousand dollars a month to run on our own. For a $100 you’re paying for that. As soon as you’re willing to give me 25% of all the money you make from us, then I’m willing to give you back money when we’re down for an hour or two.”

I just, in fact, I even started commenting multiple times that. And then I’m like no, I can’t. That’s not the right response. I think us as a team we all wanted to get defensive because we’re doing our best. It’s not even our fault. It’s Amazon’s fault. Amazon’s not refunding my money, I guarantee that. In fact, we’re spending more to be able to actually get answers from them. It’s so frustrating and multiple times I wanted to do that, so I messaged my team, everyone on support. “People are upset, and they have every right to be. I’m upset, they’re upset and we cannot be defensive. That’s going to cause, that’s just the wrong thing. It doesn’t help anybody. We have to have empathy. Empathy’s the only thing that’s right in this situation.”

So when people on Facebook complain and send me, mouthing off, by default I want to say, I tried to go to everybody and say, “Look, that sucks. I’m so sorry. It’s not okay. We’re not okay with it. You shouldn’t be okay with it. We apologize. We’re sorry.” And try to bring empathy to the situation as opposed to where we naturally go. I think that was a big part of it. Communication, I think empathy is big.

And I think the third thing is understanding. A lot of the things I talk to you guys about in the last year or so and what the new book is about is really when you build a culture of people where it’s more than just…..the best way to explain it in one of our masterminds is a dude who’s super cool named Noah. Noah in one of the things said, “Because I’ve bought into you, Russell and I’ve bought into Clickfunnels, I see all your competitors pop out. I see them in my Facebook feed, I see the emails. I look at them for less than a second, just long enough to laugh, then I close it down. Because I bought into you.”

And I think that reason why the community is doing okay through something like this and why we’re able to recover from something like this is because we’re not just a product, we try to become more than that. We’ve tried to become a community, tried to build a family, tried to not just give you guys the tool, but the training and the platform and everything else that ties into that. It’s because of that, again on the same side I’ve talked about before, when we were building Clickfunnels, I didn’t want everyone to say, “That’s Russell’s company.” I want them to say, “This is our company.” It works both ways. When we have down time I don’t want people, I want people saying, “We have down time, this is something we’re all struggling with.” And we look at it more as a community as opposed to us, not us versus them, but you know, here’s the service provider and here’s us.

I think for all of us, the more you can focus on that. You’ve heard me talk about that a lot in this podcast, but you’ll hear me talk about it more when the book comes out. Because that’s what the whole first section is all about. How are we building a following of people that are part of something bigger that you’re creating as opposed to someone who’s buying your product. And I think that those are the 3 things I kind of learned and more reaffirmed of today as we went through this mini disaster.

So hopefully, I hope to see you guys because it may not be today, might not be tomorrow or a year from now, or maybe it will never happen. But if and when it does happen, those are some of the tools that have helped us to survive now 2 disasters in the 2 and a half years we’ve been live. Hopefully if any more come in the future it will help us to wave the, survive the storm as well.

But I just wanted to thank you guys all for being listeners of the podcast and I want to thank you guys for being members of Clickfunnels. If you’re not using Clickfunnels yet, hopefully this is just one more reason for you guys to come try it out. Because we really do care. We’re here for you and we’re not leaving. We’re not going anywhere. So if you’re not a member yet, go to Clickfunnels.com, get your free 2 week trial, test us out and see what everyone is talking about.

This week Eli said we passed 30 thousand active members, which is a huge milestone for us and our goal is to get 100 thousand by the end of this year. And obviously the only way we’re going to do that on our side is to become better. Become a better infrastructure, become better people, become better teachers, become better marketers, become better at the fulfillment side, become better at on-boarding and I think that this was a really good chance for me and for my team to look at that. Look at what happened and make some really good choices based on that and some decisions and build it stronger and better so that it keeps getting better for you guys every single day.

The one big difference I would say between our platform and anything else that I’ve ever seen in our industry is just because of the success we’ve had so far, we’re able to put a lot of time, energy, money back into the infrastructure and make it better and better and better. So that’s why hopefully you feel safe and comfortable building your business and your platform here with Clickfunnels.

So with that said, I hope that helps you guys. I hope that in your time of trial, as the leader, the entrepreneur, the CEO or whatever it is your role is, that some of these lessons will help you and give you that foundation you need so that you can wave the storms. And that’s about it. With that said, someone’s ringing my doorbell, I’m going to check out who it is. Appreciate you all for listening. Talk to you all soon.

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Highlights from my keynote speech at Affiliate Summit.

On today’s episode Russell talks about going to the Affiliate Summit and trying to get 150 affiliates excited about Clickfunnels. He explains what he told them, and tells you how to be a part of his affiliate bootcamp program.

Here are some of the cool things you should listen for in this episode.

Find out why Russell had a booth at the Affiliate Summit, even though he hates booth events.
Learn some tips and tricks Russell has that will help you be successful as an affiliate.
And find out how you can follow sign up as Clickfunnels super affiliate to make a ton of money and be able to retire in 100 days.

So listen below to find out what affiliatebootcamp.com is all about.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. I just got out of the airport, back to Boise Idaho, sitting in my car and it is so cold, I am dying. It’s literally, I think zero degrees, maybe negative one or two right night. I have a light jacket on so if I’m chattering during this episode, that’s why. I’m driving back to the office, then back home and I just wanted to talk to you guys for a little bit.

So I was at Affiliate Summit yesterday, which some of you guys were there. Which is kind of fun, I met some of you guys there. Affiliate Summit is a really strange event. It’s an event, it’s not even an event, I don’t even know. The events I go to, that we put on, Funnel Hacking Live, for those of you coming to Funnel Hacking Live, it’s like a rock concert. Tons of energy and emotion and it’s a really, really fun thing.

Here it’s like, a whole bunch of people have booths, we had a booth. Then there’s probably like 500 other booths. Then people come and pay to walk around the booths. Then they have little break out rooms of 100 people at a time, and you can go to the break out room to hear the little speakers. So I don’t normally speak much, but Affiliate Summit was a big deal because a long time ago I went to it and I was like, “This is so cool, these guys are affiliates who are making money.” I thought it was really cool so I wanted to, I thought it would be cool to speak at. I didn’t realize what exactly that meant until we got here.

I was like, oh wow so there’s 6 thousand people at the event, but the biggest room they have holds about 150 people. They’re like, “Yep.” And people have to pay extra to come to your session. I’m like, this is the stupidest business model I’ve ever heard of. Anyway, whatever.

So the first day we walked around the booth and I walk by and this little guy comes and grabs me, and I’m like, “Hey, how’s it going?” and I recognized him, you know that feeling when you’re like I know you somehow, but I don’t know how I know you and it’s kind of awkward. I’m trying to not awkwardly look down to your nametag to read your name because then you know that I forgot who you were. So I’m just like, “hey!” We were talking, and after a while I realized who he is. He was the media buyer we used for Neuracel, he’s the one who took Neuracel and blew it up over.

I was like, “oh man, how’s it going?” and he’s like, “I left that company, I went over here to this other company. Dude, I gotta thank you for introducing me to Trey.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” and he’s like, “Trey Lewellen.” and I’m like, “Yeah?” and he’s like, “When you introduced him to us, he had this really weird flashlight offer that no one thought was going to work and I tried to blow him off four or five times, but finally he was so persistent. He prepaid all this stuff, so I had an affiliate run his offer and dude, you probably don’t know this, it was the biggest affiliate offer in the history of affiliate marketing. That offer did over $10 million in the first 90 days. There’s never been an offer that big.”

I was like, “Dude, that is insane. It’s interesting, I didn’t get a piece of any of that, I introduced you. I could introduce you to a lot more people, but man if you don’t, I got nothing out of that.” I’m just kidding, I was joking with him. But it’s kind of true. At least you should have sent me a Christmas present or something, I don’t know.

Anyway, that was kind of cool. He looked at me and said, “Dude, Russell, do you understand what you guys have done with Clickfunnels?” “What do you mean?” “You’ve changed marketing forever. You’ve changed affiliate marketing. You’ve changed everything.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Pre Clickfunnels, I had maybe 5 or 6 guys come to me that had an offer that we could run. Now I’ve got 16 year old kids with offers that are converting and they’re making millions of bucks. That never happened. You’ve literally given everybody the ability, everybody equal playing ground, everybody can be in this business.”

And I was just like, dang. That was two cool compliments in one thing. I was like, “You don’t have to pay me any percentage of that 10 million bucks now, because that was awesome.” So that was kind of cool, I wanted to share with you guys.

Then we had our Clickfunnels booth that was really, really cool. We’re not a big booth company yet. I hate booths, this is why. Every other type of marketing on planet earth, we are very big on. If we can’t see the ROI, the immediate return on investment, track able, then we don’t do it. Booths you can’t. It’s like, okay we have this booth. But it’s like, all our competitors are at these shows and if we’re not there, they’re talking trash about us, we assume. So we gotta kind of be there, it’s frustrating.

So we had the booth, it was awesome. Bunch of my favorite people were there working the booth, it was pretty cool. Then I had a chance to speak, the topic they gave me was affiliate funnels. I had 18 minutes to speak. I think they’re trying to be ted talks except they’re not. So I had 18 minutes to speak on this thing, so everyone comes into the room initially. The speaker right before me, I was sitting in the room because I wanted to see what was going to happen, and there were literally two people sitting in the room. I was like, are you kidding me? No one’s going to be coming to hear me, this is so awkward.

Because people had to pay extra. You pay to go to the booths, and pay extra to hear to a speaker. Anyway, I’m like, no one’s going to come. So my whole team is trying, I’m like tell everyone. Try to get people to come to my thing. Because I don’t want to be the only talking to myself, that’s really awkward. But luckily, they went and got some people. We ended up with probably close to 100 people in the room. They said it was the biggest audience of any of the breakout sessions, so that was kind of cool, I guess. Of 5 or 6 thousand supposed attendees, we got 100 to sit in a room for 18 minutes.

So then I get in this room and it’s set up so weird. There’s this stage, but there’s a pole, there’s all these chairs, it was so stuffy and corporatey. Ugh. I hate this corporatey, crappy stuff. So I start my slides up and jump down off the stage and come out in the front. I’m like, “I’m not standing behind there guys. We’re hanging out down here.” And I started it and give my whole presentation, and it was funny because I was trying to get this audience to be excited about life and the fact that we’re in the greatest time in the history of the world. I’m like, “You guys are affiliate marketers. Do you realize what that means? You can and should be making millions of dollars. And you don’t have to go to college, and you don’t have to have annoying bosses and all the crap that comes. You guys are living the dream.”

And they’re all just sitting there like, “Blah.” So unexcited. So I spent the 18 minutes trying to get them to smile. I’m telling jokes trying to get fun and exciting. I hate when people’s energy is that low and it’s hard to get them to, I don’t think it’s the people. I think it’s the environment. The whole event is so corporatey and it just kind of ruins it. I was telling people, “you come to one of our events and it’s a lot closer to a rock concert than it is this, at all.” I hated school, so we’re not doing school. We are doing something that’s actually conducive to learning and emotional, I want people crying in our audience. We have that. I want transformations, and that doesn’t happen with school.

