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As you’re planning your year this year, make sure to spend time focusing on this important aspect as well.
On this episode Russell talks about having an end of year goal meeting with his partners and what it means to fortify yourself against your weaknesses. Here are some of the amazing and insightful things to listen for in today’s episode:
Find out why Russell started off the end of the year meeting with Clickfunnels partners asking what the things are that could take down Clickfunnels. How Russell has learned from some weaknesses his former businesses have had and how he is fortifying himself against them with Clickfunnels. Why you should fortify yourself in all aspects of your life, including business, your marriage, your relationships, etc.So listen here to find out why it’s so important to look for your own weak spots and to fortify your business against them.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about fortifying your weaknesses so your company can continue to grow long term.
Hey everyone, I hope everything’s amazing. We are getting ready for the holidays, in fact, this episode will probably go live during Christmas, maybe even on Christmas, I don’t even know.
But last week we had our big partner meeting where all our partners fly out to Boise and we lock ourselves in a room for two days and we discuss the plans and the future and world domination, and what we’re going to do, and trying to figure out the whole process. And what’s crazy is our goal for the last year, last year when we did this, our goal was like, we want to do a hundred million dollars in sales, in the calendar year. Because we’d done it in like 3 years or something, it took us to get to a hundred million. And we’re like, we want to do a hundred million in a calendar year. So that was the big goal.
And actually, what’s crazy, as of yesterday when I’m recording this podcast, we did it. We broke a hundred million dollars in one calendar year, which is crazy. Insane, so thank you for all your support, everybody who’s invested in programs, uses the software, who loves what we do, we are grateful for you guys and for making it happen.
Now next year it’s like, what’s the next goal, what’s the next phase? So we had the big meeting, got everyone out here and it was a lot of fun. We basically, like I said, lock ourselves in a room and we just have a big list of items we go through and then we try to prioritize and schedule and figure things out. It’s just kind of a cool thing we do every single year.
But I wanted to share with you guys how I started the meeting this year, because it’s different than normal. So basically, we started the meeting and I brought everyone together and said, “Okay, we’ve done some amazing things this year, we have some big goals for next year, but before we get into any of that, I want to talk about all the ways that Clickfunnels could fail.” And everyone’s like, “oh, that’s a depressing way to start the meeting.”
I’m like, “Not in a depressing way, but if we’re not aware of where our chokepoints, where we could actually get tapped out, if we’re not aware of what our weaknesses are, then it’s almost like, a lot of people, we don’t want to look at those things, so we kind of hold a blind eye.” And not just in business, but in everything, in life. Like where are my weaknesses in my marriage, and in my family relationships, with my kids, where are the weaknesses?
We typically, our brains don’t like to think about the unpleasantness of things, so we kind of block those things and we don’t talk about them or don’t think about them, as opposed to the opposite, which is like being aware of them, acknowledging them and then fortifying yourself around those things so that the problems don’t happen. So that’s what we kind of talked about.
So in every business there’s things that can make your business crash. I know because I have crashed multiple businesses in the past. And hopefully I’ve learned each time and I’ve tried to fortify things stronger the next time. For example, last time I had my big business crash, some of you guys may have heard this story before, it was actually right about the time I started this podcast. But we had a hundred and something employees and we had all our merchant accounts, I think we had 14 merchant accounts, but they were all with the same processer, the same bank.
So I thought we had diversity because they were different merchant accounts, but apparently because they’re all with the same bank, the bank looks at them as one merchant account, even though there’s like 14 of them. So when that bank decided they didn’t like us anymore, they shut down the merchant account, but that shut down all of our merchant accounts, lost 14 of them.
And we had this huge business, it was growing, everything was doing amazing, but that one thing, that chokehold was able to like really quickly, someone just pinched that and the whole company basically went under. I had to let go 80 people in a weekend and it was horrible and it was all because of that one thing.
So I started thinking, what are the things inside Clickfunnels, that if they were to go wrong, could destroy this amazing thing that we built? So one of them again, is merchant accounts. Are we diversified? Do we have backups? If Stripe shut us down what would we do? What would be the process? What are other things we can ensure that we don’t? What are our chargeback rates? What are our refund rates, what’s high, what’s low, where do we need to be? Just figuring out all those things because the last thing in the world I want to happen is lose my merchant account and then I lose Clickfunnels, right. And then everybody who we’ve been serving, now we screw them over because they lose that piece. These are the things that keep me up at night, by the way. So that was the first one.
Then we talked about what happens if the FCC doesn’t like how we sold something? Oh my gosh, that could be another chokepoint. If the FCC came in and said, “We don’t like how you sell your stuff.” We could be shut down. So we’re like, what do we do?
So it’s like, let’s go and hire an FCC lawyer to go through every single page of every single funnel and give us feedback and we’ll make changes to the copy. Let’s look at our webinar presentation, things that aren’t compliant, let’s change those things. Let’s look at all sorts of things, join the BBB, joining….there’s another organization we’re trying to join. Whatever we can do to protect ourselves from anything bad like that happening. Make sure that we are squeaky clean in all aspects there.
And then we’re like, what happens if our servers go down? What happens if….we’re looking at all the possible things that could go wrong and then instead of trying to turn a blind eye to them and not think about them, we try to face them straight on and be like, here’s the weaknesses. What do we need to do? How do we fortify? What are all the things we can do to protect ourselves and protect our customers and the people we’re serving? It’s those things.
So I share with you guys because, first off, so you’re aware I’m doing everything in my power to continue a solid foundation for all you guys. I want to make sure you have a place to build your businesses on and your legacy on and we want to make sure we’re here for a thousand years. So hopefully that gives you guys some comfort there.
But second off, I think you guys should all be looking at your businesses as well. If you only have one merchant account, that’s scary. If you only have one traffic source, that’s scary. If all your ads come from Facebook, what happens if Zuckerberg decides to change how ads work? Or everything’s coming from Google, what if the algorithm changes again? Just being super aware.
What if I have a business partnership I don’t like? What if my partner and I don’t get along? What could happen there? What happens if….all the what if’s and looking at those things and figuring out how do we fortify against this?
The same thing could be true in your marriage. What are the points where something bad could happen in your marriage, what are those things? Be aware of those things, and how do we fortify against that?
When Collette and I first got married and first started this business and started hiring people, one of the very first things that we kind of sat down and said is, “Okay, I’m not going to go to lunch with a single female.” That’s just something that I will never do. And that’s just a stronghold. Even if it’s someone I’m not attracted to, or someone way different, it’s just a rule. I don’t go to lunch by myself with a female. You just don’t do it, because who knows what could happen or what people could think could happen or whatever. It doesn’t even matter, it’s just I’m fortifying myself against potential problems.
So we set up these fortifications ahead of time and then you won’t have the issues. So now that we’re in this season of planning and preparing and figuring things out, I just challenge you guys to look at your weaknesses and fortify yourselves around them.
You know, if I was to go to war against another country, I’d be looking at the same thing. Where are weak at? Are we weak on land? On sea? Where are they strong at? Where are we weak at? How do we fortify ourselves so that when the attacks come there, we’re prepared for them and we can withstand the blows.
Anyway, there you go you guys, there’s the lesson for today. It’s not going to be the most fun conversation, but I promise you it’s a lot more fun than the conversation you have afterwards, when your merchant accounts get shut down, or when Zuckerberg shuts down your traffic, or when the FCC finds your funnels not compliant, or when…..whatever your thing might be.
And so I just want to encourage all you guys to do what we did and really look at those weaknesses, focus on them, and figure out how to fortify them as you’re making your plans for the upcoming year. Because doubling your company, or tripling your company, or whatever your lofty exciting goals are, which are fun, all that fun disappears quickly if you’re not careful.
So I hope that helps somebody out there. I know it’s a big thing for us this year, as we’re trying to figure out how to go from a hundred million to a billion, which I don’t think is a 12 month goal, but I think it is a 10 year goal. How do we make sure we’re fortified so that when we 10x where we’re at now, we can handle it and support it and we’re prepared for it?
Yeah, so I hope that helps you guys. With that said, I appreciate you all. Thanks so much for hanging out on the podcast. If you learned anything or if you enjoyed this, please take a screenshot on your phone, just click the buttons, take a screenshot, go to Istagram, Facebook, wherever you’re social at, post and say your number one thing, your biggest takeaway you got from this episode. Please tag me in it, because I love to see that. And then if you use hashtag Marketing Secrets in the post as well, that would be awesome.
It’s been fun watching more and more of you guys taking snapshots and posting your big takeaways from the episodes, that means a lot to me and I love it. So please keep doing it, plus it helps other people find out about our podcast, and hopefully I can help serve more people.
With that said, thanks you guys, and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.
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A late night story session with Russell, talking about more of his failures that built his foundation.
On this episode Russell looks back on things he did over a decade ago, and why he is bringing some of those things back, even though they were initially failures. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:
Find out what kinds of things Russell heard were good ideas, which he then tried, but didn’t have success with. See why some of those things he considered failures are coming in handy now that he has Clickfunnels. And find out why it’s important to try things, even if you fail at them.So listen here to find out why even when you consider something a failure, it has been a valuable part of your journey.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Right now I’m walking up my stairs in my house, about to go to bed, but there’s just something too cool on my mind that I got to share with you right now.
So I just wanted to share a story that hopefully all you guys will have this same story in ten years from now, or twelve years from now, or fifteen years from now or whatever. But when you’re living it in the moment, it’s kind of annoying, but looking back in hindsight it’s the most amazing gift ever.
So let me tell you what I’m talking about. So I first joined my first mastermind group over a decade ago now, and at the time I didn’t know how to do anything. I had a couple of websites, I had a little email list, I was selling stuff and I joined this mastermind group. It was Bill Glazer’s mastermind group. And I get in this group, and at the time, this is right before the real estate bubble popped like in 2008 or whatever that was. So in the group there were 18 people and nine of the 18 people were real estate coaches, teaching people how to make money in real estate. And then the other nine were all sorts of other weird businesses.
So it was kind of cool, I came into this room and all these people doing amazing things. I’m sitting there and the first guy gets up and he talks about how he has a call center. I was like, “oh my gosh, I should have a call center.” And then the second guy gets up and he’s like, “Oh, I do live events.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I should do live events.” And the third guy gets up and he’s like, “I do local events.” I’m like, “I should do local events.” The next guy gets up, “I run radio ads.” I’m like, “I should be running radio ads.”
And luckily for me at the time, I was super naive and didn’t know that I probably shouldn’t do all of them at once, so instead I’m like, “Dude, I need to do all of them at once.” So after my first set of meetings I go back home and sure enough I tried to do all those things at once.
For example, one of them was, I remember there was a guy that was doing these local seminars and he would run radio ads and do direct mail and he’d fill these local seminars and people would come locally and come to the seminar and he’d sell something to them. And then from there he’d take them to another event and they’d have this whole process.
So I got home and without even thinking I’m like, “We’re going to run local seminars.” And so we went and booked a Holiday Inn and I went, “How do we fill this event?” This is pre-facebook, pre-myspace, this is a decade plus ago. And I was like, “I don’t know. We could run direct mail.” So I call up some list broker that I found and I was like, “Do you guys have direct mail for people in Boise who want to get rich on the internet?” And they’re like, “Um, sure. We’ll sell you a list like that.”
So they sold me a list of 5,000 names. And then I was like I gotta send a direct mail piece out. I’ve never written a direct mail piece before, but I just gotta figure it out. So I remember I made this postcard, and because it was in Boise it had a picture of me wrestling at Boise State. So I had a picture of wrestling on this business seminar. It was like, “Learn how a local Boise State Wrestler makes money on the internet. Come to this free event.”
So we had a phone number for people to call to come in and RSVP. Then I was like, “Okay, we got a direct mail piece, but we gotta figure out other ways to fill the event. What should we do?” And we’re like, “We should do radio ads.” So we call the radio station and I’m like, “Hey, I want to run a radio ad.” And they’re like, “Okay.”
And I had been learning about copywriting, so I remember I wrote my own little ad and took it to the radio station. And then the host, or whatever they call them, the DJ, whatever it’s called, the person at the radio station who talks on the radio, who’s going to read the ad, he’s like, “Oh this ad is horrible, I’m just going to freestyle it.” So he wants his own ad. I’m like, “No you don’t understand. This is how direct response copy works.” And we kind of fought back and forth and we ended up making a hybrid ad that he read that had a call to action form for the live event.
So we run this local live event and we run the direct mail, we run the radio ads and we get, I don’t know, a couple hundred people to RSVP, and we set it up like, “Okay, we’re going to do one event in the morning, one in the afternoon and one at night.” So we did that. And I don’t know how many hundreds of people that signed up, we only got a few that actually showed up for each event. And then they showed up and we didn’t know what to sell. So we tried to sell these really weird things, they didn’t really work.
I remember I did three presentations that day, and the first presentation, there was probably like 30 people in the room and it went really well. You know, I had my suit and tie and my shaved head with my glasses on. I did my little thing, and I think I sold a $100 workbook and we sold a few of them. And then the next group came and like 3 people showed up. It was so awkward. I gave the same presentation I had done earlier in 90 minutes. I did it in 25 minutes just because I was nervous and I was talking even faster than Russell normally talks, which is pretty fast. And I don’t think I sold any with that group. And then t he third one came and it was a bit bigger and I sold a couple. I think I made like, I don’t know, four or five hundred bucks at this little event we ran. And we probably spent five grand, probably more than that, through direct mail and everything.
Anyway, a colossal failure. I’m like, “I will never do local events again, that was the worst idea ever.” And then somebody else was like, “Well you should do your own big events.” So I was like, “Oh, cool. I could do that. I went to an event one time, I should be able to run an event.” So we rented a hotel room and started trying to fill an event and it was harder than I thought it was going to be.
But luckily I met a partner, Stu McLaren, Stu and I did two or three events together, which is awesome because he had actually run some events. I think the first event we ran, people showed up and we’re just like, “Alright sit down.” We had no idea what to do. When we started running them with Stu, Stu was like, “We need to get nametags for people.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s a great idea.” He’s like, “You need to register people.” And we’re like, “Oh yeah, we didn’t even think about that.”
They had a process to make these events. So we had two or three events with Stu where we had, I remember we’d go to like Walmart and buy a hundred dollar printer, and we’d print off a hundred name tags, and then at the end of the event we’d raffle off the printer. Like “The first person who does whatever, we’ll give you a free printer.” A printer we had bought because we didn’t want to pack it up and ship it back to our houses.
Anyway, we did three or four of these little events with Stu and made a little money and learned a lot of good lessons there. And I remember the last event I did was this one in Salt Lake, and it was the back of, we had a product called the Twelve Month Millionaire and it was an interview that I did with Vince James where he had made a hundred million dollars in 23 months, and it was a six hour interview I did with him, so we sold that product. And on the backside, we gave everyone who bought a ticket to this live event where we were going to teach online, offline fusion marketing. You know, how do you use offline tactics with online.
I was so excited for this event and I think we had 3 or 400 people who had RSVP’d saying they were coming to the event. I think we sold like 9000 copies of that product, which was amazing. But 300 put the, I think it was a $100 deposit down to say you were coming to the event.
So we had this event, and we thought we had 300 people coming to it, so we built out the whole thing. And then we, it’s so embarrassing, we get to the event and less than 100 people showed up to it. So this huge room is completely empty. We had no stage, there was this little ghetto projector. So we did the event and we ended up making…we sold something at the event and ended up making a little bit of money, but not a lot. And that was the time when I was like, “I will never in my life do live events again.”
That was it. We would never do it again. I told my team, “We’ll never do it again.” And then fast forward a little while after that, we like, someone told me we should build a call center. So we’re like, “We’re going to build a call center.” So as Russell does, instead of thinking, I just went and found somebody who knew how to do a call center, we hired them, hired more people, built out a team, got some cubicles, got some phones, started selling leads, started selling stuff and it started working and then we started growing.