I don’t know about you but, I cried at school but it wasn’t because I had a life changing moment, it was because I wanted to kill myself because all the crap they taught was useless. So that’s my…where this whole thing happened. So I’m trying to think with these guys. There’s two slides and I showed my first slide. I was like, “I have kind of a unique angle.” At an affiliate summit, just so you know, there’s the vendors who have products or there’s the networks, the affiliate networks, where they’re selling a bunch of products. And then there’s the other side, which are the actual affiliates. So I knew there were two audiences.

So I was like, “How many of you guys are affiliates, how many of you guys are networks, how many are both?” It was kind of split down the middle. I was like, “I come from a unique perspective, because first off, I’m a really successful affiliate. This is a Ferrari I won in an affiliate contest.” I showed them the Ferrari I won, “But I’m also a really successful vendor, network. In fact, that same Ferrari I gave away two years later. I won a Ferrari as an affiliate and I’ve given away that Ferrari to an affiliate. So I’ve been on both sides of this game. So I have a kind of unique perspective.” And I wanted to show them, this is how simple this business could be.

So this is the moral for this for you guys. Those of you guys who are listening and who want to be affiliates. I talked about simple affiliate funnels and I said basically, this is the process. The first thing is you got to find a hot offer. Find what people are already buying. So let’s just say, for you it could be whatever. Something you’re excited and passionate about because potentially you’re going to be writing about it and hopefully someday if you are a good affiliate and make money there, you’re probably going to set up camp there and build an actual business and create your own products and services. But you have to figure out, find a hot offer. So boom, people are buying this thing, maybe it’s weight loss supplements or maybe it’s info product on dating or whatever it is you’re passionate about.

You find the hot offer that peope are already buying and that’s kind of the first step. And then let’s say they have a video sales letter. They got some way they’re selling it, I want to watch that video and try to figure out what’s the one most interesting curiosity based thing in this sales process. So I’m watching it trying to figure out. So I watch the whole video. Maybe in the video they talk about, the example I showed was the diabetic, way to end diabetic pain. So I watched the video and in there they’re talking about this shake they make that diabetics can drink in the morning and make it so their hands don’t tingle.

I’m like, boom. That’s the one thing, intriguing and interesting. So I took that one thing in the video, pulled it out and made a headline. “Discover the weird shake you can drink in the morning that will kill diabetes nerve pain for the first four hours of the day.” Something like that. So for diabetics that saw it would be like, “That’s kind of cool.” So I turned that headline, the unique thing I pulled out of the video, make it a headline and put it on a squeeze page. “If you want to know this one weird shake I make, give me your email address.” So that’s the funnel’s one page.

So then I go and advertize on Facebook or whatever. “Hey diabetics, here’s one weird shake that you can….” And they see the ad and click on it, go to my landing page, see the headline, put their email address in. And after they put the email address in, guess what happens. It redirects them to the affiliate offer, they ten watch the video that gives them that one cool thing. And if I set it up right in Clickfunnels, it attracts my affiliate links, when they buy it, I get paid from the product. It’s so simple. Yet, we all try to over complicate affiliate marketing. So the one other thing that kind of, I guess it’s the layer of complexity, but it shouldn’t be. A lot of times, you’re not going to be profitable up front, because you’re an affiliate. So an affiliate, you’re making half the money.

That means the other half, the vendors getting, so unless their offer is really converting high, which sometimes they do, you may not break even immediately. You might spend a dollar on Facebook ads and make 50 cents. So what you gotta do next is then that person gave you their email address, now you build an email sequence. So maybe the first three email in the email sequence are like, “Hey, did you watch the video about the cool shake? Watch it here.” And your second one is like, “Here’s a testimonial of some dude who took the magic shake and their feet don’t hurt anymore. Watch the video.” Keep pushing back, two or three emails, pushing back to that original video.

And every email in that sequence will some to come back and actually watch the video and increase your conversions. And it’ll increase how much money you make off of that, off of each person you got to come through. Then after two or three emails you transition to a secondary product. One thing I do if I’m going as an affiliate in a new market, I’m not going to just find one hot offer. I’m going to find 4 or 5 that complement each other. So we have the supplement, an info product, coaching program, an ecommerce physical product, whatever. I find 5 or 6 different things that that client would want. And then in this email sequence I’m introducing different products.

“Okay, you tried the supplements, you saw the video about the weird shakes. Hopefully you bought that info product, because it will help you a lot. But the next thing is there’s these really cool supplements over here that have been known to lower nerve pain, you should buy these.” I have two or three emails talking about the nerve pain supplements. Then from there. transition to “If you’re still suffering from nerve pain you may need ‘blah’” and I find 5 or 6 different products to serve them and I build email sequences that sell each of those products.

When I was showing everybody the thing, the cool thing is when somebody comes in, and hopefully you guys are able to visualize this. If not, I have a way for you guys to kind of see this in action here in a second. If you’re getting lost, that’s okay I’ll show you where to go to see this. Hopefully you’re seeing this. You pay a dollar in Facebook ads, they come in and opt in. Somewhere in the sequence on day one, on average I make 30 cents per offer, day two I’m up to 45 cents. Day three I’m up to 60. Day 5 I’m up to 80 cents. Day 7 I averaged 90 cents. And by day 8 is my breakeven point. That’s where I’ve made my dollar back. So what’s cool is you gotta figure out, where’s your breakeven point?

We’ll look at that and say, on average in this funnel we’re spending a dollar on ads on Facebook or Youtube, or wherever you’re buying your ads from. But by day 8 I’ve made my buck back, it’s breakeven. Then guess what happens after day 8? Day 9 and beyond? Day 9 is magic because anything you make from day 9 and beyond is pure profit in your pocket. And that’s the magic in affiliate marketing.

It’s like building, it’s like an ATM machine. I want to create some money. I put a dollar in advertising in, I get two dollars back out. Sometimes it doesn’t always happen immediately, at point of sale. It might happen over 3 days, or 7 days or 10 days, but find out what’s your breakeven point. Now I know, hey I’m going to put a dollar in on Monday, by Friday I’ll have my dollar back and then everything I make Saturday, Sunday, Monday and the rest of my life, pure profit. That’s affiliate funnels. That’s what I showed those guys. Pretty cool right?

So for those of you guys who may have gotten lost in the explanation, it’s easier when I have a whiteboard because I can draw pictures, and circles and arrows. Those of you guys who have been with me for a while know that that’s what I like doing. There’s that. If you want to see me kind of sketch this out, I did a video that kind of explains this. You can see it for free if you just go to affiliatebootcamp.com. Oh I almost got hit by a Sherman Williams paint truck. I survived. No worries, you guys.

Alright, if you go to affiliatebootcamp.com, there’s a video that talks about how to become a Clickfunnels super affiliate, and I walk through how to basically sell, because if you get 100 people to sign up for Clickfunnels, your commission on that is $4000 a month recurring, and it’s a car payment. So the whole video is how you’re going to retire as a Clickfunnels affiliate within the next 100 days. How to sell, basically get one person a day to sign up for Clickfunnels for 100 days, at that point you got a $4000 a month residual check from us, and you’ve got a car, which is amazing.

So affiliatebootcamp.com will show you that process. So when you opt in for free the next page is a video from me where I kind of explain this, I just talked about. I talked about creating the squeeze, talking about opting in, talking about that sequence that’s happening, what your breakeven points are. It’ll kind of map the whole thing out for you. If you need, even if you don’t need more details, you should still go through that. In fact, if you have an affiliate program, or you want to run an affiliate program, you should go funnel hack that. That funnels been building our affiliate program really well for us. It’s at affiliatebootcamp.com.

Yeah, that’s just kind of another way if you want to look at this a bit deeper. So that’s the magic guys. That’s what I shared this weekend, the affiliate bootcamp. If you guys are, if you listen to this right away, you will find this video. If you listen to it 5 years from now it will be hard. But I did Facebook Live it, so if you go to my Facebook page, which is facebook.com/russellbrunsonhq there is a video, we Facebook Lived the presentation, so you can see it there too if you want. See me trying to get these tired, non-excited affiliates as excited as humanly possible by walking them through this process.

But yeah, it was pretty fun. Anyway, I’m back home. I’m almost to the office, I’m going to get a couple of things done and head home, see my wife and kids and get back to the real world. So appreciate you guys all, thanks so much for listening. If you’re enjoying Marketing In Your Car, please go to iTunes and subscribe, share, comment, all that fun stuff. And if you do that, I’d really appreciate it. So thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye.

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The thing that’s probably keeping you from actually getting what you want.

On this episode Russell talks about the first time he met Tony Robins and what he learned about himself when driving in a car with him. He talks about the importance of not being driven by significance.

Here are some of the interesting things in this episode:

Find out how Russell felt meeting Tony Robins for the first time.
Hear how Tony helped Russell realize what drives him, and why it needed to change.
And Find out why being driven by significance will lead to a miserable life, and why you should strive to be driven by love and connection instead.

So listen below to find out how Russell has changed his perspective since meeting Tony Robins.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. It is so cold here. Insanely cold. All of the ice, or the snow is now shards of glass and it’s crazy. That was the noise, if you’re wondering why. I was driving over the shards of glass in my car.

Alright, so today I have a very special message and this one’s important for everybody including me. Alright so I’ll tell the background of this story. A lot of you guys know I talk about Tony Robins a lot. He’s coming to Funnel Hacking Live, I’ve been a big Tony fan for forever, as long as I can remember. And the first time I met him was a really cool story.

So I went to UPW, actually let me step back. What happened is I was at my house one day working when all the sudden my phone rang, I picked it up and it was somebody on Tony’s team saying, “Hey, Tony Robins want to meet you. Can he meet you today?” and I was like, “Is he in Boise?” He’s like, “No, he’s in Salt Lake, can you come over. He wants to meet you.” I was like, “I’m in Boise.” And he’s like, “Oh, I thought you lived in Salt lake, that won’t work then. He’s going to be in Tron the next week doing UPW. Can you come and be his guest and then he’ll have a chance to meet you there.” I was like alright, how cool is that, yes.

So I booked my everything to go to UPW the next week, and I’d never been to a Tony event, I didn’t know what it was. I assumed it was like a marketing event. So I showed up with my backpack and laptop and I was going to sit in the back and take notes. And I get there and people are jumping and dancing. If you’ve ever been to a Tony event it’s closer to a rock concert than a seminar. Anyway, I was not expecting that. By the end of day one you walk on fire, day two I had shin splints, I lost my voice completely. That’s how crazy it is. So if you haven’t gone yet, you should really, really go.

At the event, first thing he teaches this really cool concept called the six human needs and I don’t have time to go through all of them right now, but I need to touch on it, because it’s important for the next part of it. So basically the six human needs, there’s four human needs of the body. There’s certainty, humans want to be certain. And then there’s variety, you want things to be crazy. Those are two needs that kind of conflict with each other, but they’re both there. And then there’s significance, we want to feel great about ourselves. And then there’s love and connection. I think I’ve done a podcast in the past about this, but I could go on for, I could teach a two day seminar just on that because it’s so cool. And then there’s the needs of the spirit, which are growth and contribution which is a whole other….anyway, we could go deep but I want you to understand that there’s those four.

So significance, love and connection, certainty and variety. Those are the four that we have to get met in our life. And there’s one for you. Just so you guys know, there’s one that’s your driving force in life. You’re either significance driven, certainty driven, variety driven, or you are love and connection driven, and it’s interesting.

So I’m going to leave that there. I wish I could go deeper, but I can’t in this podcast, because I won’t make it to the office, it’ll be a long call. So anyway, so I’m at UPW, he teaches this stuff, I’m fascinated by it and then the next day I’m supposed to meet him. So day two of the event, Tony’s not facilitating it, there’s somebody else facilitating it. So I started getting text messages from Tony’s assistant. “Hey Tony wants to meet with you in an hour.” I’m like, “Alright.” Then I get a text like 45 minutes later, “It’s going to be two hours from now.”

Anyway, throughout the whole day, I think our meeting was supposed to be at 10 in the morning, I was getting texts every 30 minutes for 10 hours. They kept pushing and pushing and pushing and finally I get a text, “Okay, Tony is ready to meet you. Here is the address.” This is pre-uber and I’m like, “Okay.” So I jump in a taxi and give them the address and they’re like, “This is like 45 minutes away.” I’m like, are you serious, is Tony not in the hotel?

So I get in the car and we’re driving and I’m hoping we’re going to the right place. This is going to be really embarrassing if I’m….So the taxi driver takes me to this hotel, drops me off, I text him, “Okay, I’m here.” And then this guy texts back, his name is Jay Garrity, and Jay would, just to kind of put it in perspective, so you feel my nervousness of this situation, Jay used to be the right hand man for I’m blanking on his name right now, for Mitt Romney when he was doing the first political campaign, the first time he ran for president. He was Romney’s right hand man, and then Tony hired him after that. In fact, most of Tony’s team at the time were old Romney advisors, which is kind of interesting.

So we get to the hotel, Jay Garrity comes down from the elevator, very professional, the opposite of me. He’s like “Mr. Robins is not ready to meet you yet, so sit in the lobby and wait.” So I’m like okay. So we’re sitting in the lobby waiting and it’s almost like secret service, that’s what it felt like. Jay kept looking at his phone, looking at his phone. Not ready, not ready. Probably sat there for another 45 minutes. Then all the sudden he’s like, ‘Okay, Mr. Robins is ready to meet you.”

We stand up and I was like, “Ahh.” Super intense and crazy. We jump in the elevator, go up to the floor, start walking down this hall really fast. We get to this room, the door’s open, there’s two security guards on both sides inside the room. I’m like, what in the world. We walk through the security guards and all the sudden Tony, this giant of a man, walks in and says, “Russell, welcome!” and gives me a huge hug. I’m like, “What.” Super crazy.

Then he has me come sit down and he’s made me dinner, you know someone made me dinner. And at the time he was pure vegetarian, so its like this dinner that was the most amazing thing in the world and it was pure vegetarian. I was like, “I could be a vegetarian if I had someone to cook this way.” It was amazing. Then he took out his recorder, clicked record on it, set it on the table, opened up a journal and started drilling me for an hour, asked me question after question after question. It was insane, I’ve never been more nervous in my whole life.

Drills me for an hour, we’re done. We finish eating, we talk for a little bit and then he’s like, “I gotta go back to the event.” So we go down and jump in this big suburban. Someone’s driving. Tony and I sit in the back and talk and it was interesting while we were talking, he was talking about a deal he was thinking about doing with someone in our market. I won’t say his name because most of you guys would know who this person is. He was like, “I don’t think I’m going to do the deal because he’s very significance driven.” I was like, “Huh, interesting.”

And then after he said that, I started thinking, at first I’m like, oh man that sucks for that guy. And then I’m like, wait, what drives me? Am I significance driven? Tony can see into my soul. I’m freaking out, what does he see about me? What’s driving me? I was so paranoid and panicky, it was crazy.

Then we got to the event. Tony’s like, ‘I gotta go, call ya later.” Jumps out of the car, goes into the hotel, and I’m standing in the front lobby like, “Huh.” That was the most intense three hours of my life. It was just crazy. But that thing he said, “Very significance driven.” So I started thinking, what does that mean? Basically it comes back to the four human needs. One of those is the driver for you that drives most of the decisions in your life. But this person he said it was significance.

I was like, apparently that’s bad. If Tony didn’t want to work with this guy because he’s significance driven. I was kind of confused at first. Then a couple months later I went to Date with Destiny. If you go to Date with Destiny, it’s a six day event that Tony has, it’s amazing. It’s like UPW times ten. In fact, I feel bad for people who go to UPW and only get to walk on water because you’re missing the depth of what Tony actually has to offer.

So I go to this next event, and the events there’s so much stuff he covers. But if you look at the one, the biggest things you work with at the event. He helps you identify the six human needs, which one is currently the driving force. And for most people it’s either significance, or certainty. I wish we could get into a couple hour talk on this, because it would make more sense, but he also said, the quality of your life is 100% dependent on your ability to, how do I say it right? It’s 100% tied to the need, your driving need.

So if your driving need is significance, that’s going to make you miserable. Whereas your driving need is love and connection, the opposite, then you’re going to have a great life. Same thing with the opposite, if your driving need is certainty, while it’s important, it’s a need we have, if that’s the driving force in your life, you always have to be certain about everything, you’re going to be miserable.

So it was basically helping you identify what is your driving need. Then learning how to shift that to the other thing. If you’re significance driven, learn, teaching how to be love and connection driven. If you are certainty driven, shifting it to variety. Because the quality of your life is going to be completely dependent upon your ability to have variety and love and connection. That’s what gives you a good quality of life, not the other two.

But most people, it’s these other things that drive them. And that’s what’s interesting. I was listening to that and for me, I’m and I think, most entrepreneurs, I’m definitely heavily driven by significance. In fact, now that I’m so aware of it, I hate it. In fact, in the world I work in, most, not most, but the majority of the people that I work with, the reason why they are in the guru business or whatever is because they are significance driven. And that’s why I always hear people, you get to know who these people are, and you don’t actually like them because they’re driven by this thing, no one knows, they don’t know what the cause is, but it’s because they’re driven by significance.

I’ve been doing a deal with a person who are trying to, someone who I highly respected and that’s why I’ve done this deal, I’ve never met a human being on planet earth that’s more significance driven than this person. And it’s completely ruined the deal, it’s ruined the relationship so much so, this is someone that I idolized. This is someone that if you would’ve told me 5 years ago that I would have a chance to talk to them, I wouldn’t have believed it. And now I’m avoiding their texts, phone calls. One of the most annoying human beings on earth because the significance is such a driving, the only thing this person can see is significance. Everything is tied to his personal significance and it’s destroying him.

I looked at this business, the people around him and he’s destroyed everything because he’s so significance driven. As a person he’s still brilliant, but a miserable life. I can’t imagine it. And I have this struggle because it’s a constant thing for me, and I’m sure for a lot of us. Significance drives us, we feel that. That’s why we’re entrepreneurs, why we’re out there. Why we want to be onstage and write books. But I, because I’m aware, I try to check that all the time because I hate that. That’s the thing I actually hate about myself. I hate that I’m significance driven.

When people give me good compliments, I thrive off that. I love that. But then when I, after I feel that, it bugs me because I’m like, “No.” I love that, but I can’t and shouldn’t be significance driven. IT’s not a good quality of life. I need to be driven by love and connection, by variety, these other things that actually increase the quality of your life. Because connection, even if it’s not about “Look about how great I am.” It makes you feel good, but it doesn’t help anything else. Love and connection is where you’re using your tools, your gifts in a more meaningful way.

So I don’t know. For you guys, I just wanted to share some of that in a ten minute message, I wish I could go so much deeper. But start thinking about that stuff. What drives you? If your personal significance is the driving force for you, I’d recommend stepping back from that. And it’s always going to be there, but being aware of it, like, “Man, I am just doing this for significance to make me feel better?” and if that’s the main reason you’re doing something, it’s the wrong reason. If the reason is that you really care about people and you’re trying to give them something, you have this love and connection towards them, it’s just a better way to live. I think people will see it and notice it.

I hope people notice that for me. I, despite the fact that it’s a constant thing that’s there in front of me all the time, I’m constantly trying to check it and put it in the back and default to the love and connection, these other things because I know what’s important and what actually helps other people, not just your own ego. Ego is the enemy. I haven’t read the book yet, but I bought it and I bought the audible. There’s a book called Ego is the Enemy, I’m excited to read it because I think that’s what holds most of us back from true love and connection. From happiness, growth, from all the other things we want. I feel like, our ego and significance we’re craving is what holds us back from that.

And if we are aware of that at least we can do something about it. I wasn’t aware of it. I look at my career the first 5 or 6 years of my business, prior to meeting Tony, I was not aware of it and it drove me, and it drove me, and it hurt my marriage, it hurt my family life, it hurt my relationship with friends. There were a lot of issues and again, I’m so far from perfect. I still do things because of significance, and I hate it. But I’m aware of it now, and I try to not make decisions based on that. I try to make decisions based on love and connection. How will this help others as opposed to how does this put me on a pedestal?

And it’s been good, it’s been really good. The relationships that have come from it, because of that. I think our ability to affect change in people’s lives have been tenfold. And the interesting thing, this is the craziest thing about it. As I have tried to push away significance and focus on love and connection, I have become more relevant and it’s weird.

I’ve gotten significance by not going after it. It’s weird. This person I’m dealing with, this person, despite the fact that they’re brilliant, they’re no longer relevant in our market, which is insane based on who they are, what they’ve accomplished and done, there’s no relevancy. They’ve been driving and chasing after significance for so long, they’ve completely just destroyed all their relationships. Their market knows that it’s all about them. They’ve destroyed what they sought after. They have lost all significance, because they’ve been seeking after it. It’s so weird. Whereas if you don’t, you seek love and connection, you seek that change in other people, you seek that, you will get the significance you are trying to get as a byproduct of it. It’s so fascinating.

So I hope that helps somebody out there. It’s definitely helping me in being more aware of it as I’m watching it unfolding before me. If you want those things, that’s kind of the work around. Hope that helps you guys. I’m at the office working, I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

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A trick that my kids use to dominate the world.

On this episode Russell talks about his kids using “Yolo” to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do and how we can use that same mantra in our businesses to get rid of self doubt.

Here are some fun things in this episode:

Russell talks about his kids’ motivation to get out of the hot tub and run through feet of snow being just one word, “Yolo.”
Why Russell thinks that when you have inspiration you should use the phrase mantra to motivate you before the self doubt sets in.
And you’ll get to hear in their own words, what Russell’s kids’ think Yolo means to them.

So listen below to hear how Russell’s kids taught him about not letting self doubt ruin inspiration.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. Today I am actually sitting in my kitchen. The kitchen that all the wood is completely warped from our flood. All my wife and kids are out in the hot tub except for Norah who decided she didn’t want to hot tub. So we are standing here and I’m supposed to be feeding her dinner because she’s hungry, but instead she’s eating a popsicle. That is called good parenting, because it’s the only way to get her to stop crying. So yes, I should teach a parenting course someday. If your kids are crying, just give them a popsicle. Oh man, some days it’s really hard to be a parent. But those days you just give them a popsicle and it becomes easy again. Just kidding.

Parenting advice aside, because nobody wants that right now. But I do want to talk about something really super cool. Because we’re in the hot tub, it’s been snowing, Boise has been Boise Snowpocolypse, or whatever you want to call it. The last week we’ve had 3 or 4 feet of snow and then it rained another foot and everything was soaked, and my house was flooding. Oh and today we were filming a testimonial video in my front room and I walked on the carpet and the carpet is soaking wet and I looked at the wall and there’s water seeping behind the paint of our wall. Anyway, it’s a total disaster nightmare. Not gonna lie.