The next thing I knew, I woke up one day and we had 80 sales people in the world and I’m like, “What in the world is happening? What am I doing?” And if you’ve heard some of my stories about that whole crash and how it fell down, but we figured out, I learned that model imperfectly.
Man so many more. We did free plus shipping offers with forced continuity that we learned and made money with. Then we got shut down because of the forced continuity. We did so many things like that. And at the time I went through the process, I learned the lesson and then I was like, “I’ll never do this again because it was horrible and painful and it didn’t work.”
But now it’s crazy, a decade later, and I’m looking at Clickfunnels as we’re growing it now and I’m like, “How do we grow this?” and I’m going back in time to a decade ago and I’m like, “Remember when we did those live events locally that didn’t work because I didn’t understand the model and I didn’t understand what I was selling, didn’t have the right offer? Those would work now. If we made a couple little tweaks that model would work.”
So right now we’re working on building out a local model. We’re filling up local events and sending speakers to these events. Funnel Hacking Live. We launched Clickfunnels and I swore we’d never do events again and people were like, “We need an event. We need an event.” And I’m like, “No, I’ll never do an event again.” And finally we agreed and we did Funnel Hacking Live number one, which had 600 people, and number two had 1200, number three had 1300, number four had 3000, this year we’re going to have 5000, and we have probably one of the biggest marketing events in the world now, by far the best. I’m not saying that because I’m biased, it literally is the best. If you’re not coming, you’re insane.
Anyway, that came on the back of this thing I had tested years ago and it failed, but I learned the pieces and process and I learned enough of the skills to know when I needed it to dust it off and bring it back out and this time do it right.
The call center, we built this huge call center up and shut it down, and then when Clickfunnels came out I swore, we will never do a call center. We’re never gonna do a call center. We’re not going to build out a sales team. And sure enough, guess what I’m doing right now. We’re building out a sales team. We have a front end sales team calling new leads. We got a back end sales team selling migration packages and things and we’re building that out again, right now. And again, it’s something that I swore I’d never do again, but it’s something I learned, cut my teeth on, and now we’re doing it correctly. We’re doing it right. We’re doing it in a way that will continue to grow the company.
And there’s more. These are just two or three different things, the top of my head, that we’re doing now that I had tested a decade ago, now we’re finally doing.
So I’m sharing with you guys because I’m guessing, if you’re all like me you’ve tested and tried a lot of things and some of them haven’t worked. And at the time, you probably were like I was and been like, “Local seminars are a scam, I would never do this. This is the worst business ever. Whoever told me to do that was a moron.” But the context, the situation wasn’t right yet. But now I have that skill that we’re bringing back.
So for you guys, the same thing. I know that you’re trying things, you’re testing things. Some things aren’t working, but I promise you, there’s a reason why you’re learning it. And just because the first funnel or the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or tenth offer doesn’t work, it’s okay because you’re learning how to make offers.
I’m working on a presentation, I’m speaking at Garret White’s Warrior Week, next week. And one of the sections I’m talking about Hook, Story, Offer and talking about how you need to make offers and whoever makes the most offers in the marketplace traditionally wins. And then I’m going to actually show all the offers I created from the beginning of time until Clickfunnels. A lot of people think, “Oh there’s probably ten offers or a dozen offers or a couple dozen.” But there are over a hundred offers I made before I made the Clickfunnels offer. Over a hundred.
These weren’t just like things I threw out quickly on a Facebook live, it’s like a hundred full blown funnels with headlines, sales video, product, creation, all those things. Over a hundred different offers I created before we created the Clickfunnels offer.
Okay, so it’s all those things, just a consistency of doing it and doing it and doing it. Because you have no idea which one of those skills you learn in this process, you’re going to come back and later use to scale your empire, to serve more people, to get your message out to the market.
The same thing happened in network marketing. I can’t tell you how many times I tried network marketing, had ups and downs and pros and cons. It’s funny because last week David Frye, he’s one of my favorite people I’ve ever met, he posted this thing like, “If I was still doing network marketing this is exactly what I’d do.”
And he mapped out this whole strategy of how he’d run these local events and how he’d film and how he’d do it and how he’d build the whole thing up and I was just like, “Oh my gosh.” There were three or four ideas and I’m like, “I remember when we did local events for network marketing. We literally ran our own local events for that. What are we doing, why did we do it, and how did it work? What are the things we learned that we can bring back and plug back into our thing?”
In fact, I remember one time, we were doing send out cards and we had this idea where we’re like, “What if we put an ad in Craigs list, looking for people who run home parties and pay them 100 (maybe it was 300, I can’t remember) It was the same cost as it was to be a distributer, but paid them to come and consult us on how to run a home party for this new company we were trying to roll out.
This was like the greatest idea ever, it didn’t work. Well, it kind of worked. Anyway, we put ads on Craig’s list and we had like, I don’t know, 20 people who were home party experts. They had run home parties for different companies and they agreed to come and train us in a group for a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars, whatever it actually was.
So we sat down and we showed them the product and then they were supposed to kind of write out a home party and script and process and show it to us. So they had to try the product, test it out, and like use it. And then when it was done we had each person come one on one into a room back with me, and….I’m so proud of myself for trying this. And we’re like, “What do you think about the product?” they’re like, “Oh it’s amazing.” I said, “Okay, well we owe you three hundred dollars to do this thing or…” I think it was the 100 dollars, “…the hundred dollars for your time, or I’ll pay you $300 to cover your distributer fee at send out cards. Which would you rather do?”
And a couple of people were like, “I just want $100.” And like half of them were like, “pay the $300. I will become a distributer. You sold me on the product. I’m now sold on it.” And then our thought was like, “Oh my gosh, we have these people now, they know how to do home parties, they signed up for our company, maybe they’re going to go and do home parties.” And a couple of them did, it never grew really big. But conceptually it was brilliant I think. It might have been the worst idea ever.
But it was something we just tried right. And there’s so many things we tested over and over again trying to figure out what was going to stick. Anyway, I just hope this gives you guys encouragement for those who are trying things that aren’t working. They’re not working as effectively as you wanted. “Man, I thought for sure this webinar Russell told me was going to be the best in the world. Then I tested the webinar, it didn’t work.”
And you’re all angry but it’s like, maybe it’s just because it’s the wrong offer. Maybe you gotta make another offer. Change your offer, or try a different product or try a different venue. Maybe instead of doing a webinar, maybe it’s a tele-seminar. Maybe it’s a live event, maybe it’s local. Who knows? But the skill sets you’re learning each of these steps along the way is going to help you for the next piece and the next thing. So don’t discount the education you’re getting from each of your failures.
So that’s the message for today. I’m going to go to bed. I gotta get up tomorrow morning at 5, because I’m working on the Traffic Secrets book, so I got a couple of hours of sleep and then back up at it. So I’m going to bounce. I appreciate you guys, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode please take a screenshot of it, post it on Facebook, Instagram, anywhere else you like to be social. Tag me on it, do hashtag marketing secrets, I always love seeing those and making sure you guys are actually listening. Thanks so much for everything guys, and we’ll talk to you soon.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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If you don’t want your successful business to die, heed this warning now.
On today’s episode Russell sends out a warning of why you can never stop fueling your fire. Here is some of the insightful advice in this episode:
Find out how Russell learned to always fuel the fire even when he wasn’t ready to sell his customers something. See what kinds of things you can be doing to keep yourself relevant in the eyes of your customers. And find out why even when you’re successful with a huge following you need to continually put fuel on the fire.So listen here to find out some of the ways Russell fuels his fire, despite having millions of followers between all the platforms.
---Transcript---
Hey, good morning everybody. This is Russell and I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Hey everyone, it is a crazy rainy day out here. Our weather here in Boise is rainy. It wants to snow, it’s getting close to Christmas, but it’s too warm. It’s been raining like crazy, we’ve been praying it gets cold so we can get some snow, because that’d be really fun right now.
Anyway, I’m heading to the office and just had a recurring theme in my head for the last day or so and I was like, I need to share this with everybody. So I’m going to talk about first my own experience, and then a close friend’s experience, and then some of you guys, it’s going to be related back to you.
So the theme, the message today is you gotta keep on putting fuel into the fire. Now, I’ve experienced this about three or four times throughout my career, I’ve made this mistake and learned from it. And hopefully I won’t make this mistake again.
But a lot of times what happens is we start having success with something right, we’re like, “This is amazing.” And then you stop doing it, for some reason. So in our business for example, we’ll start growing a list, we’re doing something to get new customers, new people in our door. And we’re having fun with it and it’s working. And all the sudden we start building a list, then we start, we shift our focus from that to selling them stuff and doing things and all these things. And we forget about the fuel that was brining people into our business.
And at first you don’t notice it because you’re having so much success with the existing customers you brought in, but eventually it starts imploding and your company will eventually die. I’ve seen so many people who get into my world and they hear me talk about, “You need to do a podcast a week, every single week, for at least a year.’ So they do it for like a month, a month and a half, and they start making some sales, and they stop doing the webinar, because they’re like, “We’re making money, things are great. Let’s cut off the fuel that’s building our company.”
That’s what happens and logically you’re like, “I would never do that.” But how many of you guys are still doing your weekly webinars? Alright, that means you cut off the fuel to your business.
Alright, let me step back to like a decade ago when I was building my company. I remember one point for sure, I was having some success, I was making some money, things were working, and I was like, “This is amazing, amazing.” And started hiring the company, started building a team, had a bunch of people, had an office. And then I had this idea for this website that was going to be the greatest thing in the world. So we started working on it and it took us about six months to build that website.
I remember during the process I was like, “Okay, I don’t want to email my list other things. I don’t want to make them upset, I don’t want to freak them out. I want them to be ready so when I have this thing ready and launched and live, they’ll be ready to buy it.”
So for like six months I didn’t email my list, and then the new thing came out and I was so excited and we emailed the list. The list would normally get three or four thousand clicks if I send an email to them. I remember I had like 300 opens and like 12 clicks. And I was like, “Oh crap, they don’t remember who I am. I am screwed, I’m in such a bad spot right now because I need money very, very badly, which is the reason why I did this whole promotion.” And they forgot who I was. I hadn’t been putting fuel into the fire.
And it was a very sad, scary lesson. I had to fire a bunch of people, I laid off some staff and I had to scramble to rebuild my list, rebuild a connection with them, get new people. I remember in my head saying, “I will never not email my list because people forget so fast.” If I waited a week to email my list, if it takes me three weeks to email my list, 2/3rds of my list will have forgotten who I am by that point.
There’s so much noise, so much things happening, you have to always be out there. That’s the reason why I’m doing Instagram’s every day, and Facebook’s every day, and podcasts every day, and all these things every single day because we need to keep fueling the fire. Fueling the fire is what builds the empire.
So I had a friend over last night and we were talking and he’s going through a bit of a tough time now, and we start talking and it was funny because he’s got a couple of different businesses and in all of them he had stopped putting the fuel. For his local business he had stopped the fuel. He just restarted it and he was like, ‘It’s killing. We’re doing awesome again.” And I was like, “Yeah, but what’s the lesson?” and he’s like, “I’d forgotten to put fuel on the fire.” I’m like, “yeah, you gotta keep doing that.” Even when things get successful, you gotta keep doing the things that are bringing fuel to the fire.
And then that same person has a webinar, and he was doing a weekly webinar for a long time, making a bunch of money and then he stopped because he started selling other events and things like that to this list, and it worked for a while and then attrition started happening and atrophy, or whatever you want to call it. And then it slowed down. I said, “Start doing the weekly webinar. Get back with it. That’s the fuel that builds the business, that keeps doing it.”
That same friend has a podcast and he’s like, “I used to podcast a couple of times a week and I haven’t podcasted since June.” It’s like, you gotta keep fueling the fire, you gotta keep fueling the fire, even when you have success over here, you can’t stop fueling the fire.
So that’s just kind of the message for you guys today. This is a very short one, I know. Partially because Funnel Friday starts in like 5 minutes and I gotta run in there and get it all set up. So I’m a little late.
But I just wanted you guys to think through that because you guys are going to go through these cycles of like, you’re focusing on how do I make it rain, how do I fuel the fire, how do I bring people in here, and you’re doing that and doing that and all the sudden your list and your customer base will start growing. And then what’s going to happen, I’m warning you, for those who haven’t done it yet, and I’m reminding you for those who have. You’re going to shift your focus, and you should, you should be shifting some portion of your focus to that audience and serving them and what’s the next thing I need and how else can I, what can I do? Is it an event? Or whatever, but the big thing is you can’t stop. You still have to tie in, I have to keep fueling the fire. I have to keep fueling the fire.
In our company we now have John Parkes on my team, who literally, his entire job is adding fuel to the fire. He’s running the traffic side of things. He’s always doing things. And for me, I’m content. I keep creating podcasts. I gotta do at least two podcasts a week. I gotta do at least this many emails a week. I gotta do at least…we have these metrics we have to keep doing.
We have to keep running the webinar. We have to get at least a thousand people a week to register for the webinar, we have to keep doing this to have all these numbers that we just keep doing because we know that’s the fuel for the business.
I could easily stop right now, I could stop doing all this stuff. People are like, “Why are you still on Instagram? Why are you still on Facebook?” I could stop all those things, but I know what would happen in six months to a year from now, if I stop those things today. I can’t tell you how many friends I have who have been in this industry as long or longer than me who were killing it at one time. They had built up this huge following of people and then they stopped and they kept messaging this following. And the problem with that is it’s either constantly growing or shrinking.
So if you stop bringing new fuel in the fire, new people in front end, your existing list, while they might be hot and responsive now, it will continue to get worse and worse until eventually you’re out of business.
So this is the warning to you all. Continually put fuel on the fire. Initially when you start your business it’s going to be a hundred percent of your effort, because you have no fuel, no people, nothing to sell, no one to sell to. So it’s focusing, focusing, focusing a hundred percent of the time. And as customers start coming, you start shrinking it and shrinking it.
But I would say, I would spend at least 50% of all your time fueling the fire and the other 50% on serving the people you have in there. But I wouldn’t drop below that. Because if you do, it will start to shrink and shrink and eventually disappear, which is the worst thing for all of us.
Alright, there’s your word of warning. Fuel your fire, keep it going. Do not stop even when it seems like, “I don’t need to do this anymore because I got this big following and people love me.” Look at me and say, “Wow, Russell’s got over a million people between all the platforms.” I think we’ve got a million and a half on the email list, we’ve got 700,000 on Facebook, 200,000 on Instagram, all these different places, yet you keep fueling the fire, fueling the fire, because I know I will become irrelevant if I stop.
Alright guys,I’m getting a message from Melanie saying, “Where are you? Funnel Friday starts in two minutes!” I gotta go, appreciate you all, don’t forget to fuel your fire continually, consistently. If you do that your business will live a long happy, joyful life. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.
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You may be doing something that’s holding yourself, and the person you’re trying to serve, back.
On today’s special Thanksgiving day episode Russell talks about why it’s okay for people you are coaching to seek out coaches that can help them with things that you cannot. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear from Russell on Thanksgiving.
How Russell’s niece seeking a new gymnastic coach relates to marketing coaches. Why as a coach you should allow your students to seek help from others who might be more helpful with certain aspects that you are not. And finally, why seeking significance can actually hinder your ability to achieve it. And only after you make the switch to service and contribution are you able to achieve significance.So listen here to find out why you should always be looking to help your clients, even if that means they need to go to someone else for guidance.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to a very special episode of The Marketing Secrets podcast.
Alright everybody, today was Thanksgiving and I literally, it’s 10:15 at night and I just dropped my twin boys off at my brother’s house. And what’s crazy is when I’m done recording this podcast, I will then email it to my brother, he will then edit it and somehow magically get it on iTunes, and then his wife, Rochelle will then take it and transcribe it and put the transcript up there for you as well, and she’ll post the transcripts on Marketingsecrets.com, and they do that every single episode for you guys. So I’m grateful for them on this amazing Thanksgiving.
So yeah, so I thought I would just share that so you guys know how the process works. People always ask me, “how do you podcast?” and the answer is I don’t know. I literally get my phone out, click record and start sharing what’s on my mind. And I have something that’s on my mind today, I actually had so many things.
And part of me wanted to do an episode where I wrote down everything I’m thankful for, and I just haven’t done that yet because there’s a lot of things and I was going to go over them with you guys. Maybe I’ll still do that, I don’t know. And I had other things that I want to talk about, but there’s one message that just came pretty loud tonight and I thought it would be fun to share it with you guys.
And the reason why it kind of came to my mind was I was taking my kids back from the hotel, we’re in Utah right now, my parents live here. So we had Thanksgiving with my parents, and now we’re staying in a hotel close to their house. And we had all the kids over to the hotel swimming, and having fun and I was driving them back, driving some of my kids to my parents house, some of them to my brother’s house, just dropping kids off at cousin’s houses everywhere and I was driving one of my cousins, and she’s a gymnast, she’s an amazing gymnast.
And it’s funny because she worked out at gym for most of her whole career, and then she kind of hit a sticking point where she wasn’t getting further than she wanted to get. And she couldn’t get past that sticking point and some of her friends had gone to this other gym and they got some really good coaching, they had a really good coaching staff there. The coaches there had helped them get past these plateaus and it really helped.
She went back to her coach and she was like, “Hey, I want to go to this other gym to help me get past these plateaus so I can continue to progress.” And what’s crazy, and this is where the lesson is going to come from, for all of you guys. But what’s crazy is the coach, instead of being like, “Yeah, I care about you as an athlete, you should.” The coach took that personal and started yelling at her and screaming, and kicked her out, and kicked her little sister out, and kicked everyone out of the gym because she wanted to get help from other coaches. It’s crazy to me.
Sorry, the moral, the good part of the story is she’s gone to this other gym and all of her numbers and all of her things have gone up because this new coaching staff is able to help her.
And it’s funny, the other day on Facebook somebody posted something and they tagged me on it. They were talking about who your favorite marketer is, and they said, “Sorry Russell, unfortunately my favorite marketer now is Steven Larsen.” And they tagged me to apologize to me, and I thought it was so funny.
And I remember I messaged back to that person, I was like, “My only goal in this whole game is to get my clients, my students, my people, whatever you want to call them, a result. That’s it.” I don’t care how you get the result right. I think there’s a lot of times when we get stuck in the ego of ourselves and get so worried about, they must have success through my program or the way that I do things. And it’s like, no, no, no. If you actually care about your student, if you actually care about their well-being, if you actually want them to succeed, you’re not going to sit back and only go through your path.
And I posted it and I was like, “That’s amazing. I don’t care if you get it through meor through steven. Steven’s amazing. He’s got gifts, he’s got talents, he’s got abilities that I don’t have. And if you can get the result you’re looking for through him, I’m more pumped than you are.” I honestly just want to serve at this point in my life. I don’t care. And if someone else can serve better than me to a certain person or certain audience, that’s amazing. Let them. That’s why I bring amazing people to Funnel Hacking Live, people who can out teach me on certain topics because I just want people to get the result. That’s all that matters to me. And I think that’s how good coaches should be.
I remember growing up, I had a really, really good high school coach named Steve Bowdren and I’m super grateful to this day for him, for a couple of reasons. One, he was an amazing coach. But number two, he never cared if I went and got coaching from other places. During the off season I did freestyle at a freestyle club and had coaches there. And then I did Greco at places, I went to other high schools, other places. And he was always okay because he didn’t, he wasn’t tied into his ego of, “I must be Russell’s coach. I must be the only person that instills knowledge into his head.” He was like, “No, Russell wants to be the best. So I’m going to allow him to be the best.”
So he allowed me to go out there and be coached by tons of other people. So for that, if nothing else, outside of the fact that he was an amazing coach as well, but his willingness to do that is rare. We have so much ego tied into this thing, of it’s gotta be us, it’s gotta be us. And I Just wanted to share that because I see that happening a lot in the coaching world. We’re all coaching people in different aspects of their life, or helping with health or weight loss or fitness or finance or whatever it is you do. All the different products or services, but sometimes we get too caught up in that piece of it, that you want to be the one that’s instilling all the information and knowledge to your person and I think that that’s a tragedy because none of us are amazing at everything right.
It’s interesting, we had Bart Miller, who is a close friend, he’s the guy who makes me look good at all of our events, gets me all dressed. I pay him a bunch of money to take me shopping to look, not in my t-shirt and jeans, like I would have showed up to my events. And Bart has got a successful ecommerce business as well, he’s in my inner circle, pays me to be in my inner circle, stuff like that.
And he asked me, “Hey, I’m thinking about getting some help with the ecommerce side of my business, what do you think I should do?” and I was like, “Oh if I was you, I’d hire Ezra Firestone.” And he was like, “Really?” I’m like, ‘Oh, totally.” And he’s like, “Well, okay.” And then he’s like, “Can you introduce me to Ezra?” and I’m like, ‘Heck yeah man, Ezra’s the man.”
So I introduced him to Ezra. I’m like, “Ezra, Bart. Bart, Ezra. You guys should work together, I want 10% of everything you make in the future. Just kidding, go do your thing, have some fun, everyone blow up their businesses.” So they went off on that thing and Bart told me later, he said that Ezra was so confused like, “I don’t why Russell told you to sign up for my coaching. You’re his student. Why would he recommend me.” And stuff like that. Because for me, I don’t care. I don’t care how people get results, I just want people to get results.
I’ve seen, I’ve had people who are close to me inside my business who are like, because if you look at the Two Comma Club X coaching, I brought in a lot of coaches this year. I brought in Julie Stoian, I brought in Alex Charfin, Steven Larsen, all these amazing coaching, John Parkes, James Friell, people who are legitimately amazing at what they do.
And it’s funny because a lot of people have come to the program and gone through it, and I know a lot of people have signed up for Alex Charfin’s high end coaching after my program, after they’ve gone through a lot of our stuff. And they’ve gone through to Alex’s stuff. They’re introduced to him through my program and then they buy his stuff later. And I have people who are like, “You know Alex is just taking people from your program and signing up.” And they’re like freaking out.
And I have to stop them and be like, “Look, look, look. I don’t care how they get the result. I just want them to get the result. If they get that through us, that is a huge honor and I’m grateful and glad we can be a little piece of their journey. But if Alex can serve them at this level or this piece of their business different than I can, then why not? I don’t have one coach, I have tons of coaches.
It’s funny, I’ve heard people that I’ve got coaching with before tell other people like, “Russell Brunson learned everything that he learned from me.” And I smile because I learned a lot from them, and I’m grateful for them, and I don’t usually say stuff. But I’m like, man, I have tons of coaches. And it’s like every coach has something they’re amazing at. I have some gifts and abilities, there’s things that I can do inside a business that are really, really good.
And I’m proud of what I can do and it’s a piece I’m really, really good at. But there’s other pieces of the business that I’m not good at, that I don’t’ want to be good at. I don’t even want to. People ask me those questions and I’m like, “You should hire someone who’s focus is on that.” And they’re like, “But I pay you to coach me.” And I’m like, “You pay me to coach you on this piece that I’m the man at, but someone else is the man at that piece.” Or “Someone else is the woman at that piece and you should find the right people to coach you and mentor you along the way.”
The reason why I went on this whole rant, is because I just wanted to share with you guys is, don’t think that your client is your client. That’s the biggest problem that we have, and then we get in this scarcity mindset, like, “Oh it’s my person and if they read anybody else’s books or listen to anything else, they’re going to leave me.” If they leave you, that’s okay. Your job is not to protect them. Your job is to give them your piece, the thing that you’re good at, give them that piece.
So people come to me and I give them pieces that I’m really good at and I plug that thing in and I keep trying to develop my piece and get better at it, and share more of it. And I want to keep developing myself as a human, but I am not offended when somebody goes and gets coaching from somebody else. In fact, I’m grateful for it because that piece is going to get them closer and closer to their end result.
So stop thinking of your customer as your customer and realize that this is a human who is in the market that I’m in and they’re trying to get a result and I feel like my thing is the best and I’m going to serve them at the highest level that I can, but sometimes serving them at the highest level possible is to allow them to get coaching from different people at the same time.
I look at my amazing cousin, I guess she’s my niece. I look at her and she’s an amazing gymnast. And if that coach would have been like, “Yeah, you should get some help from that coach and this coach.” Instead of destroying this relationship with her and her family, instead it could have been this amazing thing where he opens up the door to say, “I know this person and this person. Here’s my rolodex. Here’s other people you could bring into your world that could help you with this piece and this piece.” And they could have all grown together.
And then guess what’s fascinating? This is the coolest thing. That original coach, the coach that opened up the door and allowed her to go to other places, would have been the one who got all the credit. That’s what’s interesting to me, I look at a lot of people who I’ve helped in business and then go off to other coaches and get other pieces in other places, and I’m so grateful for this, most of the time they come back and give me credit. “Russell helped me to grow my business.” “Russell gave me this piece. But I got this piece from this coach, and this piece from this coach.” But because I was the one who helped them and served them selflessly and allowed them to go and learn from other people, for whatever reason the credit still comes back to you.
It’s crazy because that coach, my nieces coach wants the significance, so because of that he’s trying to hold this in and keep the significance. And because of that he lost his significance. Whereas when you open it up and allow, and try to serve people at your best and don’t be offended if they come or they go and just do your thing, that’s when you get the significance you’re actually seeking for.
It’s been funny, Dave Woodward and I have had this conversation four or five times in the last two or three weeks, it’s kind of crazy. About this fascination of like these people I know who at one time in their life were very significant. They had the significance from what they do and then as time has gone by they’ve become less relevant and they’ve lost their significance.
So they try and they fight and they cling, trying to get significance, and they do it in this way where they feel like they’re going to feel more significant because of this, and all these things they’re trying to do. And the reality is the more they do it, the more it distances themselves from people and the more they lose their significance.
And I look at me, there was a time in my career where I was very significance driven as well and I was seeking after it and trying to get the recognition. I wanted to be on stage and I wanted people cheering my name and all this kind of stuff, and I was fighting for it, tooth and nail and it was hard to get. And I got some of it, which is why I kept, you get that and that fuel that drives you on for a while.
But I remember a couple of years into this business I got over it. I was like, that’s not as cool as I thought it was going to be. I was like, I’m not going to worry about significance anymore. And I remember it was a mental shift for me. I was like, I’m stop thinking about me and start thinking about my customer. And for me, that was when I started really transitioning from, “How do I serve Russell’s ego?” to “How do I serve my customer?” and it was this weird shift and I stopped seeking for significance and started seeking as a servant. How can I serve? How can I impact? How can I contribute to other people? And that’s what my shift became.
And then the most fascinating thing happened. When I made that shift mentally, I get more significance now than I can handle. Today was Thanksgiving. I probably conservatively would say that between email, text, Voxer, Instagram, Facebook, those are the platforms I see directly on my phone. Between those channels, I’d say conservatively today there was well over a hundred something people thanking me for what I do. So many I can’t even respond. I feel guilty, I can’t even respond back to all of them or I would have missed my whole family on Thanksgiving.
And then I open up Facebook and I can’t open up Facebook without seeing like 10 people talking about CLickfunnels and what we’re doing. I go to events and I get asked to do these huge events now and all this craziness that I’m not seeking for, it comes to me now. When I stopped seeking significance I got more significance than I can even handle. So much that I just want to hide sometimes, and I don’t know how to get rid of it, because it just keeps coming. But I can’t stop serving because I get addicted to that.
And I just want to tell these people who are seeking after significance, when you stop seeking significance and you start serving, you’ll get more significance than you’ll ever dream of. And it doesn’t seem right, it seems backwards and doesn’t make any logical sense, but it’s happened for me.
And the people in my herd, in my tribe, in my influence, who I’m able to communicate with, who listened to that and they believe it and they shift, they find the same thing. And it’s fascinating.
Most entrepreneurs, so if you’re in this spot don’t feel bad. Most of us get in this business because we want significance, we’ve a chip on our shoulder. Somebody said something bad about us, somebody didn’t believe in us, we were the dumb kid in school. There’s all these reasons so we get in this business because we’ve got a chip on our shoulder and want significance. And then we start fighting for it and start fighting for it. And initially it’s okay, it’s what gives us that initial drive and motivation that we need to get off or butts and change something.
But the problem is that some people get the hit of significance and they keep going after it like a drug. And they go for the next hit and the next hit and then next hit. And it’s, I don’t know, it’s weird. But you can’t, it’s hard to get that direction. You get little hits of it and it goes away, hit and it goes away, hit and it goes away. It’s almost like it’s face, it’s like a hollow significance. I don’t know.
But when you make that shift to service, contribution the significance will come, almost more than you can handle. It’s almost like, it’s tough now sometimes. I love it, I’m not going to lie, it feels amazing. But it’s interesting.
So for you, if you’re listening to this, look at the spectrum, are you seeking significance? And if so, don’t feel bad. It’s okay, it’s how all of us got here. But the fastest way to get that significance, is actually not seeking after it. It’s not by positioning and posturing yourself, it’s not by all those things. It’s by finding your people and serving them. And sometimes serving them means letting them go.
Sometimes it means helping them find other coaches, sometimes it means being okay if somebody else helps them with something. What is best for the person you’re serving? That should be the thought in your head constantly. What is the best for this person I’m trying to serve? What is the best for them? Not what’s the best for you, what’s the best for them? And if you think about that, it will change everything.
Anyway, I hope that helps. I’m back at the hotel, I’m now going to finish this podcast. When I finish it, what I’ll do, I’m going to save the title and I’ll end it. I’ll email it to my brother, and in a week or two it will be live on iTunes. And like I said, his beautiful wife will transcribe it and she’ll post it on Marketing Secrets-the blog, on marketingsecrets.com, and that’s kind of how this whole podcast thing works. It’s a lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed tonight and I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving, no matter where you’re at around the world. Just remember that shifting from significance to contribution will change your life and it will change the lives of the people you have the opportunity to serve.
Alright with that said, appreciate you all. I’m getting messages from my wife and my brother and my sister all asking where I am at, so I better go in and see what’s up. Talk to you guys all soon. Bye everybody.
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All of us have a unique ability that seems impossible to clone, but what if you could clone it? Let me show you what I’m doing.
On today’s episode Russell talks about how he is attempting to clone himself, and how that is going to give him more freedom. Here are some of the outstanding insights in this episode:
Find out why Russell is finally building out his speaker team, after a year since the idea originally surfaced. Russell asks the question how you would clone yourself to get more freedom, while still scaling your company. And see how many speakers it will take to replace Russell, and why he should have done this from the beginning of Clickfunnels.So listen here to find out how Russell is cloning himself, and why you should consider doing something similar.
---Transcript---
Hey what’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, it’s late night and I’m headed to the office and I got another episode of Marketing Secrets podcast for you.
Alright everyone, so you may be wondering, “Russell, why are you going in the office again late tonight?” This is an exciting one. There’s just not enough hours in the day and I love my kids and so because of that I leave everyday at 3:00 for wrestling practice, which means I cut my day off by like two hours, which means I gotta squeeze it in somewhere. Especially right now while we’re trying to change the world. It’s insane.