But the one nice thing is that the Hot tub is good no matter what. So we’re out in the hot tub in the snow, and we’ve pretty much hot tubbed everyday. Man, we had 5 snow days in a row, almost 10 days in a row between Christmas break and this and everything, we’ve been hot tubbing a lot. And it’s fun because the hot tub is surrounded by tons and tons and tons of snow. So the first day you hot tub everyone’s like, “Oooh it’s so cold.” And they’ll touch the snow a little bit and try little things. Take little snow balls and throw them at each other and then dive back into the water. Now it’s insane because they do these things, and this is kind of the point of today’s message.

So I was there yesterday with the kids and they’re jumping up and screaming and running around our house, which is a pretty long distance in the snow. First they were doing one lap, then two, then three. Now they’re doing four laps around the house and then they dive back into the water. And then they’re doing snow angels, front and back and then back in the water. And they’re running across the yard, onto the trampoline, doing snow angels on the trampoline and jumping and run back and dive in.

All these crazy things. Stuff that’s super painful and super crazy, and they keep doing them over and over again. And what’s interesting and this is the point, before they go, every single time, they’re like, “Hey, let’s do it.“ and they’re all like, “But it’s so cold.” And then Dallin, I think Dallin who started this, he’s the one, he always says, “Yolo.” And he jumps up and takes off.

So it’s like everyone’s freezing. No one wants to get in the cold snow, but then Dallin goes “Yolo.” jumps up, steps in the snow and sprints probably I don’t know 500 yards in the snow in around our house a bunch of times and then dives back in. I was like, “What are you, when you’re yelling, what are you yelling out?” he said, “Yolo.” I was like, “What does yolo mean?” “You only live once.” And then he goes, “Yolo.” And jumps up and takes off and runs out in the snow again.

I was kind of laughing, actually he said, “You only live once so spend it or live it stupidly.” I don’t know what it was, and then he takes off. So all the kids, every time they’re about to do something crazy that they normally wouldn’t do, they look at that challenge, run across the snow, do a snow angel, a front snow angel and back, three somersaults in the snow and run back and dive in. They sit there and you know when you want to do something cool, there’s that moment of like, “Huh, I can’t do that.” And the second that moment comes to them, they yell out “Yolo” and boom, they just go.

And I was like, how cool is that? This is way harder, what they’re doing, than what we’re trying to do in business every day. Yet, we come up with plan and this idea and this obstacle and we’re like, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” And all the sudden your brain starts talking to you and your brains like, “You can’t do that. You’re Russell Brunson, you barely graduated high school. You’re super awkward, when you talk people won’t know why you came to talk to people.” All these things start flooding into your mind.

What happens to most of us is we sit there like, “Man, you’re right. I am just Russell Brunson. I’m really not that good. I barely graduated from school. Yeah when I get in a group and I talk one on one with people I have no idea. I feel awkward, I don’t know what to say most of the time.” And all these thoughts keep flooding your head and if you listen to them long enough, you start believing them and you have so much fear and anxiety when there are things there, you just don’t take that action.

And I think what’s interesting, is that they’re flooding their mind with, as soon as those things start coming up, “Yolo.” Boom, they just take off and they go. I think for all of us, if we start doing that think how powerful that would be. If just every time something comes to us, like an idea, when we have that idea, that inspiration, and I think those inspirations aren’t just from our brain. I wish that I was that smart, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s coming from on high. I think that you can call it whatever you want, for me it’s my Heavenly Father. I think we are inspirations we get from him. “Hey you should try this thing. Hey you should take this leap of faith. Hey you should go talk to this person. Hey you should create this. Hey you should test…..” Whatever those things are.

Those are gifts that we’re getting and it’s like, okay go do it and all the fear and self doubt comes in and stops it most of the time. If we start becoming like my insane kids are, and the second you have the idea and you know it’s right, because you know it pretty quick. Should I do this, yes I should. Oh but…..as soon as that, right before that but comes off, yell out at the top of your lungs, if you’re in a spot where you can, if not say it in your head as loud as you can, “Yolo.” Y O L O, you only live once. “Yolo.” And just go, just run, just sprint, don’t even think because once that inspirations coming to you, it’s there and if you believe like I do, it was given to you from a higher power, whatever that might be for you, then you’re hesitation to that is, and I believe in an adversary. There’s God and there’s the opposite side of that, there’s Satan or whatever you want to call it, that tries to take things from us.

So as soon as you have this inspiration, “This is what I need to do.” The adversary is going to come and start self doubt and try to keep you from doing that thing that could change your life and change other people’s lives. So I think one of the most powerful things we can do is yell out, “Yolo.” The second we get inspiration and start running, just sprint.

Ellie just walked in, I’m going to ask her. Hey Ellie, what does Yolo mean to you guys when you say “Yolo” and start running in the snow?

Ellie: I don’t know.

Russell: You don’t know? What does it stand for?

Ellie: I can’t remember.

Russell: You don’t….

Ellie: Wait….you only live once or something like that.

Russell: You only live once. Then tell us some of the crazy stuff you guys are doing after you yell Yolo.

Ellie: we were walking in the snow.

Russell: She’s being all shy now. Let me ask Bowen. Bowen just came in. Hey Bowen, what does Yolo mean to you?

Bowen: You only live once.

Russell: So what are the things you do when you yell Yolo, what do you do?

Bowen: Dallin says spend it, you only have one life so spend it stupidly. He actually told me what it says and I’m like, oh that makes sense. (kind of inaudible, this is a guess.)

Russell: Then what do you do, you say Yolo, then what kind of crazy things do you do?

Bowen: Jump in the snow, ankles hurt to death.

Ellie: It’s fun.

Russell: It’s fun? How many times did you run around the house?

Bowen: 5 times.

Russell: 5 times.

Ellie: When our cousins were here I went two times around the house.

Russell: Does Yolo help you to not freak out when it gets cold? What does it help you do?

Bowen: It kills you.

Russell: Oh it kills you. So Yolo is the challenge. There it is from the mouths of kids. So that’s what I want to recommend, start thinking about that, think Yolo. When you get that inspiration that you know what’s right, before the self doubt, the adversary, whatever it is that you think, whatever it is, I don’t care. But things start popping into your head about why you can’t or shouldn’t or you’re probably not worthy to do it. Whatever those things pop up, just shout Yolo at the top of your lungs and start running. That’s the key.

And it hurts right? Did you hear that. Tell them, it hurts right.

Kids: I get tons of scratches. It was before the acid rains….

Russell: it was before the acid rains. But was it worth it?

Kids: running around the house before was softer.

Russell: Before the snow hardened it was more worth it?

Kid: Yeah.

Russell: Ellie says it was worth it though, right? You only live once, you might as well do it. Otherwise, think if you didn’t do it, would you regret it?

Kid: Yeah

Russell: You would regret it?

Kid: I’d still be running around the house if the snow wasn’t that hard. I mean, it would be a lot more fun.

Russell: Would you regret it if you yelled Yolo and sat in the hot tub, would you regret it?

Kid: yeah, because I’d be burning to death.

Russell: Because the hot tub’s too hot. Plus your life would be boring. Would your life be boring if you did nothing and just sat there the whole time?

Kid: inaudible.

Russell: Alright, they’re being goofy now. Alright, so Yolo, you guys. That is the message for today. Tattoo it on your forehead, on your hand, on your t-shirt. No tattoos though. Temporary tattoos?

Kid: yeah.

Russell: K you can do temporary tattoos. Anyway…

Ellie: Or permanent marker.

Russell: or Ellie says permanent marker, not permanent marker. Just a marker you can do it with. I don’t know if you heard Ellie, if you take a shower it will wash off. Anyway, the key though is, when the self doubt comes, after the inspiration comes and the self doubt comes, Yolo. Run, get out of the hot tub and start running before your brain can talk you out of it. Because it will if you’re not careful. So Yolo. Appreciate you guys. Have a great day and we’ll talk to you soon.

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A quick glimpse behind the scenes of what I’m really doing to build and launch my funnels.

On this episode Russell talks about being the contractor of your business and finding awesome people to do the work you need to get done. He also talks about failing and why you should expect to fail many times before you find something that works.

Here are some of the informative things you will hear in today’s episode:

How Russell realized that his role in his company is similar to that of the contractor building his new office.
Why on average it takes 12 failures before millionaires are successful and it’s not based on luck.
And what the concept “You’re just one funnel away” really means.

So listen below to find out why finding good people and failing is actually really important in building a successful business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. Sorry, I just get excited. Anyway, it’s crazy here. We’ve had 5 snow days in a row, but today the kids finally, finally got to go back to school, which is nice. But everything is soaking wet. It’s been raining and flooding. Our house flooded. We have a lot of damage. So that’s kind of a nightmare.

But the good news is we just went to the new office and it’s getting close to done. We’re about two weeks away from moving into it, which is the most exciting thing in the world. And as we’re sitting here in the office, and I thought about it last night. Last night I finished, I finished! What? I finished the Expert Secrets book. At least this round of it. This is the most painful round of edits thought. It took a lot of time. I have one more round of edits after this, but it’ll go away faster.

So I’m pretty much, for all intents and purposes done with the Expert Secrets book, I’m so proud of it. The crazy thing is it’s almost, its within like 100 words of the Dotcom Secrets book, which is weird. That was not planned, but it’s kind of cool too.

So when I got done with that it was 1 in the morning, so I started looking at all the cool projects we have. We use Trello, some of you guys know. James Friel got us set up on Trello, so I was thinking of the projects. So I sat down and I’m like, “Who are all the people involved in getting this project done? What are all the talks?” So I sat down last night and just busted out a whole bunch of Trello cards. Assigning people, getting them doing what they’re supposed to be doing. All the pieces. Then it was done and I went to bed and passed out and it was awesome.

Anyway, I was thinking about that versus how some of you are running your business and I want to just liken this also to the new office. I’m in a new office and the contractor dude is there, and he’s kind of showing us everything and what’s interesting as I look at this, is that the contractor didn’t actually do anything really. If you think about it, right? He was sitting there and he got paid by me, I think, I don’t know how much contractors take, 10, 20, 30% or whatever, they get paid a bunch of money.

So we pay him and he’s like, “Cool.” So then he goes and is like, “Alright, we need a designer.” And hires a designer. And he’s like “Oh, we need someone to do this part.” And he hires someone. And all the contractor’s really good at doing is just knowing what are all the pieces that need to go into launching, or to completing and building, and then hopefully he’s put in time to find really good sub-contractors to do each of those pieces. And that’s it. And he gets paid the lion’s share of the project. And all he’s doing is he’s just figured out what are all the pieces that go into building an office, or house or whatever the project is. And then who are all the people I need to hire to do those pieces.

I was thinking about that, for me with our funnels and stuff, that’s all it is. Because I’ve done it so many times, I’ve done this now I think I’m on my thirteenth year or so of this business. Some people are funny, “How come all the things you do are successful.” The reason why is because I built up a really good team of people over the last 12 years. I look at myself almost like the contractor in my business. I know all the pieces that go into us successfully launching something. I don’t have to rethink that, I just know it. It’s second nature now because I’ve done it so many times.

There was a time and a season of my life where we were literally launching something at least once a month and if that once a month thing would fail, we would do one every single week until one didn’t fail because that’s how we had to pay payroll. It was a nightmare, but we launched things all the time. Because of that, I know the process. I know that to get something launched here all the things. I know everything inside of my head. And because I’ve been doing it so long, every single time I’m finding, initially it was me doing everything. But then I realized I’m not very good at design, so I hired a designer. Then I realized this and I hired…..I probably hired a hundred designers in the last 12 years. Now I know 3 or 4 that I really liked and I now I just work with those 3 or 4 people.