But I’m pumped because what I’m doing tonight is literally going to free me. It’s interesting, I was hanging out at Tai Lopez’s house and we were talking about Clickfunnels, this is shortly after we’d passed our first 100 million in sales. I was talking to him and Alex Mayer, who is one of his business partners, and they were like, they asked how many sales people worked at Clickfunnels. I smiled and I was like, “It’s just me right now.” And they’re like, “What? How did you do that? How is it just you?” and we kind of laughed.
And if you want to know how I did that, obviously go to the, we’re in the middle of our product launch right now, 10xsecrets.com, or depending when you get this maybe the launch will be over and the product will be gone. But if it still is available go to 10xsecrets.com. But that’s how, really good presentations, spoke in front of masses, and did that for the last four years.
But eventually one becomes tired and one tries to figure out how am I going to scale this without me, is it even possible? It’s funny, last year about this time, we decided we were going to build out a speaker team, so we found who I thought was going to be the right person to be the first test person and to grow it. And it turned out really, really bad, and that’s as far as I’m going to go into that. But it kind of made me just walk away from it last year and not want to do it, thinking it wasn’t going to be possible and there’s no way I can replace myself, Russell, because of the bad experience and the bad person we tried to do this project with.
So I kind of gave up on it, and then this summer we were in Kenya and I met my friend, Pete Vargus, and Pete told me about a project he worked back a few years ago. It was one of the survivors, or one of the people that passed away in Columbine or, I can’t remember the exact story, I’ll probably mess it up. But that person went and gave a presentation and it was super inspiring and changed a bunch of people’s lives and Pete heard it and it changed his life.
So he went to the person and he was like, “I want to take this presentation on the road.” And the guy’s like, “I can’t, I need to be home with my family. What if I build a speaker team of people and went out there and the speaker team goes out and does all the selling for you?” and then Pete went behind the scenes and did that and built a huge speaker team and they went out and ended up having, I can’t remember, a couple hundred speakers traveling all around the world doing presentations everyday somewhere in the country, giving this presentation. He was able to get this message out to more people, which is exciting.
So it kind of re got me excited about the project we started a year ago and walked away from, which was building out a speaker team. So some of you guys probably saw on Facebook live, in Kenya we did a Facebook live with Pete, talking about the concept of building a speaker team and had people apply. We ended up getting 250 deep applications that came in, which were insane.
From that we had all those people take my slide deck and go and make their own version and pitch it and do the webinar and send it back to us to see how they did. From that we had 50 or so people that submitted the thing back. So right there, what’s that, 4 out of 5 gave up that fast when we asked them to do some work. And then from the 50 that came back, we went through all of them and we picked the top 20. And tomorrow the top 20 are going to be here in Boise. And we’re a two-day speaker training with them to teach them all my pitch.
So I’m in tonight just cleaning up the slides and getting ready for tomorrow. Because tomorrow morning I’m going to basically give the presentation as if I’m one of them. So I’m doing the funnel hacks presentation without being Russell. I have to be one of them so they can see what it sounds like and how you do it when you pull yourself out. So I have to tweak the slides a little bit and we’re adding some stuff in.
During the 10x launch, it was kind of fascinating. We did the upsell and I interviewed a whole bunch of people, like Armin Morin who invented the stack, and there’s some things I do in my stack that he doesn’t do that I like. But there’s some things that he did and I didn’t do that I love. So I’m going back in and weaving some of those things into this as well. Just some super, super cool things.
So that’s what I’m working on tonight, to get that in place. The reason I’m sharing this is I think all of us, me included, we think that what we have is a super power and we’re the only ones who can do it. So every time you try to think about scaling you’re like, “Oh I can’t because it’s me and I can’t scale me because I am a rock star.”
And what this is, if you look at all the things I’ve done in this business, there’s things that I, I don’t know how to code. Todd and Ryan and all the geniuses they do all the coding for Clickfunnels. I don’t know how to do customer support, I can’t do most things. But the one thing that’s my unique ability is creating a presentation and then delivering that presentation. And up to this point it’s been me doing that, and it’s at the point now where it’s exhausting. I can’t keep doing it.
I did a webinar a week every single week for years. And then I spoke around the country, around the world doing this for a long time. And I just can’t physically do it anymore. Man, what if we had 20 people who were on the road every single month? It’d be 20 or 30 presentations happening around the country every single month, which is really exciting. So that’s what we’re working towards and what we’re trying to do, but it’s me literally replacing myself, cloning myself, and training and teaching them my pitch and my script and how it works, and building out this entire speaker team. So it’s really exciting.
So for any of you guys who have ever thought the same thought that I have, if I could just clone myself, if I could just whatever. Realize that you actually can. But it takes a little work. It’s not just clicking a button and having the cloned sheep pop out the other side of the machine; you have to actually do something. But if you do it, it can free yourself.
So that’s why I’m coming in late tonight, to put in this extra effort. Because I told my wife and kids, “Look, this is my retirement.” Right now I speak a couple of times a year. Next year I’m speaking at Grant Cardone’s 10x event because there will be 35,000 people, so I can’t say no to that. But that’s it. I’m not speaking anywhere else next year.
So because of that, we’re plugging in these speakers and it’s going to be amazing. So that’s the goal now, to train them on my presentation, and my pitch and to get them learning it, and understanding it, and mastering it, and presenting it. And sure, they may not close the same percentage that I do, but if they can close 75% as well as I do, and we’ve got 20 of them and I don’t have to leave my house, that’s the best clone I’ve ever seen.
So that’s the game plan. So with you, my question for you is what is your unique super power, and could you clone yourself? If you had to, if you had to listen to Russell saying, “Look, four years from now you’re going to be in a spot where you try to clone yourself.” What would you do now?
I wish I would have done this speaker team thing the first year. Can you imagine as soon as Clickfunnels first came out , if I would have stopped for a month and built out the speaker team and then sent 20 people out on the road instead of just me? I mean, we might not be at 100 million; we might be at, who knows, abillion, by now?
So for you, because you maybe think, “Oh, in four years from now I may start trying to figure out how to clone myself.” What if you did it today? What would you have to create? What would you have to put together? What would you have to figure out? Who would you have to find? What would their skill set need to be to be able to replace your skill set?
What’s cool about this is I don’t have to get them to write their own webinars, they’re just taking mine. They just have to be good at presenting, and standing onstage, and following the script and doing it with enthusiasm and energy and excitement. And if they can do that, they’ll crush it right.
Anyway, I’m excited; we’ll see how it all goes. But that’s the plan. So for you guys, that is my question for you. How could you clone yourself if you had to? Think about that and ponder on it because that’s going to be the question you have to ask and the answer you have to figure out if you want to get true freedom.
Alright you guys, appreciate you all. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll talk to you all soon.
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In the times in your life when you win, and the times in your life when you lose; the only real purpose is for you to capture a story to help more people.
On this episode Russell talks about his experience at Entrepreneur of the Year, and why he is grateful he didn’t win. Here are some of the insightful things you will hear on today’s episode:
How the Entrepreneur of the Year event is similar to a body building competition. How Russell plans to use the story of not winning the award in the future. And why you should look for every opportunity to add to your story, whether your winning or losing.So listen here to find out how The Entrepreneur of the Year Awards compares to body building competitions, and why Russell feels grateful to lose.
---Transcript---
Hey, good morning everybody. This is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I got so much good stuff to talk to you guys about today. Entrepreneur of the year event, something funny with my kids, and a whole bunch more.
Hey everyone, man, I have like 12 podcasts in my head right now that I want to share with you guys, of lessons from this last week. Some of you guys know that this last weekend was the entrepreneur of the year, the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award ceremony.
Earlier this year I submitted for the entrepreneur of our region and I won it, which was really cool. And then basically all the regions get together and do a national tournament. So I was all excited to go to this national thing and compete and see if we could win the national entrepreneur of the year award.
So I thought, if we’re going to do this we should make an experience out of it right. That way we can do an episode of Funnel Hacker TV, that way it’s not just me going somewhere on an event because I go to a lot of events and it’s just like boring. So how to make this memorable for me and for my wife and for anyone else I want to bring.
So I decided, hey, I’m going to bring my parents, because that would be fun to have them come to something like this. And then Dave and his wife Carrie wanted to come to, which was super cool. So the first thing was like, we can just fly there or what if we did it up right and just rented a private plane? So we rented a private plane, flew down, picked my parents up in Salt Lake, which my mom was certain she was going to die on the plane. She’d read a book about someone who got in a plane wreck one time. So because of that she was convinced that certain death was the only possible outcome for this vacation. It was really hard to convince her to go. But she agreed finally.
So we flew down and picked them up and went to this event. That night we got there, and they did it right. They had this huge dinner with this amazing buffet. It was amazing. I’ve been to a lot of buffets and this was like four steps past anything I’d ever been to before. They had this dessert bar and they literally had a donut wall, a wall with these pegs coming out of it with thousands of donuts all over them.
They had this thing that looked like an ice cream bar with tons of different kinds of ice cream flavors, but it wasn’t ice cream it was cookie dough. It was a cookie dough bar. It was insane. They scoop out tons of cookie dough into the thing and then they had chocolate covered bacon, and they had…the desserts alone were amazing. Anyway, it was amazing.
Then there was the Kelly Clarkson concert. So we were like 5 rows away from Kelly Clarkson and she did this huge show for us, a private event for everyone who was at this thing, which was super cool. And that was the first night.
The next morning we woke up and if you watched my instagram stories, I made some jokes, but we had a chance to see the winners of last year’s entrepreneur of the year award. And I’m going to kind of tease them, but also I’m grateful for them, so I’ll talk about both sides of it.
But they are a venture backed company who’s trying to solve cancer, which is really, really cool and I’m grateful for people and entrepreneurs and companies like that. But the problem, the frustrating thing on my side is that they’ve raised $2 billion dollars in funding in this thing. So I’m like, that’s awesome. I’m grateful that they’ve done that, what they’re doing, that they’re trying to stop cancer. That’s so valuable and helpful. But it’s funny because I don’t know if I would consider that being an entrepreneur. It’s like, the entrepreneur in this business, their full time job is to go sell people on giving them more money. And then they have people they’ve hired to solve cancer.
You’re more like a glorified sales person who’s just selling to VC’s. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s entrepreneurship, but maybe I’m wrong. But I am grateful for what they’re doing. They raised $2 billion, and it’s interesting because most of the companies that were there had all raised money. I think there’s probably half a dozen of us who are boot strapped entrepreneurs and the rest were all like VC backed.
And it was funny because I was talking with Dave ahead of time about this, I’m like, you know in the body building world there’s two competitions. There’s one that’s like the body building competition, everybody comes and there’s no rules. They never say, ‘oh yeah, go use steroids.” But they don’t test for it. So because of that, that’s when you get guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferigno and these dudes who are insane. When you look at them you’re like, that can’t be human. It’s because they’re not human, they’re on steroids.
So there’s that term, then there’s the natural body building contest where you have to like not be on steroids to qualify. And those guys look way smaller. They look amazing, but standing next to each other you’re like, that dude’s on steroids, that’s the difference.
I feel like it’s the same thing here. The entrepreneur of the year award was like all these dudes who are steroids who took venture capitalist…got $2 billion in funding, and then there’s people like me, who are the natural ones. Who showed up and if you look at us by ourselves we look good, but you look standing next to someone who received $2 billion in funding it’s like, how do you compete with that. It’s fascinating.
In fact, for those who were, I don’t want to leave you in suspense. We did not win the entrepreneur of the year award. The guy who won it in our space is Thomas Siebold, which if you’ve ever heard of Siebold, he’s a billionaire. He started a new company because he’s a billionaire, he just funded it and had other people fund it. How do you compete with that guy? Come on now, that’s not fair. In fact, Siebold is the dude who Mark Benioff, who owns Sales Force used to work for. So he was Mark Benioff’s mentor.
Anyway, so it’s like, that’s who I was competing against, billionaires. So I lost to the billionaire, but the billionaire was all roided out, so I don’t feel too bad. Anyway, and then the dude who won entrepreneur of year overall, of all the categories, was the guy who started Groupon, which actually was really cool. Groupon was his sixth business and then he took it public, and now this is his new business. Again, it was confusing, but they went from zero to $2 billion dollar valuation, excuse me a billion dollar valuation in 2 years.
But again, they haven’t sold much stuff, but because of all the money they’ve gotten from funding their value there. So once again, they’re all roided out and they beat me. But it was still kind of fun to see.
And again, I want to step back, well in the intro of this podcast I make fun of it. About companies who cheat and take on venture capital. And while I do feel that, I am at the same time grateful that there are companies out there who are trying to cure cancer. There’s companies out there who are trying to do these things, that probably couldn’t be done by a bootstrap entrepreneur, just because of the nature of what it is. It takes $1 billion apparently, in funding to cure cancer before you have the pill and start selling it. You can’t start selling it ahead of time.
So I understand it and while I tease and I joke about it I am grateful for those entrepreneurs who are doing that direction. I just don’t believe in it. I think for us bootstrap entrepreneurs there should be an award as well. So we may or may not being working on the Bootstrap Entrepreneur of the Year Award, because I think it’s something that needs to happen.
Just like in body building there’s the body building competition, then there’s the natural body building competition. I think that’s more interesting to me and I think to you guys as well, because most of you guys don’t have $2 billion in funding.
So it’s like, okay how do we actually, in fact it’s funny, one of the panels, they were doing the interview and they asked the guy, “What’s it like as an entrepreneur taking on the risk?” and the guy was like, “Well, you know the nicest thing about risk, I just go back to my venture capitalists and get them to give us a couple more hundred million dollars, and then the risk fear goes away.” I’m like, what? That’s the worst answer ever. It’s like, what do you do when you hit plateaus? I just take more steroids. Come on.
I wanted to be like, that’s when we freaking hustle. We recruit a team of people that believe in our vision. We work our butts off for free and we create something truly remarkable and then we sell it to our customers, and they love it so much they finance it. That’s the answer I wanted, but no. It’s like, we go back and take another hit of roids.
Anyway, that’s kind of interesting. But I digress, there were so many other cool things that I wanted to share with you guys. So many cool stories I could share with you. In fact, I’m sure I’ll do separate episodes. Like for example, Jennifer Gardner came and spoke and she is funny, I teased my wife, I think everyone’s allowed to have one celebrity crush right, and she’s totally my celebrity crush. Ever since 13 Going on 30, I was like she is the coolest ever.
So she’s been my celebrity crush, and she came and spoke. And she was so amazing, not just from the point that I have a crush on her, but just insanely amazing. I was so impressed with her. Anyway, I’ll tell you some stories about her in another episode.
But blown away by her. Just so many cool things that happened. But the biggest thing I wanted to share with you guys, and this is kind of the purpose of this podcast, and then I’ll go deeper on other episodes about some of the specific things I learned. There’s some really cool lessons I learned from watching the Kelly Clarkson Concert. Specific things from Jennifer Gardner, specific things….but for this one, what I wanted to talk about, the natural vs the regular body building contest, how it relates to entrepreneurship.
Because I think sometimes some of may look at those guys and be frustrated. And it’s like, no, just understand that they have a role in this world and we’re grateful for them, but it’s not who we are. We’re the natural body builders and it’s something to be proud of, I think, that you bootstrap your company. So that’s number one.
But number two is like, I didn’t win the contest. It’s funny because so many people reached out to me, “Oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” And it’s funny because I didn’t care. I didn’t go into to it to do it. I’m always going into things looking for the story. What’s the story I’m going to be able to tell because of this experience? I think that’s something that all of us should be looking at because we all go through tough times.
And I’m not saying this was a tough time for me, it wasn’t. I was fine not winning. But when I’m going through something I’m looking for what’s the story that’s going to happen in this thing that I can use to inspire somebody or to sell something or to whatever. I’m always talking to you guys about you need to be building up your rolodex of stories. When I do a webinar, the reason I can do webinars so fast, and I can crank them out and I can sell well is because I’ve got this huge rolodex of stories that I’ve been building up for over a decade that I can pull out really quick in a moment’s notice.