I probably hired a hundred website builders. I hired a hundred programmers, probably a thousand programmers. I’ve done all these things over the years, and from that I’ve got my hands full of 4 or 5 favorites. So when I know I have a project done, I know Rob’s going to do this, so and so’s going to do this, boom, boom, boom. I task the whole thing out and everyone starts working on it. And what’s cool for me, as the contractor, this isn’t true in all cases, but in the building, the people can’t frame the building until the person is finished doing the foundation. There’s things that have to go in order.

With what we do in our business, most people can do their thing independent of everyone else. The video guy can do videos independent of everyone else. The designers can do that. The copywriters, everyone do the thing indepently. The goal is getting everyone to start on all the pieces as soon as humanly possible. Everyone is doing the pieces and they start coming in and then the last step, which for me as a person is my favorite part, so I do it now. But I could have outsourced the part. For me it’s like, here’s all the pieces now, these are all the things I needed to get this funnel done, now I just need to plug them all in. Because of Clickfunnels, I just plug them in. And obviously I work with Steven Larsen on my team.

We plug all the pieces in and it’s ready to launch. But if you look at all the projects I have, what’s interesting is I’ve got the next probably 10 funnels completely done. Front end project is done, everything is done. I just have to, all the assets are sitting in Trello boards finished just waiting for me to say, “Okay, I’m ready to launch this one.” Then I login, spend a day and plug all the pieces in and boom it’s ready to go.

In fact, yesterday we were working on the Funnel University Newsletter, if you’re not a member of Funnel University yet, by the way, you’re insane. Go to funnelu.com. Anyway, we were…. I got a……are you kidding me? Road closure. Dangit. There’s some huge pot holes up here. Okay, so now I’m on a road closure and I’m going through a neighborhood and I have no idea. Dang, I’m really bad at these kind of things. I’m so bad at directions. I’m just going to follow the headlights in front of me and pray they’re going the same direction I’m going.

Anyway, where did I leave off? So yesterday we were doing January’s Funnel University Newsletter and in the newsletter I was showing the Marketing In Your Car funnel, which we reacently launched and you have all seen. The strategy behind it, the marketing in your car funnel was a couple of reasons. One was to get you guys all indoctrinated listening to Marketinginyourcar.com every single day. That was number one, number two is to get more subscribers. Number three, this was actually our core reason, is I’m trying to get people to join Funnel University. You probably saw that in the upsell sequence.

Yesterday in the newsletter I was showing how basically if you look at probably the next dozen funnels we roll out, they will be new, cool front ends to help build our cult-ture and get people excited about Clickfunnels. So different swag things, different cool things, but then the upsell sequence is all pushing, the upsell sequence is identical, it does not change. So I literally in 40 minutes, and I record the whole process, all the Funnel U. Members will be able to see it inside the new forum we’re setting up for you guys. I took the Marketing In Your Car funnel and cloned it.

I already had the video done, I already had the graphics. Everything was already done weeks ago, months ago actually. I just drag and drop, boom, boom, in 40 minutes the new funnel is ready to launch and it was done. It came because I knew, whatever, 6 months ago, that I wanted to do a project called Funnel Graffiti. I knew, in fact, it’s been almost a year, because we gave out funnel Graffiti at the last Funnel Hacking Live event, so it’s been a year. So then we filmed the video this summer.

But I tasked all this stuff out a long time ago, so it’s all sitting there done and as soon as I’m ready to launch it, it was done. So it took 45 minutes to launch this funnel because I had all these things done. So that’s the powers, if all of us as marketers start looking more at our business as we’re contractors as opposed to the actual sub-contractor working, and you can sub-contract out to yourself, especially the stuff you like to do, I’m guessing if you’re like me, you like building stuff in Clickfunnels, so sub-contract that out to you or a certified partner or whatever. But look at yourself more as a contractor, and become a master at understanding what are all the pieces that go into launching a funnel.

And the funny thing is that the only way to know all the pieces that go into launching a funnel, is by launching a funnel. In fact, I try to get this through people’s minds all the time. Because everyone thinks their first funnel is going to be a winner, right. So they create this funnel and go through all the pain and heartache and headache that go through making your first funnel. And there’s a lot. You have to figure out how to write copy, to edit pages, and images and videos and orders and products. There’s so much crap that goes into your first one and then it’s horrible.

And most of the time your first one will fail, you will not make any money. In fact, most of the time you will lose money. It’ll be a bucket of money with a hole in the bottom and the cash will be pouring out of it. But you have to be okay with that because the only way for you to learn every single step in the process, for you, is to do it once.

Always tell people that the first funnel, you’re going to spend so much time and effort, and it might fail. In fact, you’re probably going to fail but you gotta be okay with that. Because it’s not about you launching this funnel and making a bunch of money, its about you as a new contractor, a new funnel builder learning a new process, all the pieces that go into that. Because after you do it once you’re like, “Dang, well now I know I need this and this. I hired these people, this guy sucked and this one was awesome. I’m not going to hire him again, I’m going to hire a new person.” And you keep doing that over and over again and eventually after you launch three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty funnels, whatever that is, you will have your dream team of people that are working with you. You will know exactly who to go to every single time.

And if you fast forward six months to a year from now, you’re going to be in the same situation I am. I don’t fail anymore because I know our team. I know what our market wants. I know who is going to do each piece of it, so I can quickly create something and just have it work really, really quickly. For you guys that’s the goal.

I had two interviews yesterday from people that were asking about the whole “You’re just one funnel away” concept, that’s the theme of this year’s Funnel Hacking Live event. And I wanted, during those interviews I explained, “Look, you’re just one funnel away, you don’t know which funnel that is. I wish I could show you guys the landscape of failed funnels that I’ve had in my 12 years in this business.” I’ve got more failed funnels that I could show you, than I guarantee most of you guys have ever even dreamt of attempting. But because of that, that’s how I built my team. How I figured out what didn’t work. I’ve mastered the process. All the pieces that go in there like the back of my hand. I don’t have to think anymore, it just happens.

So today, excuse me, last night I was like, “here’s the project, here are all the pieces.” I tasked them all out and now everyone’s working on them. I’m not sure when we’ll launch that project, but I do know that the second I’m ready for it, all the pieces will be there and I don’t have to think about it at that point. I’m digging my well before I’m thirsty. I’m getting all the things in place.

So think about that you guys. Again, this whole concept, “You’re one funnel away” Is so powerful. You don’t know which funnel it’s gonna be. You’ve gotta keep building, walking, trying, failing, moving forward. A really cool, I might have shared this with you guys before so forgive me if I have, but it’s worth repeating. Probably almost ten years ago now, maybe even more, I got this Jay Abraham course and I was listening to it. And one of the speakers was Brian Tracey. I had never heard Brian Tracey speak before and he was on stage, and it was just, I loved what he was saying.

I remember what he talked about; he said that one day he was watching this TV show with a bunch of millionaires. It was like a news talk show or whatever. There’s like twelve millionaires on stage and they were interviewing them and asking a bunch of questions. And the host asks a question, “How many times did you guys have to fail on average before you had success?” and they didn’t know off the top of their heads, so they cut to commercial. During the commercial break they did all the math and figured it out. They came back, and this panel of people, they said that they figured on average, they’d each failed about 12 times before they had success.

Brian Tracey said something interesting, he said, “Do you think that they just tried something and failed, tried something and failed. And on average the 12th time they got lucky and it finally worked? Or do you think that the first time they did it, they didn’t have the resources or the connections, or people, or idea or whatever, but they did it and it failed. The second one, they did it and it failed. The third, they did it and it failed. Each time they failed they learned something. And they figured something out and literally by the 12th time, they had failed every way possible.” By the 12th time they knew how this process worked and there was no way they can fail at that point.

It’s like Thomas Edison, he said when he, every time he failed the light bulb, he was like I figured out a new way to not build a light bulb. He had a thousand ways he tried and didn’t work, but he didn’t look at those as failures. That way didn’t work, that way didn’t work. Cool, this way it worked. We gotta look at things that way as well, you guys. So many of us are getting into this like, ”I want a million dollar webinar.” And I’m like, dude that’s awesome, but you gotta put in the work man. Let me tell you how many decades of effort. I guess just one. But I mean, for me to be able to do what I do now, we can do a webinar and make half a million bucks, it didn’t just come magically. It came on the back of ten years of failing and failing and trying and failing and building a team, and learning and growing and learning and growing and coming to that.

Obviously, we’ve tried to give you guys a lot of short cuts. Perfect Webinar is a short cut. Clickfunnels is a short cut. Honestly, Facebook’s a short cut. Facebook’s the greatest gift to marketers right now, in the world. And I don’t think it will be here forever, but it’s here now and it’s amazing. All these short cuts, so hopefully you guys don’t have to spend ten years, but do know you are going to have to spend some time. And do know you are going to fail, but if you keep it in your mind that you’re just one funnel away….I don’t know if that funnel is today, tomorrow, a month from now, six months from now, but if you have that in your mind knowing with absolute certainty that one of these funnels is going to be the one, it’s going to be the freedom maker for you. You have absolute certainty of it, you keep building, moving forward, pushing, I promise you will hit that. But you have to have absolute certainty that it’s going to happen.

One of the interviews yesterday, someone asked me, “What was the “why” behind what got you into this thing and why you push yourself so hard?” I said, “When I got started, I was watching these people online who were having success. Back then in was Armand Morin, Alex Mandossian, Marlin Sanders, my mentors. Mark Joyner. All I know is I looked at these guys and I believed them. I believed that what they were doing was making them money and because I saw them doing it, I had 100% absolute certainty that it worked and that I could make it work. I didn’t know how, but I was positive that I could and it would. Because of that I didn’t stop. Because I had perfect that it was going to work, so I just started running and running and running.”

I think a lot of problems that some of us have is that we don’t have faith. “I think this can work. I think this can work for me.” And because of that you try and dabble and try and dabble and doing quite go all in, but if you know with absolute certainty that there’s no way this is going to fail, it’s going to take you a bunch of times, but you know that’s it’s gonna work. It’ll push you through the hard nights, the failures, the funnel flops. But it’ll be worth it. I promise you guys it’s worth it. It’s not only worth it for you and your family, because the money that comes from it is amazing, but it’s worth it for the people you are serving with the products and service you are creating.

You will touch their lives in a way that doesn’t make sense to you now, but when you see it and you see the fruits of that, it’s pretty amazing. So I want to leave that with you guys today. I hope that helps. I’m at the office now. I’m going from the new amazing office to the old crappy office. In the old crappy office two more weeks or so, then we’re out of here.

Appreciate you all, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, or any of them, please go to iTunes and rate and review us, I’d appreciate that. Please become an affiliate for Marketing In Your Car, free MP3 player, let people know about it because that’d be cool. Thanks you guys. Appreciate you all, have an awesome day. Bye everybody.

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Some cool stuff I learned during day #1 of Snowpocalypse.

On this episode Russell talks about how he is preparing for the predicted upcoming Snowpocalypse in Boise. He also tells some of the things he has learned while driving around and listening to marketing courses.