So I’m like, what are the stories that I can pull out of this experience that I can use in other things? Like when I spoke at the 10x event and I did 3.2 million dollars in sales. And everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh, you made 3.2 million dollars in sales.” I’m like, yeah, that was cool but I’ve got a story now, and that story will make me ten times that 3.2 million. To be able to tell that story about how I’m the highest paid public speaker in the world. How I netted a million dollars an hour. All those things, I will sell way more product from that than I ever did from the money I made at the event.
I’m looking for the story. So for me, it’s like this whole thing happened. I didn’t win it, but like for me, the story is this whole thing I kind of shared with you guys today, this natural versus unnatural. And I promise you, we are going to building a Bootstrap Entrepreneur of the Year Award and a thing, and it’s going to be a movement and a big thing, based on this story.
The fact that I lost, I’m so grateful that I lost because now I have this story about, “Hey I lost, but I was going up against people who were on steroids.” It’s not really, it’s like bringing a gun to a knife fight. Let’s come back and let’s build the natural body building contest for entrepreneurs. Now I have a story I can share, and a reason and a purpose and a thing that’s going to call to all of my people. It’s going to call out to the bootstrap entrepreneurs. The people I love serving are going to hear that message and be like, “Yes, that’s who I am.” And they’re going to hear my voice and they will come to me.
So that’s the magic. In the experience I’m looking for the story because the story is the next phase of the thing.
So for you, I want you guys to keep your eyes open more for the stories that are happening. Every day when you have success there’s a story there that’s more valuable than the success. When you fail there’s a story there that’s more valuable than the failure. And most of us just go through it and we’re upset or happy for the thing that just happened.
It’s like, no, no, no. That thing that happened was good, but it was not the finish line. It was the story you need to inspire people to sell your next product, to do your next thing, to create your movement, to call a new segment of people into the marketplace. Whatever it is for you, the story is the key.
So keep your eyes open for the stories that are happening around you. That’s the magic, that’s what I want to make sure you guys aren’t missing, because if you did, for me that whole weekend could have been a wasted weekend. “I lost, let’s not talk about it.” No, no, no. “I lost, let’s talk about it.” That’s more powerful.
Alright, with that said, I’m home. I’m going to go get ready for the day. A lot of fun stuff happening this week. I’ll take you guys on some of the journeys but we are, my kids have….so today’s Monday morning, I’ve got a wrestling match Tuesday with the kids. Wrestling match Thursday and then Friday and Saturday there’s a wrestling tournament. So we got wrestling all week.
And I was supposed to fly down Friday and Saturday to go be with the Harmon Brothers, to work on part two of our viral video campaign with them, the problem is that it was booked on Friday/Saturday and I found out later that my boys had a wrestling tournament Friday/Saturday. So I was like, okay my kids are more important than my company. I’m not missing the wrestling tournament. So I had to talk to them and move things around. So what’s happening is Tuesday’s wrestling match ends, after that I jump on a private plane and fly to Provo to get to Sundance, so I can be there for the writing retreat.
So I’m there all day Wednesday at the writing retreat, half day Thursday, and then I jump in a plane and fly back and get back just in time for my kids’ wrestling match on Thursday night. So this whole detour is costing me like $16 grand in flights to be able to….
So anyway, someday I’m hoping my kids listen to this episode someday when their father is dead and they’re like, “I wonder if my dad loved me?” and be like, “Yes, he loves you a lot. He rearranged heaven and earth so he wouldn’t miss a wrestling match because that’s how much he loves you.” So I hope they listen to this someday and know how much I love them. They are the coolest little things in the whole world and I cannot wait to watch them wrestle.
So that’s my week this week, plus we got a speaker training happening in Boise so Tuesday/Wednesday we are training a team of 20 speakers to go out and do my presentation on the road, which is exciting. So I’m working on presentations today to train them on my stage pitch. That’s happening today and then 10x secrets, we’re in the middle of launch right now, it’s doing really, really well. And I think I’m running a webinar because I think Monday I’m going to be doing a webinar to close out the whole thing.
So I got that happening this week plus while I’m in Provo working with the Harmon Brothers, that night we’re all trying to get them all of our new Org Chart business development stuff with the company. It’s going to be an insane week. If I survive this week, then I’ll have earned Thanksgiving next week.
So anyway, I appreciate you guys all, thanks for listening. If you learned anything from this, take on your phone, you can click on the buttons and take a screenshot of the screen of this podcast episode, do that and then go to Facebook or instagram, or pinterest, wherever you go and post the video and say, “I just listened to Russell’s story about ‘blah’, check out his podcast.” Tag me so I can see it and also hashtag Marketing Secrets, and let’s get some other people listening to this episode. Appreciate you guys, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk soon.
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A few of my final thoughts at 2:36 in the morning, before we launch the 10X Secrets funnel.
On this episode Russell talks about his backstory and how he learned how to persuade people to buy, and how you can learn to do it too because the 10x Secrets product was about to launch. Here are some of the super awesome things in today’s episode:
Who Russell learned the art of closing from and how you can have access to the exact same course. What kinds of things are included in the new 10x Secrets course. And how if you pay attention to the buying process of the 10x Secrets course, you can learn how it was done.So listen here to find out why the 10x Secrets product is special, and why Russell is so excited about it.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to a freezing cold, late night Marketing Secrets podcast.
Alright everyone, it is officially 2:36 am in the morning. By the time you’re listening to this, this will have already happened, but tomorrow is the 10x Secrets product launch. And I am so excited. I don’t even know how to explain my excitement level.
I feel like there’s been a lot of cool things that I’ve tried to bring into this world. I know we all have these legacy projects we have. So I think Clickfunnels is by far my biggest legacy project. This thing we brought into the world to help empower entrepreneurs to sell more products and change the world, which has been good. But I think the thing that, I think the books that I’ve written have helped simplify the process for people. But I think the thing that’s the most beneficial is like, having a funnel is really good, understanding how to do it, how to create products is really good. But how to sell is the most important thing.
There are so many entrepreneurs who could change so many people’s lives, but they do not have the ability to persuade somebody into giving them money so that you can go and transform and change their lives. And I think for me that was the key. I spent 15 years of my life, for those who don’t know the backstory, trying to understand this skill.
I went to my very first marketing event probably 13 years ago I think, 12-13 years ago, as an awkward, shy internet nerd who had no friends, outside of my beautiful wife and some wrestling buddies. And I was trying to figure out how to make money online. And I went to this event and I was expecting to learn SEO and PPC and all these things, and instead I saw a speaker get up, talk about internet marketing and at the end he sold his package, and I watched in amazement as people ran to the back of the room.
It was a $2000 course, I did the math, “2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, oh my gosh that guy made $68,000 in an hour and a half.” The next guy got up and spoke and he sold, he sold a $5000 package and I did the math and by the time he was done he did like $120,000 in sales. And I saw the next speaker and the next and the next. And after three days of watching this, I was like I have to learn this skill. I have to become a master of this.
So I started the journey and it was not an easy road for me. There were ups and downs and bumps and bruises and all sorts of nightmares in between. Lonely nights, long trips on the road. Some trips where I financed, you know, I pay to fly out and go to hotels and everything, and I’d go and I’d speak and sell and I wouldn’t actually sell anything and I’d fly home. And man, I’d lost $6000 trying to go sell on this thing. $6000 we didn’t have, expecting to go out and kill something and bring it home, and coming home empty handed, not once but multiple times.
But I kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it until I started learning how you persuade, how you teach, how you make an offer, how to control a room, how you get people to do what you need them to do so you can actually change their life.
And that was a 12-13-14 year journey for me and I really feel like tomorrow, actually today a couple hours from now, I think it’s nine hours from now the launch. Nine hours and 21 minutes is the launch. But I feel like this is the culmination of all that. Where I’m taking everything and putting it into a super product. It literally is, it was after the Grant Cardone event where I did 3.2 million dollars in 90 minutes and then 30 days later I got onstage at my own event and did 13 million dollars in 90 minutes. I made more in 30 days than I had made prior, usually in multiple years.
And after the 10x event I promised everyone I’d do a training, showing them how I did it. And I did a 6 hour training and that is the foundation of this product, that 6 hour training. And then as we started creating this as an, in fact, if you guys listen to the podcast, if you remember after the Grant Cardone event I said, some of you guys are going to be blown away I made 3.2 million dollars, but this is just the beginning. I’m going to make way more telling the story about how I made 3.2 million dollars. So this is the beginning of that.
So as we started putting the offer together it kept getting better and better and kept plugging in more things. We spent this whole day working on my webinar slides and making template versions of them that people can take and literally have my slides and my power points, my keynotes so you can go tweak them and edit them for yourself. I did a whole training for like 40 minutes on how to edit the power points and all the psychology behind them.
I did, I found a 2 ½ hour training I did with my inner circle that showed the choreographing of the 10x event and also the Funnel Hacking Live event. Like how did we do 13 million dollars in sales at our own event? We choreographed every minute of the entire event and I walk through the choreographing of that. I put that in the course, I put interviews from all the legends that I learned closing from. I can’t even tell you how much we put into this thing, but it’s insane and I’m proud of it.
I hope that all of you guys get it, not just because I wanted to make money, I do, I’m not going to lie. But that’s not the purpose. I want you to get it because of how much money it’s going to make you. It’s going to give you the ability to actually persuade your audience to give you money. And when they give you money you will have the ability to help them and serve them and change their lives.
People who don’t pay, don’t pay attention. And if you can’t get someone to pay, you’re not going to have the ability to get them to pay enough attention to your message to be able to change their life. And this skill set that I want to teach you guys, it will change everything.
I could show you guys tons of people that have gone through pieces of this training. Brandon and Kaelin went through this training, boom Lady Boss was born. Dan Henry went through this training, you’ve see how he’s blown up. I could show you hundreds of people who have learned this stage presenting webinar style that I do and have built multiple million dollar a year businesses. And this is the first time I’ve put everything together in one spot.
So if I was you, a couple things. Number one go to 10xsecrets.com right now and buy slowly. The funnel, I’m very proud of this funnel. There’s so much in it and if you put your student glasses on when you buy, you’ll notice what is he doing? Why is he doing it? Where’s the layout? Why is the button here? Why does the order form look like this?
All those things are strategically thought out and tested. They’re not something we just make up, so buy slowly, it’ll be worth the price of admission alone, just to study the funnel. Number two buy the upsells because they are insane. I wish I could tell you everything. The order form bump is my power point slide deck and the training goes with it. It is insane. If you don’t buy that, you must hate money.
The first upsell, I literally got John Childers, the dude who trained almost all public speakers for 20 years, the people who, he’s like the founder of this industry. He licensed his course to us, and his course, it’s called Childers Chunks. It’s not just like, here’s a course on how to speak from stage. It literally is all the stories he uses to break false beliefs, and you listen to the course and he gives you the chunks. You learn them, you memorize them, you plug them into your presentation and now you can use them. We licensed that entire thing from him, so you get that as part of the upsell, which that alone, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that course and how many times I memorized his stories to be able to tell them in my presentations.
The fact that he allowed us to license that is insane. It’s insanely good. The second upsell is my FHAT event. We used to charge $15,000 for it, and now you can literally do the FHAT event virtually from your home at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the cost. If I was you I would invest in everything. I wish I could just force you to buy it all, because it’s worth it all. And we give everything at these hugely discounted prices because I want everyone having this.
Like I said, as soon as you learn how to persuade, everything will change for you. Anyway, thanks for letting me rant and talk about it because I’m so excited. If you haven’t checked it out, go to 10xsecrets.com, pay attention, watch the process, watch the videos, watch the copy, read the copy, look at the links, look at the structure, look at the order forms, look at the upsells, look at the copy at the bumps, this is a marketing education that I hope you guys are paying attention to.
Alright, with that said, I’m going to bed. I have to be here in like 3 ½ hours to work out with my guy. So it’s going to be a short night, early morning, but then the launch is tomorrow and that’s the best part. So thanks everyone, have a great night and I’ll talk to you guys soon.
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A cool new way to look at how you structure your sales funnel.
On this episode Russell talks about a new kind of funnel he’s been developing for the 10x Secrets launch, called the Unboxing Funnel. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:
What an Unboxing Funnel actually is. How you can use the Unboxing Funnel in addition to the webinars you already have to sell the same products. And how this funnel can allow new customers to come in, who you would be unable to close on a $1,000 webinar funnel.So listen here to find out what an Unboxing Funnel is and you can use it.
---Transcript---
Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about what I call an unboxing funnel.
Hey everyone, I hope you are all having an amazing weekend. I am actually out today in my yard. We’ve been having fun with the kids, cleaning things up, getting ready for winter, which is near upon us. And I’m hoping the wind doesn’t blow too loud as I’m sharing this stuff with you. But I just got this thought in my head, and I’m excited and wanted to share with you.
So I’m going to dive deep into an unboxing funnel because next week we’re launching out 10X secrets master class, which I’m really proud of and really excited for. And what we’re doing in is what I call an Unboxing Funnel, so I’m going to break down what that is and share it with you guys because I think for a lot of us marketers when we’re doing things, we only look at things one way. Like a lot of you guys are doing webinars and you’re looking at that one way, so I want to share with you this because basically what we’re doing is what we’re calling an unboxing funnel, which is like a webinar, but we’re chipping out the side and breaking it up and unboxing it into a really cool offer.
So I’m going to go walk you through that in a second. But first I’d love to get your guys’ feedback because I started thinking, I don’t know if you guys all do the same thing, but when I see people I’m competing against do things….I’m always watching, right. I think it comes from me growing up as a wrestler. As a wrestler I knew what I was trying to accomplish. First I wanted to be State Champ, then I wanted to be an All-American, then I wanted to be a National Champ.
So I had these things and I’m watching all the people I’m competing against. So I’m watching the matches, I’m watching the scores, I’m watching what they’re doing, I’m watching the moves they’re good at, then I’m practicing based on that. So I’m back in my, I’m watching a tournament and I see a guy who’s better than me, who wins a tournament. Maybe I take third, he wins it. I watch the match, I study it, I go back to my dorm room, I start figuring out how do I beat this guy? This is what he did, and how he did it. I gotta get better in these positions and this thing. So when I had the chance to wrestle him next time, I’d be able to beat him.
That was my whole life. That was twenty years of my life, which is, if you wonder why I compete so much in business and why I love this game, it’s because it’s the same thing. I’m looking at my competitors and what they’re doing and trying to figure out the next move. It’s like a game of chess for me.
It’s fascinating to me, I don’t feel like….for some reason, no one is being willing to step up and hard core compete against us, which is kind of frustrating as a competitor, I’m used to that. I’m not used to that, I want people to step up and compete. And instead nobody really is, which I guess is probably good. But at the same time it always surprises me.
So I look to people I’m competing against and I’m watching, I don’t know about you but I watch what they do. It’s like Chess and I’m looking at the moves they’re making. I see the move they make and then I try to, based on this I’m going to do this. And this is where I got to get stronger, and this is where I gotta protect ourselves, which is logical strategy as an athlete, as a competitor.
But for some reason in business, nobody’s…I don’t know. It’s interesting. So instead what I do is I watch as our competitors make moves, and then what I do is I put myself in this role where I’m like, if I was consulting these people, this is what I would do. It’s kind of a fun exercise in my head.
In fact, I remember probably two and a half years ago, I did a podcast episode, it was right have Clay Collins, the founder of Lead Pages had done something that was totally playing into, it played into our strengths and it was like the greatest thing he could have done for me. And I remember being so shocked.
It’s like if I was wrestling in a wrestling match and the person is like stepping into me, which opens up the leg for me to shoot on. I was like, “Why are you doing that.” I remember being so confused like, dude, you literally just opened up a gap to make it so easy to dominate you.