Here are some fun things you will hear in today’s episode:

Why Russell had to get up early to prepare for a crazy storm coming to Boise, and hear some of the interesting things he bought.
What courses he listened to while he drove around preparing for the storm.
And what he learned by listening to those courses along with some things he learned from his own experience.

So listen below to find out how Russell is preparing for severe weather in Boise, but still learning about marketing at the same time.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell again, hope you guys are doing awesome. It is Snowpocalypse here in Boise, so they told us last night. At 1:30 I got an email from Brent, on my team. It was a video from Vin Crosby, the local news dude, it was a ten minute long thing talking about why the next 5 to 7 days is going to be insane. He talked about basically getting a foot of snow that should be starting in about 15 minutes from right now. Then after the snow comes, the next day it’s supposed to rain ice, so it’s going to rain like an inch of worth of water that will instantly turn to ice. Which he said will probably break tons of trees and power lines, which means we got no power, which means basically there’s a good shot there’ll be no power for the next 4 or 5 days. I’m like, “What?”

That was at 1:30 in the morning last night. So I’m like, crap I’m probably the last person to know about this. I don’t watch the news. So I was going to go race to the store last night, but then I woke up my wife and she’s like, “Everything is closed right now.” So we set my alarm for 6am this morning. The alarm goes off, I jump into the car and head on this journey to save my family from snowpocalypse, which is really fun.

I first went to Walmart because they opened earliest. Got tons, like 5 pallets of water and toilet paper, those kind of necessities. Then I went to Fred Meyer and bought food and, it’s funny, Brent was there. I bumped into Brent. It was so funny. I’m like, “Hey, what are you doing? How funny that you’re here.” He had these two space heaters. I’m like, “Oh I’ve got 5 space heaters in my house.” And he’s like, “But you plug them in, right?” I’m like, “Oh crap, yes.” And he’s like, “Well these are ones that run on propane, you need to get one of those.” So I got a propane thing. That was at Walmart. So Walmart was out of propane, so that’s why I went to Fred Meyer.

At Fred Meyer I bought 20 canisters of propane. Each propane thing will keep the heater going for 3 to 6 hours. So I got enough to keep me warm in a tiny room warm for 5 days if we need it. And then we got food and stuff so that was awesome. Then Brent was like, “I went over here and I got a generator.” I was like, “Oh!” So I run over here to get a generator, they were all sold out. So I went to another place, they were sold out. But then luckily Dave found generators not sold out.

And then I went to Dicks Sporting Goods, trying to find a generator, but instead I bought a whole bunch of stuff for the wrestling room. So the wrestling room is all prepped out as well. They canceled church tomorrow, which if you know anything about Mormon’s, we don’t cancel church. So something crazy is about to happen. So we’re all ready for it. The kids are all excited, they’re getting their little tents sent up and everything, and likely nothing is really going to happen. But if it does, we’re prepared.

So I’ve been Snapchatting my whole preppers journey. But while I was doing this whole thing, it’s been probably 4 or 5 hours that I’ve been on the road going back and forth from my house to the store, from my house to the store, I’ve been listening to a whole bunch of cool stuff. In fact, I’ve gone through about a day and a half of the 5 thousand dollar seminar while I was here. While I’ve been doing this.

It’s amazing you can learn so much. So what I want to share with you guys today, is some internet marketing math. Some numbers for you all. This is a little different than, I’ve done math episodes in the past but here’s some key metrics for you guys to look at. Maybe we’ll call it the KPI episode. So here’s some KPI’s-Key Performance Indicators for your business. Hopefully these will help.

Some of these I’ve had in my business for a long time, some of these I picked up today, which were kind of cool. So we’ll start at the very beginning. The first thing is you should know that on average you will make about $1 per name for each person on your list. Honestly, it should be higher than that, but that should be the baseline. You should make at least that if you are emailing your list and actually communicating with them. So that means if you have a thousand people on your list you should be making at least $1000 a month. Ten thousand people on your list, 10 grand a month. Thirty thousand people on your list, 30 grand a month and so on and so forth.

The first time I ever heard that, I set a goal. I said, “Crap, I want a hundred thousand people on my list.” And that became my focus. And sure enough, just like I was told and I heard, my income stayed very similar to that for a long time. And by the time I passed a hundred thousand people on my list, I was making a hundred grand a month. So for you guys that are setting goals, make that the first goal. Goal number one is that.

Again, $1 per month, per name is on the lower end of the spectrum. Right now I look at our company and we are almost $8 per name on our list. We got a big list. So yes, that’s on the low end. Just to kind of have the metric to shoot towards. So there’s number one.

Number two metric is, and this is kind of cool, I learned today. On the continuity program, so if you have someone one a print newsletter or a membership site or whatever it is, there was this test they were talking about. They said that for the test on average, for every dollar someone spends with you for continuity, they will spend $3 more with you throughout the year. So if they’re paying $40 a month, they’re going to average, whatever that is. So every dollar in continuity, they’re going to spend $3 more with you. So that’s kind of cool.

Dan Kennedy used to tell me that for thousand people you have in a continuity program, it’s an extra million dollars in revenue you will make that year. And I started looking, after that I launched a print newsletter and sure enough, just like he said, for every thousand people I had on my continuity program, we were making a million dollars a year in revenue. It didn’t come directly from the continuity program, but it came from, because they’re members of your continuity they will start buying other things. So they will buy, who knows, coaching programs, upsells, other products, things like that. Because they are getting it, they will spend three times as much money with you when they’re a continuity member than they will when they are not.

So that’s the second thing. If I were looking at your business I would be looking at how many subscribers do I have? How many people are on continuity right now paying me monthly? So that’s the next metric. And then the third one I want to share with you that’s kind of cool. Matt Furey is on this course I’m listening to from probably ten years ago, so it’s older. One thing he said that was awesome, he said, “You should try to get at least 500 people to buy from you a month.” Obviously first off you have to try to get one person to buy from you. But after you got customers, it’s happening; people need to make at least 500 transactions a month with you.

I started thinking about that, it goes back to the RFMS thing that we talked about 2 or 3 episodes ago. Recency, Frequency, things like that. But if you think about that, you need to be getting your customers buying at least 500 purchases, need to be happening per month. Obviously for me, we’re way past that. But it’s still a good metric, a good number to look at.

So there’s some new metrics for you guys. Hope that helps a little bit. Because for me, when I look at things, it’s funny whatever we measure grows. If you look at sports, without changing anything else, your lifting routine, your eating, anything, as soon as you start measuring stuff, it grows. It’s like a magic trick. So those are the three things you can start measuring. First off, how many people are on my list. That should be something you look at daily. When I first started doing this I was like man, I wanted a big list. So I start looking, I’m like oh I’m adding twenty people a day. I started looking and I started growing 20 to 30. 30 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 to 200, 200 to 500, 500 to 1000. You already know, we’re trying to get 1000 people a day on our list. That metric grew because we looked at it. So looking at subscribers.

Number two looking at your continuity members. I don’t know about you guys but we’re obsessed with Clickfunnels. Looking at our metrics on that. And Funnel University, the same thing, I got a goal, we are just shy of 30 thousand active members in Clickfunnels, as of today and our goal is 100 thousand by the end of next year. So we’ve got to look at that number a lot, because we have to add a lot of people to get that number. But it’s definitely attainable, we can get it.

In Funnel University, our goal is to have 10 thousand members in Funnel University, but I gotta look at that number and consistently have it in front of me. So my CPA’s gotta email me that every single day so I know what’s the number. Because if I’m looking at it, then it’s gonna grow.

Then the third metric for you guys to look at is frequency of purchasing. Trying to get, make sure there’s at least 500 transactions a month going through your merchant account. If not, you need to be doing fire sales, you need to be doing cool things, you need to be doing free plus shipping, whatever it is to get your people to buy more consistently. So that should be another metric.

So there you go, there’s three metrics for you. A dollar per name per month. A thousand people paying continuity is worth a million dollars a year to you. And you need to be getting 500 transactions a month coming into your merchant account. And if you do those things, you’ll have a very healthy business. So there’s three cool numbers to look at and measure. I hope that helps. I’m home, I’m going to unload firewood I bought today and all the other toys and food and if I don’t survive the snowpocalypse, tell my parents and everyone else who’s not here in Boise that I love them. We will talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks everybody.

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The process of going from hot to warm to cold traffic.

On today’s episode Russell talks about re-launching the Marketing In Your Car podcast and how that is going. He also talks about building a Dream 100 list and how that helps you grab big piles of cash before trying to market to a cold audience.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

The exciting new things happening with the Marketing In Your Car podcast.
Why Russell tells people in his Inner Circle to grab the piles of cash in front of them before doing extra work to market to a cold audience.
Find out what is happening with Russellbrunson.com and how you’ll be able to watch him go from 0 to a million of his books sold.
And how you can watch the each process by subscribing to the podcast, following Russell’s blog, and by watching Funnel Hacker TV.

So listen below to hear Russell’s thoughts on the podcast, and his Dream 100 list.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a freezing cold Marketing In Your Car. Boise has been covered in feet of snow, not foot, feet. Many feet of snow. Everything has been frozen. We’ve had three snow days in a row, back to back to back. But I had to get to the office today because we were doing a webinar, and I don’t trust my home internet connection as much as the office. Plus I miss everybody, I wanted to see them all again. I’ve been working from home the last few days.

I still haven’t finished the book, it’s killing me. But we did get launched the Marketing In Your Car free MP3 player. So if you haven’t got yours yet go to marketinginyourcar.com. I’m guessing though if you’re listening right now, you’re probably on. We had to do a couple of things, I think I told you. Our old RSS feed, I totally screwed up on so we retired that podcast. So it’s, that one’s kind of paused. It says archived image there. And then if you come to the new one, that’s the one you’re listening to right now. And we’re all hanging out and having fun over here.

And what’s been fun, by kind of restarting the thing and launching the free MP3 player, we were able to do a new launch around it, which is fun. So we’ve got over a thousand people in the first 24 hours have gotten a free MP3 player. So hopefully a thousand of you guys are listening to this, or more, that are new. And hopefully we’ll keep growing. I just appreciate all of you guys sharing and all the good feedback for the podcast. Makes me happy.

In fact, today was really, really cool. One of my friends, he’s the Clickfunnels member and someone I met, I think at the first Funnel Hacking event, anyway, his name is Travis Cody. He sent me, I got this box in the mail today and I opened it up and there’s a video playing on the screen of this box, talking and it’s Travis talking. And then I looked down and inside of the box there’s these two huge books, and I pull them out and a lot of you guys know I’m Mormon, so there’s a Book of Mormon. It looks like a special font on it, different color and everything. And it looks like two Book of Mormons, but it’s the Book of Brunson. I’m like, what? I open it up and it’s all of my podcasts put in this book. It was the coolest gift I’ve ever gotten.

I don’t know, he says he’s got an idea, so maybe we’re going to start selling these as an actual product, but it was super cool. So I got the Book of Brunson now. So if I start quoting scripture, I’m like, “The Book of Brunson, Chapter 2, Verse 16.” You’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s all coming from this podcast. It was a super cool gift from him. So thank you Travis if you’re listening. Appreciate that, it was really fun. It’s just been fun re-getting excited about this podcast. I’ve been doing it for so long now and at first, I don’t think anyone listened for a long time. But I was doing it because I thought it was fun.

And the cool thing is that, because of the way I set up the RSS feed, I had no way to check if people are actually listening. Which is actually helpful because then I didn’t know if anyone was listening, so I didn’t assume people were listening. Now, a few years later, I know we’ve got a lot of listeners. Now that we’re moving things over I’ll actually be able to see how many people are listening and downloads and all that kind of stuff. So that will be kind of fun. But regardless, it’s something I enjoy and it’s been hugely beneficial for me, just to get out my thoughts and ideas and what I’m thinking.

And you guys have obviously have been a huge sounding board for me as we’ve gone from near bankruptcy when I started this podcast, to where we’re at today. And I just appreciate you guys listening and sharing and commenting. So if you guys are listening, please I love for you to come and comment on the new feed because we switched over, obviously there were zero stars, I think we’re like 35 or 40 stars now, so that’s good. But the more you guys can come and comment, let me know. Right now, especially for the next week or two, I’m really intently reading comments. So feel free to drop a comment. I’m sure I’ll read it, which will be kind of fun.

With that said, welcome to the podcast, those of you guys who are new. So for those who are new, the way this works is as I’m driving to the office and back I just share cool ideas and things we are working on and stuff that I think would be helpful for you. I’m heading home from the office right now. I had a webinar today with JLD, John Lee Dumas, which was fun and worked awesomely. We helped serve his people well. We sold a bunch of Clickfunnels, which is the key to happiness for me and for them as entrepreneurs, as you know, which is really cool.

And then afterwards we had a Dream 100 meeting. What is a Dream 100? As you listen and you guys catch up on my podcast, I talk about this a lot, but this is the foundation of promotion of business for me. So go back and find some of those calls where we go deeper. Basically Dream 100, who are the 100 people in your market that have your dream customers on their list right now, and how can you get them to promote you to their audience?

When we launched the Dotcom Secrets book, we built the dream 100 list, and we started sending people Dream 100 gifts in the mail. We sent them copies of the new book that was coming out, we sent Ferrari key chains because we were giving away a Ferrari. We did all these cool things, we kept sending them out. And we did that to get people to promote. And it’s funny because from that Dream 100 campaign, we got a whole bunch of people promoting the book that I didn’t have relationships with at all.

We found who were all the top business podcasters that are out there. So I had a bunch of them and we started sending them the book and stuff. John Lee Dumas was one of them, I never met him at the time. A couple of days later I get an email saying, “Russell, your book is awesome. I want to promote it.” And now we’ve done 3 funnel hack webinars, he’s sold a few thousand copies of my book and we’ve made a bunch of money together. And it came from the Dream 100 concept. John was just one of the many people we did it with. But I built lists of 100 people, and honestly my Dream 100 list keeps growing and growing.

And that’s what today’s meeting was about, kind of trimming that down. Who’s our Dream 100 for my next book launch coming up in April? And we’re putting those things together and kind of mapping out a strategy. And a couple of things I want to know. One thing, the book launch is at the end of April, so we’re like almost 3 1/2 months away. And we’re doing this now. A big part of this is digging the well before you’re thirsty.

A lot of you will launch a product and then start going and bugging JV partners and stuff and it’s like no, do that work ahead of time. So we’re planning out now, we’ll be contacting everyone and getting people information so they can get it on the calendar, and we’ll be sending copies of the book as soon as they come out.

We’re trying to prepare for that and get it ready and build a good relationship with everybody before that. Just to kind of get people excited for the book. But it’s the foundation. So what’s cool is we have our new reality show that’s close to done called Funnel Hacker TV as well. So we filmed the Dream 100 process today so you guys will be able to see it soon. You’ll see how this is the foundation for everything we do in our business, building that list of partners. And initially…..my biggest goal of the Dream 100, if I can get them to promote my book or whatever the thing is that we’re selling, that’s the best. If I can get them to promote on a podcast, or through their blog or email, that’s number one. So we try that initially, but a lot of people can’t or won’t.

So after that is done, we try the first phase, which is let’s get them to promote it, that’s a warm audience, excuse me that’s the hot. We got the hot and transition down to warm. The warm audience may not know me but I can market to Toni Robbins’ followers, or Tim Farris’ followers, or things like that on Facebook, so that’s a warm audience. People may know Toni and not me, but I can create a bridge page that bridges that gap between Toni and me, and then get them to buy the book or whatever the thing is, register for the webinar.

So we start building bridge pages to our warm audience to bring them from there over. So that’s the second thing, taking the Dream 100 list we have and then going after them as a warm audience. We’re advertising directly to them as opposed to Toni or someone directly marketing to his people. So that’s phase number two in our Dream 100.

And then phase number three is to go into cold traffic and stuff like that. So one cool thing we’re doing that’s not live yet, but may be live by the time you guys get this. Changing up Russellbrunson.com. So again, depending on when you go there. If you go there and see a picture of me standing there with a bunch of links around the sides of me, that’s the new one. I’m doing this blog and the blog I’m going to be documenting this journey of how we’re doing this whole thing from the dream 100 to the book launch and trying to take you on a journey from how we went from 0 to selling hopefully a million copies of my book. So that’s kind of cool.

So you’ll see the transitions we go from hot traffic, our own existing lists, then our partners lists, then shifting and transforming down to a warm audience. From there trying to saturate that, and from there transition down to a cold audience. And what’s the differences between going after warm traffic versus cold. Because it’s different. The way I position hot, if you’ve read the Dotcom Secrets book you know about hot traffic, warm traffic, cold traffic, but it’s different the way I sell to each of them.

So we start with the hot, it’s funny in my Inner Circle, everyone’s trying to convert cold traffic. I’m like, “Wait, there’s a huge pile of cash sitting right in front of you. Grab the big pile of cash first. That’s your warm market, grab them first. That’s the hot market, excuse me. Then there’s the warm market, which is one step back, that’s the next big pile of cash, so grab that before you go for the cold.” Make all the money you can out of the hot market, then go to the warm market, then you go to the cold. And each level of that process, moving from hot to warm to cold, the sales process, the funnels, the messaging, the language patterns, all those things change.

I’ll be sharing those and documenting them on the new Russell Brunson blog. How we went from 0 to a million copies of my book here over the next, I mean who knows how long it takes to get me a million bucks, probably a couple of years, which will be kind of cool.

We’re going to be doing all sorts of stuff. We already have in the works, plans to do infomercial, radio campaigns, mass market, PR. It’s going to be a ride. It’s going to be a fun journey. So hopefully you guys will come along on the journey with me. But just know that that’s kind of what we’re doing. The goal is to show the strategy. How we roll out a book and how we take that book and help it to, the Dotcom Secrets book, when we launched that, it was the foundation that got us, to now we’re almost 30 thousand active customers inside of Clickfunnels. So that’s the goal, how do we do that and how do we leverage a book or any kind of front end product, to build the back end of your company.

So that’s the journey that I’ll be taking you guys on. I hope you can join me for the ride. With that said, I’m home. In a day or two or whatever check out russellbrunson.com, check out the blog and we’ll start the first post. I already wrote the first post, and we’re going to start doing that once a week. Sharing the journey and showing you how many books we sold from each of the things and that’ll be the game plan. With that said, I’m home. Appreciate you guys, thanks for listening, thanks for subscribing. Please come comment and share, let me know what you’re thinking. I’m excited to be on this journey with you guys. Talk to you all again soon. Bye.

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Something I’m testing to stimulate and increase the quality of our customers.

*SPOILER ALERT**** In this episode of Marketing In Your Car, Russell spills the beans on the ending of Star Wars: Rogue One, so if you haven’t seen it, skip ahead to 1:20. After that, he also talks about learning all about RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value) from some old school guys and why he will be spending 2017 focusing on the frequency that his customers buy.

Here are some other cool things in this episode:

What Russell plans to do to increase the frequency at which his customers are purchasing.
Why it’s important to keep your customers “Warm”.
And find out what some of the cool things are that will be happening this year.

So listen below to learn what RFM is and why it’s important for your business.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody! I hope you guys are doing awesome, it is New Year’s Eve morning. It’s the morning of the eve. I don’t know if that makes any sense. But I’m heading to the grocery store real quick to get some stuff for the party tonight. I’m really, really excited for it. Some cool things happening, just real quick.

For those of you guys who want a timeline for when, if you’re listening to this in the future, last night Rhonda Rousey fought what’s her name Nunez. The fight lasted less than 48 seconds, it was insane. I got home last night and seriously tried to find a pirated copy online because I had a hot date with my beautiful wife last night. It was crazy. I can’t even…I felt so bad for her. So that happened last night.

And last night I went and saw Star Wars Rouge One. I gotta tell you what, people are like, “Star Wars sucks. The new Star Wars is lame.” All these things, right. It was amazing. I don’t know. The fact that, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the fact that everybody dies at the end was amazing. That was actually, I mean it’s sad, but that was so cool for the story line. And then the fact that the very end that Darth Vader has his fight scene and going through thrashing everyone. How could someone not think that movie was not amazing? I don’t know, anyway, it was amazing.

It’s funny because I get done, and not that I’m easily amused, but if you listened to my podcast a while ago, I don’t know how much money they invested in that, but I paid $12 for the ticket. Insane, they entertained me for that long and it was amazing. I loved it, it was really fun.

But I digress, because today I’ve been wanting to do a podcast because I have something that I’ve wanted to talk about for three days and I keep forgetting to talk to you guys about it. So I’m stopping everything, I almost did it last night at like two in the morning because I’m so excited but I was kind of tired. So I’m talking about it now. This is a cool thing I wanted to share with you guys because it was a big epiphany for me. In fact, let me catch up the last podcast. We told you about my goal, what we’re doing, trying to 3x the company. In one night we had three hundred thousand dollars in new money we had to make, it was insane. So we launched funnelimmersion.com, some of you saw that. Plus we went and hit all of our other Hail Mary passes. Of the five Hail Mary passes we threw up, almost all of them hit.

It was crazy, within 24 hours of me doing that podcast, we made over 500 thousand dollars and smashed our goal. It’s crazy. The last two days we didn’t even need to do anything. But then the next two days, because of the momentum of that first initial push, it was insane. So we did, well we’ll see what happens today, in the last 3 days we needed an extra 300 thousand dollars in money, and we made almost a million.

In fact, it’s crazy, for us to triple the company, and I didn’t know this until after we did it. I’m glad our accountant didn’t tell me, because I would have thought it was impossible if he would have told me. I’m so glad that sometimes people don’t tell you stuff. Belief is such a funny thing. But he told me after we had smashed the record he was like, “Just to put this in perspective, for you guys to beat your record, in December, the worst month in the industry, you would have had to make 40% of the money that you had actually made all of the last year.” I was like, “What?” It’s just crazy. We ended up doing, we made, actually hit 50% of last year’s revenue in December, which is crazy because last year was an 8 figure year. So 50% of our revenue. We basically got half of our money last year, in December. And way more than 3x’d our company from the year before, which is crazy.

So I feel bad for the morons in 2017 who are running this company, because they gotta 3x that again. Oh crap, that’s me. Dangit. I was like, “The more we do now, the more we have to do next year.” So it’ll just keep raising the bar.

Alright, so I’m going to step back. There’s so many other cool things I want to share with you guys. Funnel Hacker TV episode one is finished and it’s amazing. All the other ones are in production. The two comma club video and award thing is in process and almost done. There’s so many, I can’t even tell you guys how many cool things are happening right now. The new Marketing In Your Car mp3/funnel/element in the editor are all going to be live next week, next Thursday. I’ve been going for four and a half minutes and I didn’t talk about what I’m talking about because I’m so excited. There’s so many cool things happening

you guys. It’s just blowing my mind.