So I’m so confused by this, so I did a whole podcast episode I remember that day, driving to the office. Like, “If Clay Collins hired me as his consultant, this is what I would have said, and what I would have showed him, how he executed things poorly.” And it was a really funny episode. And then I realized I was probably a jerk to post that, so I didn’t. I don’t think I ever posted it. I don’t even know. I may still have it somewhere. I should go look for it.
But it was a really funny podcast, me coaching my competitor on what they should have done, as opposed to what they did do. “You stepped here, which means you were out of position, which is why we were able to attack and open up and expose your flaws, which in a wrestling match is how I beat you. Whereas, instead if you would have done this, this actually would have been, something for me as your competitor I would have been on my toes for.”
Anyway, I didn’t publish that one because I thought it would be probably too soon. But part of me is almost wanting to do the same thing right now and publish for example, this is insanity to me. Word is on the streets, and I’ve seen some of the stuff they’ve been publishing, it’s crazy. Infusionsoft right now is in the process of changing their name. And in the documents sent out to their partners saying why they changed their name is literally because people are teasing them, calling them confusion soft.
I’m like, you guys have a 18, 19, 20 years of branding behind this thing, and you’re literally changing your name because people in my community, and I didn’t start this, it was all them, have been teasing them and calling them confusion soft. It just blows my mind. I want to, as a marketing consultant I want to be like, “Dude, what are you doing? There’s no better…if I were wrestling you literally just stood straight up and put your arms down by your side, and it’s almost impossible for me to not score and take you down at this point.” It’s strategically insanity, but that’s the move they’re making right.
So part of me, and it’s not just that I tease them, there’s all, like it’s happening with other businesses around, like, people I look at like, these are legitimate competitors that could have a shot if they would just play their cards right. And they’re doing everything, they’re literally like, “Here’s my leg Russell.” And I’m like, “Is this a joke? Are they setting me up?” And I grab the leg and take them down and I’m like, “Nope, they literally gave me their leg.” What were they thinking?
So part of me wants to start a whole podcast where I just critique my competitors and tell them what they should have done to actually be a threat, as opposed to giving us their leg and letting us just take them down. Maybe I can’t do that. Maybe I should do it in the past like, record them all and then publish them like a year later.
Anyway, let me know if you guys want me to do more of those things because I think it’s funny and at the same time I think it’s good for you guys because we should all be thinking strategic like that, looking who are the people who are also trying to serve your customers. And if you’re half as passionate as I am about my customers, the reason why I’m so aggressive, if you’re wondering, “Why is Russell such an aggressive marketer? Why doesn’t he just play nicer?” It’s like, I honestly feel in my gut if people aren’t using us, if they’re not using Clickfunnels, not going through our training, not doing our stuff, any other option that they’re going through is like less effective for them, they’re going to struggle.
I care about my customers so much that I, that’s why I market so aggressively. Because I want my customers to have success and I feel like any other option is blocking them from the success that they deserve. So that’s how you have to kind of look at your business, and when you realize that, “oh my gosh, these people are doing great things, that’s cool. But man, I could serve these people at such a higher level. I need to do everything in my power to get my message out to protect and save these people that I’m serving.”
That’s how I feel about it. That’s the gut feeling you should have as you are serving your audience, and if you don’t have that yet, it’s like, oh man, you need to make your product better, make your service better, make your message simpler to understand, make your processes….whatever it is, make it better, because you should feel that way, because no one else is going to feel that way about your business except for you. You’ve got to feel that passion about it or else it doesn’t make sense.
At the traffic secrets event I was telling, I went kind of on a little tangent rant with those guys there, but I told people, it’s funny people are always blown away, “Russell you close 15% of the webinar. You close 45% of the room.” Whatever the numbers are and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s really, really good, but honestly when I get done I’m so pissed that I wasn’t able to close the rest of them.” Like, what was wrong? What did I say to, what more could I have done to convince these people that this is the path they need?
Like the 10X event, it’s funny because there’s 9000 people in the room. We did 3.2 million, that means we closed a little over a thousand people, which means 8000 people didn’t buy. And for me it’s like, what more could I have said to convince those other 8000 people? I don’t know what else I could have done. And it frustrates me because I’m like, I know any other option, any other alternative that they try to go for is not going to be nearly as, it’s not going to help them get to their goal faster than what I’m offering them. It’s like, what else can I do to make sure that happens. So that’s why I’m so always focusing on this game, because I care enough about our people. So there’s number one.
Alright so let me know if you guys want me to do a podcast like that, because it would be funny.
Alright, let me go back to the purpose of what I want to talk to you guys about today. So the concept I want to talk about today is what we’re calling the unboxing funnel. So what is an unboxing funnel? Well, it comes down to the offer and the first time we started nicknaming it this was about last year’s Funnel Hacking Live, because every year we get a bunch of ecommerce people. They come in and they’re like, “This funnel thing doesn’t work for us. It works for info products, but not for physical products.” And I’m like, “No, you don’t understand.”
And I started talking about like, imagine if somebody came to your ecommerce store, it could be Amazon, it could be Shopify, whatever. They came to your store and they bought everything you got right. They fill up the whole cart with all the good stuff, and all the things they would need to be successful with whatever the product or service is they’re buying from you right.
What an unboxing funnel is, you’re taking this cart of everything they could buy and then you’re pulling things out of the box. You say, “What’s the very best thing that somebody could possibly want from me?” And that’s what you’re going to lead with. Then what’s the second best thing? That’s going to be my order form bump. What’s the third best thing? That’s going to be the next piece. So you have this, you’re unboxing all the offers that are in this cart, and then you put them in a logical sequence of order. And that’s how you build a funnel the right way.
So if somebody comes in, like for example Trey Lewellen, when he launched his flashlight offer, the same one that did $20 million dollars in like 6 weeks, which is insane. He could have just had people come to his flashlight store and he has his flashlights and cases and warranties and all that stuff that’s there. But instead he unboxed what his dream client would buy and said, “Okay what’s the best thing they would want?” The best thing they would want is the survival flashlight, so that’s the first offer. “What’s the next thing?” They probably want a case, that’s the second thing. And the third thing, they want extra batteries. The fourth thing they want, a warranty. Fifth thing, faster shipping. And he unboxed all the things he could potentially give his customer at one time, and let them kind of pick and put them into a funnel. So that’s what an unboxing funnel is.
So it’s funny because the product we’re launching next week, which by the time you guys hear this it will probably already be launched, so if you haven’t purchased it yet, you’re insane. Go to 10xsecrets.com and go buy it. And if you don’t buy, at least I’m going to explain the strategy behind it so you understand.
So I very easily could have just done a webinar to sell 10x Secrets, but I have done a webinar multiple times and my role in this ecosystem at this point, I don’t feel is to just keep doing the same thing. If I did then all I’d get is people that are coming doing webinars through us. My job is to keep developing and inventing and creating new funnels, new ways to sell so that you guys can model them. Does that make sense?
The last thing I need in my life right now is more money. That’s not what I’m doing this or the launch for. It’s so I can create a model for the rest of our community to look at and then to emulate for their funnels. It’s like if I just did another webinar, you’re like, “Oh Russell did another webinar. Yay.” And there’ll be times I do more webinars, but it’s like the reason why I did the thirtydays.com funnel was so that you guys could listen to that, look at and be like, “Oh my gosh, how could I use something like this in my business?” “How could make a summit?” “How could I do a challenge?” We’re just innovating and developing and creating and doing new things, to be a model for you guys to come back and model what we’re doing, funnel hack it and take it back into your businesses.
So that’s what I feel like my role is in this ecosystem. So this time we’re like, “How do we create a cool funnel that shows people what’s possible?” I feel like the people who study me close have done, they’ve all done webinars now and free plus shipping offers, because that was the two funnels we have done primarily. So it’s like, okay I’m going to do new things, new concepts.
Alright so that’s what this unboxing funnel is. Instead of doing a webinar, which I could definitely do a webinar. If you look at what the offer actually is, it’s a thousand dollar offer. If I were to sell it on a webinar I could easily sell it for a thousand dollars and it’d be, “You’re going to get this and this and this and everything when you buy.” So instead what I’m doing, instead of doing that, I’m making an unboxing funnel. So I’m unboxing the pieces out of here.
So if I was to sell this on a webinar, I look at what’s the offer that on the webinar I’d sell for a thousand dollars. So I have all that, and I look at all the pieces of the offer and say, what’s the sexiest, best, most exciting piece of this offer. I figure out what this and I pull that part out, pull it out of the funnel and now it becomes the front end.
So you’ll see when we launch this, the front end offer, what it actually is, and it’s going to be my 10x training, the 6 ½ hour training, that’s the core thing, and there’s a couple other bonuses that go with it. Those are all things that would have been pulled out of the stack slide, and that becomes the frontend. We’re going to sell that for anywhere from, I can’t remember yet. We’re still kind of going back and forth on the price. Somewhere between $197 to $300, somewhere in that range is where the front end will be. So people will buy that.
Then the order form bump on the page will probably be $47 and it’s going to be the Power Point slides and a video of me explaining how the slides work and kind of going through it and training them on the slides. So that was another component that would have been the stack slide if this had been a webinar.
The upsell now is going to be this closing program. Like, how do you close on a webinar, what are all the different closes. So I’m bringing in all the people that I learned closing from, John Childers came and taught his Childers Chunks. In fact, he actually let me license, this is so cool. He used to sell a $25,000 speaker training where he taught his Childers Chunks and I paid him a ton of money to license that, so now inside the Closer Secrets program there’s a licensing, we licensed how to do the Childers Chunks. So you get his entire $25,000 course, it’s in there.
And then I got, John Childers is the guy I originally learned public speaking from, so it’s like his best stuff. And then its Myron Golden coming in and teaching how to do the price marinade and the repitch. We’ve got Ted Thomas coming in teaching Trial closes, all the closing stuff. That becomes the second part of the offer. And that part will probably sell for, I believe, $297.
So we have a $197 product and a $297 upsell, a $47 order form bump, and then we’ll have a second upsell, which will be the FHAT event. So those who came to the original FHAT event, it’s the same event that Natalie Hodson came to before she launched her Abs Core and Pelvic Floor product that a did a million dollars in four months. It’s the same event that Brandon and Kaelin came through before their webinar. The same, all these people went through this event, they each had to be $25,000 to be in my inner circle to be at that event. It was a private event I did just for them, and people have talked about ever since because they have seen all the results from it.
But that event is then, three day event is the second upsell, which is the FHAT event recordings, stuff like that, which will be a $497 offer.
So if you take that, and you take all the products, the front end and the two upsells and you add up the price of what we’re actually selling it for it ends up being a thousand bucks, which is the same I would have sold it for on the webinar, but I’ve unboxed each of the pieces to turn it into an actual funnel. Does that make sense?
So $197 front end, $297 upsell, $497 upsell, but it’s the same product, but I’ve unboxed it. So instead of selling it through a webinar with a longer form presentation, I unboxed it and I can sell it differently. So I sell it through sales letters and sales videos and things like that.
Anyway, so that’s what I wanted to share with you guys, because a lot of you are like, “I have a webinar that’s killing it, what should my next offer be, Russell?” A lot of times the next offer isn’t doing a whole new offer, it’s unboxing the webinar that you’re killing it with. Unbox it and create an unbox funnel, which is like front end, upsell, downsell type thing.
So it’s not like you have to create something new from scratch, it’s just you’re unboxing it, and selling it in a different way. Same product, different funnel, different strategy, different way to do it. Because some people may never be will to pay the $1000 for you course, but they may be able to pay $200 or $97 for your front end. And maybe they can’t buy all the upsells, but it gets them in, and now you get a whole bigger segment of the market and helps get into your products, and then you can serve them and eventually you’ll be able to send them up to the higher levels.
So that’s kind of what I wanted to share with you guys today. The concept of an unboxing funnel and thinking back about that with whatever it is you’re selling. If you’re trying to figure out, what’s my next funnel, what’s my next product, what’s my next thing? It might be just as simple as unboxing it and doing something amazing.
So there you go you guys. I hope that helps. With that said, I’m going to go finish cleaning my yard and then go play with my kids some more. We’re going to a football game tonight. It’s the BYU, Boise State football game. For those who know my backstory, I wrestled at BYU and then they cut the wrestling program so I transferred to Boise State and wrestled at Boise State, and then they cut the wrestling program. So I honestly hope both teams lose tonight. I hate them both. But it will be fun to go with my kids and have a good time.
I know my daughter is a BYU fan, and my other boys are Boise State fans, so it will be kind of a family war and rivalry. And honestly I’m going to cheer for whoever is winning because I flip flop because I played for both teams, I got letterman jackets for both teams, so I’m allowed to.
Anyway, other than that you guys, have a great weekend. And if you haven’t got your tickets yet to Funnel Hacking Live, what are you waiting for? You are insane. We are more than halfway sold out, tickets will be gone soon. Just go to FunnelHackingLive.com. We are putting on a huge show for you, I’ve already spent over a million dollars cash, out of my pockets, to put on this party for you and I don’t know about you, but if I had a friend who was obsessed with marketing put on an event and spent over a million dollars to entertain me for four days and teach me funnels and change my life forever, I would spend a thousand bucks to get a ticket and show up. Unless you hate money, you should be there as well.
So appreciate you guys, hopefully I’ll see you at the event here in a couple of months. With that said, I’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.
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A scriptural lesson that applies directly to your business.
On today’s episode Russell talks about dropping hints about cool things while describing other things, much like Jesus Christ while telling parables in the Bible. Here are some of the awesome things you will find in this episode:
Why many people miss some of the amazing hints Russell drops while telling everyone about cool things. What it means to listen with different ears. And how Russell finally figured out how to listen to the courses he was buying differently.So listen here to find out you can get even more awesome information from Russell if you just listen a little differently.
---Transcript---
Good morning, good morning everybody. This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I want to share with you guys something that is insanely cool and hopefully very applicable to you.
Alright everybody, I as you know talk a lot, probably way too much. But I’m always talking right. There’s videos and podcasts and Facebook lives and Funnel Fridays and Funnel Hacker TV and Marketing Secrets podcast and on, and all these things. And it’s interesting, when I’m talking I’m always sharing things, I’m always dropping ideas and thoughts and concepts and clues and hints. I remember yesterday I shared some stuff that I think was really, really profound, but I didn’t share it in a way of like, “Okay, let me teach you a lesson.” And I was like, “This is the lesson.” I didn’t say that, I just shared something really quickly.
Actually Todd and I were doing our Funnel State of the Union address that we do every Friday, kind of walking through the ups and downs, the pros the cons, all the stuff that’s happening from the development side. So people are understanding, you know, that we’ve got 50+ developers working around the clock to serve you guys. And most companies don’t tell you about that side, and I was like, I want to bring Todd, my cofounder on to share those things.
So he’s sharing them and while we were talking, we were talking about different features that were coming out, and we shared this one really cool thing, which is Clickfunnels now tracks the stats of all your emails. So you look at every single email and be like, “hey, this email made 14000 dollars.” And then you can dig deeper and be like, “what funnels do those things come from.”
And what we did when we started testing this, we found that the emails we sent out, this email made $3 grand, this one made $15 grand, this one made $18 grand, we see the different price for each one going out. We dug deeper and it’s like, oh wow, this email $12000 came from the thing we were selling in the email, but $3000 came from the links in the footer of my email.
I was telling people, I was like, “I was so shocked that I was able to see this. Oh my gosh, not only am I making money from the email, but the links in the footer were also making me money.” And then I went on to the next thing.
Most people heard that, and the only thing we heard was, “Oh cool, we can see the stats of how much money we made in our emails.” But there was this other lesson that was a second level deeper that was so much more powerful, that almost everyone who listened, didn’t hear it. So it was the second lesson.
The second lesson as I was speaking was, “Oh my gosh I found out these footer, links in my footer that are like, ‘hey you like stuff from Russell, here are links to my other products and services.” And just putting this block of links to my other products and services in the footer of my email, each email is making me 3-4 thousand dollars every time I send an email out.
That’s multiple millions of dollars a year, just from the footer links in my emails. I didn’t break it down and stop and tell people that was the thing. But those who are listening with their ears, they’re catching these things. So this morning as I’m getting ready, we’re about to head out and have the kids work because it’s a nice Saturday, the phrase came to my head, it said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” And I started thinking about that.
Everyone’s listening to the same thing, but he who has ears let him hear. And I was like, that’s a scriptural phrase, I remember hearing that. So I went to, I have this app that you can search all the scriptures for things, so I just typed in “he who has ears, let him hear.” And in the new testament alone, the new testament alone that phrase is used 50 times. 50 times, and it’s usually if you look at it deeper. It’s usually Christ will tell a parable, or tell a story and before he does he says, “He who has ears, let him hear.” And then he tells the story.
And people are like, “Oh that story is really, really good.” And they move on. But what’s interesting is that in every parable there’s different levels of depth. It’s like, oh, here’s this story. Oh, I feel good. I heard this story. But then if you look deeper, “He who has ears let him hear.” Those who are listening with the right ears, they’re hearing a different message, or hearing a more important message, or hearing what Christ actually needed people to hear.
So for me, I’m thinking about that in context to this. It’s like, I’m always sharing things. A lot of you guys maybe saw the Funnel Hacker TV episode we did a little while ago about my trip to San Francisco and you’re like, “Oh it was fun, Russell had a good time. It was fun to see all the stuff.” But it’s like, man, there were 10 different deep, profound lessons that were shared in that thing that weren’t like, “Let me stop real quick guys, let me explain this lesson.”
But it was like, as I’m going through the video and we’re doing the vlog, we were talking and sharing things and there were all these other lessons that most people missed.
So I wanted to bring this up for a couple of reasons. I want you guys to start listening with different ears. Start listening with, what are all the hints and secrets and things that Russell’s dropping in every day conversation? They’re in the books, they’re in the podcasts, they’re in the videos. All the stuff we’re putting out, we’re not putting out just put out, right.
Sometimes we put out something and it’s like, “Why would Russell put that out?” And it’s like, those who are listening with the right ears are going to capture different things than those who are just scrolling through their news feed and seeing stuff.
So my moral for you today, is he who has ears, let him hear. What that means is as you’re seeing stuff and you’re listening to things you guys, listen for the secondary story. Listen to the secondary meaning of the thing that I’m not able to share all the time like, “here’s the cool ninja thing.” I’m just sharing, in the process of me telling stories and doing things, there’s all these things that are happening behind the scenes that most people are actually missing.
And I know that hit me up, I know the people that are listening because, for example, just certain people. Steven Larsen is one who listens with different ears and I’ll say something and he’ll, I know that he heard it because all the sudden three days later, I’ll say it in a podcast and like three days later I’ll get a message like, “Oh my gosh, you said this did you know that…..” I’m like, “Yep, he’s listening with the right ears.”
Brandon Poulin is the same way. I’ll say something and then Brandon will message me and be like, “Dude, blah, blah, blah.” Or Kaelin will hear it. The people who are having the most success are the ones who are listening with those ears.
I remember, another way I can kind of put this, first time I noticed it in myself was, I was buying everybody’s stuff for a long time, I was a buyer. I was buying thing after thing after thing. And I wasn’t getting a lot of value out of it until I started listening with different ears. I remember I started buying, but I started buying people’s things slower. I started studying not just what they were selling, but how they were selling it. No one’s telling you, “This is how I’m selling you.”
But I started listening with those ears, like “How did they get me so excited? Why was I so pumped to buy this product? Why was I anticipating? Why was I on the edge of my seat for days or weeks or months waiting to give this person money?” I’m listening with different ears now because I’m trying to figure out what were they doing? I got more value out of watching what they were doing a lot of times than the actual buying of the product where they’re teaching what they’re doing.
That’s the secret, listening with different ears, paying attention differently. Don’t just listen for the overarching storyline. What are the sub lessons that are happening? And as you start looking for those, you guys, I’m dropping them all the time. And I wish I could do a podcast up front for every single one explaining, “Hey guys, this is what this means exactly.” But I can’t. I’m just going thorugh and sharing as much as I can and those who have ears will hear. So for you, that’s the lesson and the moral, to start listening with different ears. Listen for the underlining messages because they’re there all the time, all around you.
Alright guys, I gotta go clean my room, or clean the outside. My daughter, Norah’s yelling at me on the intercom saying, “Dad, where are you?” So I gotta go. Appreciate you guys, have an amazing day. And we’ll talk to you guys soon.
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Listen to part two of my private coaching session with Nic Fitzgerald. The lessons I shared with him here are the same ones I would share with you if we could meet face to face.
On today’s episode Russell continues his chat with Nick Fitzgerald and gives him a list of seven things he can do to help his business grow. Here are some of the awesome things to look forward to in this episode:
What a few things that Nick got close to doing totally right, but missed a few key elements. How Nick can collaborate with others in the Two Comma Club X to be able to grow his customer list. And how Russell went from being a nobody, to having Tony Robbins call him to ask for help and how Nick can use that advice to advance his own business.So listen here to find out what the 7 things are that Nick and anyone else can do to grow a business.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m so excited, I’m here on stage right now at the Two Comma Club X event with Mr. Nick Fitzgerald onstage. A year ago I gave a podcast to him about how to make it rain and this is section number two.
Now those of you who don’t know, in the last 12 months since I did that podcast he’s been making it rain and he’s been changing his life, his family’s lives, but more importantly, other people’s lives as well. And it’s been really cool, so that’s what we’re going to cover today during this episode of the podcast.
So welcome back you guys. I’m here on stage with Nick Fitzgerald, so excited. So I made a list of seven things that if I was to sit in a room with him in front of a whole bunch of people I’d be like, “Hey Nick, you’re doing awesome, but here’s some things to look at that I think will help you a lot with what you’re doing.”
So number one, when Nick first kind of started into this movement that he’s trying to create, I don’t know when it was, if you created this before or after. When did you create the Star Wars video?
Nick: This was, we talked in July, it was September/October. So a few months later.
Russell: How many of you guys have seen his Star Wars video? Okay, I’m so glad. For those who are listening, about 10% of the room raised their hand, the other 90% who are friends and followers and fans of Nick have never seen the Star Wars video. His Star Wars video is his origin story and it is one of the best videos I have ever, by far the best video I’ve seen him do, it is insanely good. It comes, do you want to talk about what happened in the video? It’s insanely good.
Nick: So I told the story of, I’m a huge Star Wars nerd, so if you didn’t know that, now you do. When I was young my grandma who lived in the same neighborhood as me, she took me to go see Return of the Jedi in the movie theater and I was such a Star Wars nerd, even at a young age, that when I was playing at the neighbors house, and you know, it’s the 80s, so mom and dad are like, “Nick, come home for dinner.” That kind of thing, I would ignore them. I would not come home until they called me “Luke”. No lie. I would make them call me Luke, or I would ignore them. I would not hear them.
Russell: Had I known this in high school I would have teased him relentlessly.
Nick: So my grandma took me and I remember going and it was so fun because we took the bus, it was just a fun thing. And we went and I just remember walking in and handing my ticket to the ticket person. And then popcorn and just the smells of everything. And again, this is the 80s so walking in the movie theater; I almost lost a shoe in the sticky soda, {sound effects} going on. I just remember how my feet stuck to the floor and all that stuff.
And then just being so excited to see my heroes on the big screen and Dark Vader, I just remember watching it. This is such a silly thing to get emotional about, but you know I remember the emperor and Darth Vader dying and all that stuff. It was just like, ah. It was a perfect day. Sorry sound dude. But it was just a perfect day with my grandma who has always been dear to me.
So the purpose of that video, I’d put it off for a long time. I knew I needed to tell my own story if I’m going to be helping somebody else tell theirs. And I put it off for a long time, because working through things, I was afraid that if it sucked, if the story was terrible, if the visuals were crappy, that was a reflection on me and my skills. I had worked on a bazillion Hallmark Christmas movies, you know how they put out like 17 trillion Christmas movies every year, if one of those sucks, no offense, they’re not riveting television.
Russell: They all suck.
Nick: That wasn’t a reflection on me, I was just doing the lighting or the camera work. I didn’t write the story, it wasn’t my story. But this was me, so I put it off for a long time because I knew if I didn’t execute how I envisioned it, that it would reflect poorly on me, and it would be like I was a fraud.
So the purpose of the video, there were three purposes. One to tell a story and get people to connect with me on a personal level. As I told that story here, how many of you remembered your feet sticking to the floor of a movie theater? How many of you, when I talk about the smell of popcorn and that sound, you felt and heard and smelled that. So it was one thing, I wanted people to connect with me and just see that I was just like you.
Then I wanted to show that I could make a pretty picture. So I had that and I used my family members as the actors. And then I went and talked about how…and then I wanted to use it to build credibility. I’ve worked on 13 feature films and two television series and shot news for the NBC affiliate and worked in tons of commercials. So I’ve learned from master story tellers and now I want to help other people find and tell their story. And then I showed clips of stories that I tell throughout the years.
So that was, I just remember specifically when I finally went and made it live, I made a list of about 20 people, my Dream 100 I guess you could say. I just wanted to send them and be like, “Hey, I made this video. I would love for you to watch it.” And Russell’s on that list. So I sent that out and made it live and then it was just kind of funny, it didn’t go viral, I got like 5000 views in a day, and it was like “whoa!” kind of thing.
But it was just one of those things that I knew I needed to tell my story and if I wanted to have any credibility as a story teller, not as a videographer, but as a story teller, being able to help people connect, and connect hearts and build relationships with their audience, I had to knock it out of the park. So that was my attempt at doing that.
Russell: And the video’s amazing, for the 10% of the room who saw it, it is amazing. Now my point here for Nick, but also for everyone here, I wrote down, is tell your story too much. Only 10% of the room has ever seen that video or ever heard it. How many of you guys have heard my potato gun story more than a dozen times? Almost the entire room, for those that are listening. Tell your story to the point where you are so sick and tired of telling the story and hearing it, that you just want to kill yourself, and then tell it again. And then tell it again. And then tell it again, because it is amazing. The video is amazing, the story is amazing.
How many of you guys feel more connected to him after hearing that story right now? It’s amazing. Tell t he story too much. All of us are going to be like, “I don’t want to hear the story. I don’t want to tell the story again.” You should be telling that story over and over and over again. That video should be showing it. At least once a week you should be following everyone, retargeting ads of that video. That video should be, everyone should see it. You’ve got 5,000 views which is amazing, you should get 5,000 views a day, consistently telling that story, telling that story.
Because you’re right, it’s beautiful, it’s amazing and people see that and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need that for my business. I need to be able to tell my story the way he told that story, because the connection is flawless.” And I think my biggest thing for you right now, is tell your story more. Tell that thing.
You’re telling good stories, but that story, that’s like your linchpin, that’s the thing that if you can tell that, it’s going to keep people connected to you for forever. Anyone who’s seen that video, you have a different level of connection. It’s amazing, it’s shot beautifully. You see his kids looking at the movies, with lights flashing, it’s beautiful. So telling your story more, that’d be the biggest thing. It’s just like, all the time telling that story over and over and over again. That’s number one.
Alright, number two, this one’s not so much for you as much for most of everybody else in here, but number two is that energy matters a lot. I’m not talking about, I’m tired during the day. I’m talking about when you are live, or you are talking in front of people, your energy matters a lot.
I was hanging out with Dana Derricks, how many of you guys know Dana, our resident goat farmer? By the way, he’s asked every time I mention his name is please not send him anymore goats. He’s gotten like 2 or 3 goats in the last month from all of our friends and family members here in the community. Please stop sending him goats. He loves them but he doesn’t want any more.
Anyway, what’s interesting, I was talking to Dana, and he’s like, “Do you know the biggest thing I’ve learned from you?” and I’m like, “No. what?” and I thought it was going to be like dream 100 and things like that. No, the biggest thing that Dana learned from me, he told me, was that energy matters a lot. He’s like, “When I hang out with you, you’re kind of like blah, but when you get on stage you’re like, baaahh!” and I started telling him, the reason why is when I first started this career, in fact, I have my brother right now pulling all the video clips of me from like 12 or 13 years ago, when I had a shaved head and I was awkward like, “Hi, my name is Russell Brunson.” And we’re trying to make this montage of me over 15 years of doing this and how awkward and weird I was, and how it took 8-10 years until I was normal and started growing my hair out.
But I’m trying to show that whole montage, but if you look at it like, I was going through that process and the biggest thing I learned is that if I talked to people like this, when you’re on video you sound like this. The very first, I think I’d have an idea and then I’d just do stupid things. So I saw an infomercial, so I’m like I should do an infomercial.
So I hired this company to make an infomercial and next thing I know two weeks later I’m in Florida and there’s this host on this show and he’s like the cheesiest cheese ball ever. I’m so embarrassed. He asked me a question and I’m like, “Well, um, you know, duh, duh…” and he’s like, “Whoa, cut, cut, cut.” He’s like, “Dude, holy crap. You have no energy.” I’m like, “No, I feel really good. I have a lot of energy right now.” He’s like, “No, no you don’t understand. When you’re on tv, you have to talk like this to sound normal. If you just talk normal, you sound like you’re asleep.” I’m like, “I don’t know.”
So we did this whole infomercial and he’s like all over the top and I’m just like, trying to go a little bit higher and it was awkward. I went back and watched it later, and he sounded completely normal and I looked like I was dead on the road. It was weird.
Brandon Fischer, I don’t know if he’s still in the audience, but we did…Brandon’s back here. So four years ago when Clickfunnels first came out we made these videos that when you first signed up we gave away a free t-shirt. How many of you guys remember seeing those videos? I made those videos and then they lasted for like four years, and then we just reshot them last week because it’s like, “Oh wow, the demo video when we’re showing CLickfunnels does not look like Clickfunnels anymore. It’s completely changed in four years.” So Todd’s like, “You have to make a new video.” I’m like, “I don’t want to make a video.’
So finally we made the new videos, recorded them and got them up there and we posted them online, and before we posted them on, I went and watched the old ones, and I watched the old ones and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is just four years ago, I am so depressing. How did anybody watch this video?” It was bad, right Brandon. It was like painfully bad. I was like, “oh my gosh.” That was just four years ago. Imagine six years ago, or ten years. It was really, really bad. And when I notice the more energy you have, the more energy everyone else has.
It seems weird at first, but always stretch more than you feel comfortable, and it seems normal, and then you’ll feel better with it and better with it. But what’s interesting about humans is we are attracted to energy. I used to hate people talking energy talk, because I thought it was like the nerdy woo-woo crap. But it’s so weird and real actually.
I notice this in all aspects of my life. When I come home at night, usually I am beat up and tired and worn out. I get up early in the morning, and then I work super hard, I get home and I get out of the car and I come to the door and before I open the door, I’m always like, Okay if I come in like, ugh, my whole family is going to be depressed with me.” They’ll all lower to my energy level. So I sit there and I get into state and I’m like, okay, whew. I open the door and I’m like, “What’s up guys!! I’m home!” and all the sudden my kids are like, “Oh dad’s home!” and they start running in, it’s this huge thing, it’s crazy, and then the tone is set, everyone’s energy is high and the rest of the night’s amazing.