With all that kind of cool stuff happening. I want to share with you guys the gold nugget that I think is huge. That I can’t even, it’s going to be exciting. So here it is. For those of you guys, I feel fortunate that I got started, learning this game, back when the internet was just kind of getting new. So the only people to learn from, Corey Riddle was there. He was the pioneer, Corey Riddle. And then outside of him there was nobody that, there wasn’t a lot of people teaching. Then Armand Morin, there was a couple guys that came out, but there wasn’t a lot of stuff.

For me to learn this whole marketing game I had to go back to the old school. There’s no school like the old school. So I was learning from Gary Halpert and Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham. So most of my foundation actually came from those guys. And then how do you actually apply it to internet marketing? And I feel bad because most of you guys who are listening now came in a day and age where there’s a million internet coaches and you miss a lot of this cool foundational stuff that I was blessed enough to get by studying these old legends.

So when I was learning from those guys, it was back, everything they were doing was direct mail. And I was always trying to figure out how to relate that back to what we’re doing. One of the big things, the way that direct mail would work is that you’d have an offer, you’d write a sales letter and you’d rent a list of people that are likely to buy your product. When you buy a list, how do you know if I’m getting a good list or a bad list. So these guys, I don’t know who it was that came up with it. But they came up a form to find out how good a list it actually is. So the formula was based on three letters. RFM. So RFM is like if you’re direct person this is second nature to you, if you’re not let me talk about what it is.

So RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, and then Monetary value. So RFM. So if I’m running a list, I want a list of people that have bought a business opportunity product. Let’s say I’m selling supplements, I want a list of people who have bought health supplements, or nerve supplements, whatever it is. So the first thing I want is Recency. Somebody who has purchased something recently. You might think that if someone bought something recently they’re not going to want my thing. No, it’s not true. One thing we know about buyers in heat, when somebody buys something, they buy a lot of things right around that period of time.

So if I’m selling a business opportunity, I want to sell somebody who’s recently bought a business opportunity. It kind of doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes perfect sense when you understand how buyers work. Think about when you first got into this business and you started learning about how to make money online, or whatever that thing was for you. You didn’t buy one thing. You were a buyer in heat and you bought a lot. So I want to sell to people who have bought things recently.

Second thing, is frequency. I want people who are buying things frequently. They didn’t just buy something once and you never hear from them again. I want someone who has bought five business opportunities in the last year. They’re frequently buying.

And the last one is M, Monetary value, people who are spending a lot of money. The more money they spend, the more they are likely to spend. People like me, I buy things recently, I buy things frequently, and I spend a lot of money. I’m like the dream buyer in the markets that I’m interested in. So RFM, that was the thing. So when I’m getting direct mail lists, the higher the RFM score is the more, the better that list is for me. What’s cool is in Clickfunnels, in Actionetics, those of you guys who’ve used the Actionetics, we haven’t started training hard core on this yet. That’ll be one of the big things for next year. But we have an RFM score. In fact, we have an RFMS score.

So if you look at the action score in contacts. So if you’re in Actionetics, click on contact, and you’ll see a little circle in the top right hand corner, it looks really cool and it’s their RFMS score, it stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value, and then the S stands for Social. Because one cool thing that the internet has brought to us is the ability to watch people socially and stuff like that. One of my buddies, Jeremy Shoemoney, he found out, he did some tests and he said that….he owned an auto-responder company for a while so he was doing all sorts of cool tests and monetizations and stuff. And one of the magic things he brought to my world, he found out that somebody who joined his list who used their actual Facebook email address, or social media email address that’s hooked to a real social account, is worth 80 times more money than somebody who uses a throw-away email address. 80 times.

In fact, if people opted in and they didn’t use their Facebook email address, he would just delete them as a record. He wouldn’t even use them because it was such a waste of energy to market to them. For us, we have social as well, so RFMS. So you get the score on each of your clients that comes and you say, “Oh wow. RFMS.” How valuable is this person to you.

So you’ll see in Actionetics in the future, RFMS is going to be a big thing we’ll be talking more about. But I digress, let me come back to what I’m talking about. So for me, I had this big epiphany this weekend. As we were doing this launch and people were buying stuff and getting in. There’s something about people buying and new excitement and new energy. We’re doing this Funnel Immersion sale, and we sold a lot of them and people were going crazy. And everyone on the Facebook group was trying to convince everyone else to buy. I felt bad, some people in the Facebook group were like, “So what’s actually in this? Russell never mentioned it. So why am I giving Russell money?” and they’re like, “Who cares? Just do it. Russell says buy it, just buy it.” And everybody in our group is just jumping in, it was awesome. It was the coolest thing ever.

So anyway, I started thinking about this. And this is the pro and the con of what we’ve been doing over the last two years. My audience, especially my inner circle members and hopefully you guys listening as well. We’ve gotten really good at doing a webinar a week and bringing new blood into your business. Everybody’s doing that. So they’re getting people to purchase but then it’s kind of stopping there. We’re not getting people to purchase more often and that’s why a lot of people’s businesses are struggling. They’re getting really good at selling the first product, but then they have nothing else to offer to our audience to monetize the list that we’ve built.

So I started thinking about this and I was like, so next week on Marketinginyourcar.com actually, it’s funny, you guys have been hearing this in the intro and the outro for a while. But we’re finally launching the mp3 player, and it’s amazing. So next Thursday we’re going to have a big launch around it, and we’re going to try to sell, I think I bought 7500 mp3 players. I think we’ll sell those in a week or so and then just go from there. I’m going to do a free plus shipping thing. And there’s not really, people are going to look at me like, “Russell this funnel is no good. You didn’t really monetize that well.” And it will, there’s actually, I think it’s a really cool funnel.

But you’re going to notice from me, I’m going to be putting out a lot of things, there just little front ends that are cool. T-shirts, just a lot of front end things, and the reason why, and I had this thing, if what we want our people doing. If someone wanted to rent a list and they’re looking for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value, how do we stimulate those in our own lists? How do we stimulate?

So there’s different things, but I was looking at frequency. How do we stimulate frequency? No one’s ever talked about that, I’ve never thought about that before. The health of my customer list is going to be based on how frequently they’ve purchased from me. So if I don’t have very many opportunities for them to buy from me, they’re less likely to buy from me. And it’s hard to keep selling new info products. You’ve got to have a new hook, new angle. But I want people to keep buying from me. Because the act of buying is going to keep them warm.

In fact, I remember TJ Rohleder, he’s a bus op direct mail guy. I was talking to him one day and he was like, “Hey, you want to rent my list of buyers?” I was like, “What? Why would you do that?” and he was like, “The more they buy from you, the more they’re going to buy from me. I need to keep these guys frequently buying.” I was like, wow. How interesting. I never thought, it’s just such a different mindset from what I’ve always thought. Only sell them things every once in a while and build up the hype and make it this big thing. So for me, I think one of my big focuses for this year, I want to create frequency in my buying, in my customers buying habits. In your guys’. So I’m talking about you.

I want you buying from me often. In fact, I told my team that I want our customers buying something from us at least once a week minimum. I want that frequency up, because if they are buying once a week, they’re going to stay customers and they’re going to keep…..that’s the health of our list. If we want to increase the health of our list, we want to get them buying often. And I think my goal is at least once a week. So what I’m going to be doing, I’m going to try to create something cool once a week. Not like a new training program, or info product, those things are hard. But just a new thing, once a week, that you guys can buy from me.

So you’re going to see a couple of things. One, It’s going to be pulling out little pieces of like funnel Immersion. Funnel Immersion ended up with over a hundred hours of content, which is awesome. So I’m going to be pulling out little pieces of that, low ticket things, just to get people like, “Go buy this training on Tripwire.” Just pulling out little pieces. You’re going to see a lot more physical products, free plus shipping t-shirts. Free plus shipping shoes. Free plus shipping Clickfunnels bottles. Tons of little swag things that aren’t, I’m not going to make any money on them. But I’m just going to be stimulating frequency in my customers. Frequency in purchasing from my customers to increase the health of my list.

These aren’t going to become front end offers, we’re driving big Facebook ads to it, trying to optimize the campaign and all that stuff. No. I’m talking about the only goal of these things, is to increase the frequency of the buying patterns of my customers and then build a cult-ture. Because they’re going to have all these cool t-shirts and socks and shoes, and playing cards, and stickers. As many cool things as I can come up with. But that’s the thought.

Anyway, I want to throw it to you guys. I know I went really long winded on this one because I’m so excited. But think about that. How can you increase the frequency your customers are buying from you? Because that’s how we judge how good the health of a list is. It’s probably how we should judge how good the health of our customer base is. How often are they buying from you? And how do you now, now that you know that’s something that’s important, how do you stimulate that? How do you create cool crap that they’re going to want to buy?

It’s not going to be like, because it’s hard if you’re selling thousand dollar courses, you can’t do that every single week. People aren’t going to keep buying it. That’s not sustainable. So if you have a whole bunch of super low ticket things that you’re going to get from me. I’m not going to make any money on my free plus shipping things, but it stimulates the frequency of buying in my customers, which makes them better customers when I do come out with the big things. They’re used to buying weekly from me, they’re enjoying it. There’s an addiction that comes with that. I don’t know about you, but I’m addicted to buying things. I love buying things. I want to feed that addiction through frequency.

So that’s my thought for you, just think about that. How do you stimulate frequency in your customers? Doesn’t have to be weekly like me, because that’s going to be kind of crazy for most people, even for me. I don’t know how I’m going to keep up with that. But for you, think about that. Maybe it’s once a month, how do you get them, how do you increase frequency of buying?

So anyway, there you go. And I’m going to leave it there for today, but hopefully this stimulates some thoughts in your mind. How do you know this? How do you increase the R, the F, the M? How do you increase all those across the board? So if you start thinking about that and stimulating it. I need people who buy recently so, that comes back to frequency too. If I’m going to get people to buy something each week, they’re recent, and they’re frequent. So I kind of kill two birds with one stone. Two things are increased in my list of customer health. Next is monetary value, obviously free plus shipping is not, but if you sprinkle it every six weeks or every quarter with a high ticket thing, boom, it increases monetary value and keeps this thing going. And it increases the health base of your customer list.

So that’s what I’m thinking about this New Year’s. Hope it gives you guys some ideas as well. There’s some magic to this you guys. I looking right now at our, in fact I got a video from John on our team the other day. He’s like, “Look, our cult is way better than their cult.” I’m like, “What?” and I look at this video and he’s showing our social stuff versus Lead Pages, versus InfusionSoft, and if you look at it, our social profile is like, boom, trending up. People talking about us, trending up. All these things are trending up. Then you look at Lead Pages, trending down. Then you look at InfusionSoft, trending down. No one’s talking about them. Nobody care about them. What’s the difference? Boom, we’re stimulating growth, stimulating conversations, making things exciting, building a culture. Now we’re going to start increasing the frequency of this stuff and it’s going to be insane. I’m so excited.

Anyway, appreciate you all. I gotta go get some groceries or my wife’s going to kill me. So I will talk to you guys all again soon. Have an amazing New Years. You’re probably going to hear this after New Years, so I hope you had an amazing New Years. If you’re listening to this after Thursday go get your free MP3 player at marketinginyourcar.com. Thanks everybody, talk to you guys soon.

Marketing Secrets (2017): Recent Episodes

Russell Brunson