When I come in the office, I walk in and realize I’m the leader of this office and if I come in like, “Hey guys, what’s up? Hey Nick, what’s up?” Then everyone’s going to be like {sound effect}. So I’m like, okay when I come in I have to come in here, otherwise everyone is going to be down on a normal level. I have to bring people up. So we walk in the office now and I’m like, “What’s up everybody, how’s it going?” and I’m excited and they’re like, “Oh.” And everyone’s energy rises and the whole company grows together.
So l love when Dave walks through the door, have you guys ever noticed this? When Dave walks through the door, I’m at a 10, Dave’s like at a 32 and it’s just like, he wakes up and comes over to my house at 4:30 in the morning to lift weights. I sleep in an hour later, and I come in at 5:45 or something, and I walk in and I’m just like, “I want to die.” And I walk in and he’s like, “Hey how’s it going?.” I’m like, “Really good man. You’ve been here for an hour.” And all the sudden I’m like, oh my gosh I feel better. Instantly raised up.
It’s kind of like tuning forks. Have you noticed this? If you get two tuning forks at different things and you wack one, and you wack the other one, and you bring them close together, what will happen is the waves will increase and they end up going at the exact same level. So energy matters. The higher your energy, the higher everyone else around you will be, on video, on audio, on face…everything, energy matters a lot. So that’s number two, when you’re making videos, thinking about that.
Alright number three, okay this, you were like 90% there and I watched the whole thing and I was so excited and then you missed the last piece and I was like, “Oh it was so good.” So a year after that Facebook message came, you did a Facebook live one year later to the day, and he told that story on Facebook live. And I was like, “Oh my gosh this is amazing.” And he told that story, and he was talking about it, and I was emotional, going through the whole thing again. This is so cool, this is so cool. And he told the story about the podcast, and this podcast was an hour long, and the thing and his life changed and all this stuff…
And I know that me and a whole bunch of you guys, a whole bunch of entrepreneurs listened to this story and they’re at bated breath, “This is amazing, this is amazing.” And he gets to the very end, “Alright guys, see you tomorrow.” Boom, clicks off. And I was like, “Aaahhh!” How can you leave me in that state? I need something, I need something.
So the note here is I said, make offers for everything. Think about this, at the end when you ended, and everyone’s thinking, I want to hear that episode, where is that? How would it be? Now imagine you take the opportunity at the very end that says, “How many of you guys would like to hear that episode where Russell actually made me a personal podcast? And how many of you guys would actually like if I gave you my commentary about what I learned and why it was actually important to me? All you gotta do right now is post down below and write ‘I’m in.’ and I’ll add you to my messenger list and I’ll send you that podcast along with the recording where I actually told you what this meant to me.” Boom, now all those people listening are now on his list. Or they can even go opt in somewhere.
But all you did was tell the story and everything and we were all sitting with bated breath and I was just like, at the end make the offer. You guys want the stuff I talked about, you want the thing? You want the thing? And then you send them somewhere and now you captured them and consider them longer term and you can do more things with them.
It was like, hook, story, dude where’s my offer? Give me something. But it was awesome. How many of you guys felt that way when you listened to that thing and you’re just like, “I don’t even know where to find that episode. Russell’s got eight thousand episodes everywhere, I don’t even know where to look for it.” You could have been like, here’s the link.
Just the link….if you guys can’t figure out how to make an offer, go listen to a whole bunch of stuff, find something amazing and be like, “oh my gosh you guys, I was listening to this Tim Ferris podcast, he did like 800 episodes, every one is like 18 hours long, they’re really hard to listen to, but I found this one from 3 ½-4 years ago where he taught this concept and it was insane. It was amazing; I learned this and this. How many of you want to know what that is? Okay, I have the link, if you message me down below I’ll send you the link to exactly where to find that episode.” Everyone will give it to you.
You’ll be like, “But it’s free on the internet Russell.” It doesn’t matter. You know where it’s at and they don’t. They will give you their contact information in exchange for you giving them a direct link to the link.
Back before I had anything to give away for opt ins, guess what I used to do. I used to go to YouTube and I would find cool videos from famous people. One of my favorite ones we did was I went and typed in YouTube, “Robert Kiyosaki” because he was one of my big mentors at the time. And there was all these amazing Robert Kiyosaki videos on YouTube for free. Tons of them. Hour long training from Robert Kiyosaki. Four hour long event from Robert Kiyosaki. All this stuff for free listed in YouTube. So I made a little Clickfunnels membership site, I got all the free videos and put them inside a members area and just like, “Tab one, Robert Kiyosaki talking about investing, Robert kiyosaki talking about stocks, Robert Kiyosaki talking….”
And I just put all the videos in there and made a squeeze page like, “Hey, who wants a whole bunch of free, my favorite Robert Kiyosaki videos?” and I made a little landing page, people opt in, I give them access to the membership site, and then I went and targeted Robert Kiyosaki’s audience and built a huge list off his people. Dream 100.
Imagine with Dream 100 instead of doing just one campaign to all the people, if each person in your dream 100 you made a customized membership site with the free content right now, be like, “Hey, you’ve listened to a lot of Grant Cardone, he’s got four podcasts, 5000 episodes, there’s only four that are actually really, really good. Do you guys wan tto know what they are? Opt in here, I’ll give you the four best episodes of all. I currated all these for you to give you the four best.” And target Grant’s audience with that, now you got all his buyers coming into your world. Is that alright, is that good.
Alright number four ties along with this. Number four, start building a list ASAP. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do a call to action to get a list anywhere, have I? After today’s session you’re …..just build a list. If you got nothing from this event at all, every time you do a hook and story, put them somewhere to build a list, because that’s the longevity. Because that’s where if Zuckerberg snaps his finger and you lose all your fans and followings and friends, and all the sudden you’re trying to build over somewhere else, it won’t matter because you’ll have those people somewhere external and now you can message them and bring them back into whatever world you need them to be at.
But that’s how you build stability in business. It’s also how you sell this time, you want to sell it the next time and the next time, the list is the key. Funnel Hacking Live, the first Funnel Hacking Live it was a lot of work and we sold out 600 people in the room, and we kept growing the list and growing the list, the next year we did 1200. Then we did 1500, last year was 3000, this year we’re going to be at 5000. We’re building up the list and building up pressure and excitement and then when you release it, it gives you the ability to blow things up really, really fast. Okay, that was number four.
Okay number five, I wrote down integration marketing, adding to other’s offers to build a buyer list. So this is a little sneaky tactic we used to back in the day when I didn’t have my own list, but I had a couple of skills and talents which you do happen to have, which is nice. If you have no skills this won’t work, but if you have skills you’re lucky.
So Frank Kern used to do this as well. Frank is sneaky. He used to do this all the time and I saw him doing it and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, he’s brilliant.” So Frank did a one hour presentation somewhere and he called it Mind Control, it wasn’t Mass Control, but it was something like about how to control the minds of your prospects through manipulation and something sneaky. And the title alone was amazing. It was a one hour presentation he gave somewhere.
And he put it on these DVDs and what he did, he went to like Dan Kennedy and he’s like, “Hey Dan, you have all of your buyer and you send them this newsletter every single month,” at the time they had 13000 active members, these were their best buyers. He’s like, “This DVD I sell for like a thousand bucks. Do you want to give it to all your people for free?” And Dan’s like, “sure.”
And all the sudden the next month, Franks got his best CD with his best stuff in the mailbox of the 13000 best customers, every single person that Dan Kennedy’s been collecting for the last 15 years. So think about this. With your skill set, look at the other people in the market, all the dream 100 who are doing things and how do you create something you can plug into their offers, and every single time one of those people sell a product, your face is popping up as well.
It’s called integration marketing, my first mentor Mark Joyner wrote a book called Integration Marketing, it’s a really fast read. You can read it in an hour, but it will get your mind set thinking about it. How can I integrate with what other people are always doing? Because I can go and make a sell, and make another sell, but I was like, when we launched Clickfunnels I was like, “How can I figure out other people’s sales processes that are already happening and somehow inject myself into all these other sales processes?” That way every single time Steven Larsen sells something or someone else sells something, or all these people are selling something, it always somehow gets flown back to me.
I want every product, every course, everything happening in the internet marketing world to somehow have people saying my name. That’s my goal. How many of you guy have been to other people’s events and I’m not there and they say my name? It makes me so happy. I get the instagrams from some of you guys, “Hey so and so just said your name.” I’m like, that’s so good. How have I done that? I spent a lot of my life integrating into everybody’s offers.
Initially when I first got started, every single person who had a product, I was an interview in everyone’s product. I was like, looking at people launching a product, specific product launches coming, I’d contact them. Product launch is coming up, “Hey man, is there any way I could do a cool thing for your people? I could create this and give it to you and you could plug it into your product?” and everyone’s like, ‘Sure, that’d be awesome.” And all the sudden, boom, they get 5000 new buyers came in and every single one of them got my thing. They’re hearing my name, hearing my voice and it’s just constant integration.
I think about how I met Joe Vitale, I talked about that earlier with the greatest showman. He was in an interview in a course I bought from Mark Joyner, I listened to it, fell in love with Joe Vitale, bought his stuff, given him tons of money over the years, a whole bunch of good stuff because he was integrated in that.
So looking at other ways to integrate, the skill set that you already have into other people’s marketing channels because then you’re leveraging anytime any of these partners make a sell, you’re getting customers coming through that flow as well. Cool?
Nick: Yeah.
Russell: That was number five. Number six, I call this one rainmaker projects, because we talked about rainmaker during the first podcast interview. So rainmaker projects are, and again when I first started my career I did tons of these, where it’s like, I was really good at one piece.
For you, you’re really good at video and story telling. And I look out here and be like, okay who is someone else here that is awesome? So and so is really good at making a product on Facebook ads. “You’re really good at Facebook ads, so I’ll do the video for this course, you do the Facebook, you do the actual ads for us.”
And then, you’re awesome at doing the traffic and you bring in four or five people, like this little avenger team, and you create a cobranded product together and you launch it and everyone makes a bunch of money, split all the money, 50/50/50/50, that makes more than 100,but you know what I’m talking about, everyone splits the money, everyone splits the customer list and all the sudden you’ve all pulled your efforts, your energy, your talents together and everyone leaves with some cash, and you also leave with the customer list, and that’s when you start growing really, really rapidly.
When I started I didn’t have a customer list, I had a very small one. But I had a couple of skill sets so that’s why I did tons of these things. That’s like, if you guys know any of my old friends like Mike Filsaime, Gary Ambrose, I could list off all the old partners we had back in the day, and that’s what we did all the time, these little rainmaker projects. We didn’t call them that back in the day, but that’s what it was.
It was just like, we all knew what our skill sets were, and it’s like, let’s come together, let’s make a project. This isn’t going to be how we change the world, it’s not going to be something we’re going to scale and grow, but it’s like, it’s going to be a project, we put it together, we launch it, make some money, get some customers, get our name out in the market, and then we step away from it and then we all go back to our own businesses.
It’s not like, that’s why it’s funny because a lot of times people are scared of these. Like, “Well, how do we set up the business structure? Who’s going to be the owner? Who’s the boss?” No, none of that. This is an in and out project where all the rainmakers come together and you create something amazing for a short period of time, you split the money and you go back home with the money and the customers.
But it gave you a bump in status, a big bump in customer lists, a big bump in cash and then all those things kind of rise and if you do enough of those your status keeps growing and growing and growing, and it’s a really fast easy way to continue to grow. How many of you guys want to do a rainmaker project with Nick right now? Alright, very, very cool.
Alright, and then I got one last, this is number seven. This kind of ties back to dream 100. The last thing I talked about was, and again this is kind of for everyone in the group, is the levels of the dream 100. I remember when I first started this process, I first got the concept and I didn’t know it was the dream 100 back then, but I was looking at all the different people that would have been on my dream 100 list. It was Mark Joyner, Joe Vitale, all these people that for me were top tier. Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, and I was like, oh, and I started trying to figure out how to get in those spots. And the more I tried, it was so hard to get through the gatekeeper, it was impossible to get through all these gatekeepers, these people.
I was like, “Man don’t people care about me. I’m just a young guy trying to figure this stuff out and they won’t even respond to my calls or my emails. I can’t even get through, I thought these people really cared.” Now to be on the flip side of that, I didn’t realize what life is actually like for that, for people like that. For me, I understand that now at a whole other level. We’ve got a million and a half people on our subscriber list. We have 68000 customers, we’ve got coaching programs, got family, got friends. We have to put up barriers to protect yourself or it’s impossible.
I felt, I can’t even tell you how bad I feel having Brent this morning, “Can you tell everyone to not do pictures with me.” It’s not that I don’t want to, but do you want me to tell you what actually happens typically? This is why we have to put barriers around ourselves. Here’s my phone, I’ll be in a room, like Funnel Hacking Live and there will be 3000 people in the room, and I’m walking through and someone’s like, “Real quick, real quick, can I get a picture?” I’m like, “I gotta go.” And they’re like, “It’ll take one second.” And I’m like, ahh, “Okay, fine, quick.” And they’re like, “Hold on.” And they get their phone out and they’re like, “Uh, uh, okay, uh, alright got it. Crap it’s flipped around. Okay, actually can you hold this, my arms not long enough can you hold it? Actually, hey you come here real quick, can you hold this so we can get a picture? Okay ready, one two three cheese.” And they grab the camera and they’re off. And for them it took one second. And that person leaves, and guess what’s behind them? A line of like 500 people.
And then for the next like 8 hours, the first Funnel Hacking Live, was anyone here at the first Funnel Hacking Live? I spent 3 ½ hours up front doing pictures with everybody and I almost died afterwards. I’m like, I can’t…but I didn’t know how to say no, it was super, super hard.
So I realize now, to protect your sanity, people up there have all sorts of gatekeepers and it’s hard. So the way you get through is not being more annoying, and trying to get through people. The way you get to them is by understanding the levels of that. So I tried a whole bunch of times, and I couldn’t get in so I was like, “Crap, screw those guys. They don’t like me anyway, they must be jerks, I’m sure they’re just avoiding me and I’m on a blacklist….” All the thoughts that go through your head.
And at that time, I started looking around me. I started looking around and I was like, “hey, there’s some really cool people here.” And that’s when I met, I remember Mike Filsaime, Mike Filsaime at the time had just created a product he launched and he had like a list of, I don’t know, maybe 3 or 4 thousand people. And I remember I created my first product, Zipbrander, and I was all scared and I’m like ,”Hey Mike, I created this thing Zipbrander.” And he messaged back, “Dude that’s the coolest thing in the world.”
A couple of things, Mike didn’t have a gatekeeper, it was just him. He got my email, he saw it, and he was like, “This is actually cool.” I’m like, “Cool, do you want to promote it?” and he’s like, “Yes, I would love to promote it.” I’m like, oh my gosh. I had never made a sale online at this point, by the way, other than a couple of little things that fell apart. I never actually made a sale of my own product.
Zipbrander was my very first, my own product that I ever created. So Mike was that cool, he sent an email to his list, his 5000 person list, they came over, I had this little pop up that came to the site and bounced around, back in the day. I had 270 people opt in to my list from Mike’s email to it, and I think we made like 8 or 10 sales, which wasn’t a lot, but 67 that’s $670, they gave me half, I made $350 on an email and gained 300 people on my list. I’m like, oh my gosh this is amazing.
And I asked Mike, “Who are the other people you hang out with? I don’t know very many people.” And he’s like, “Oh dude, you gotta meet this guy, he’s awesome.” And he brought me to someone else, and I’m like, “Oh this is cool. “ and Mike’s like, “Dude, I promoted Zipbrander, it was awesome, you should promote it.” And then he’s like, “Oh cool.” And he promoted Zipbrander. I’m like, oh my gosh, I got another 30-40 people on my list and there were a couple more sales.
And then I asked him, “Who do you know?” and there was someone else, and we stared doing this thing and all the sudden there were 8 or 10 of us who were all at this level and we all started masterminding, networking, figuring things out, cross promote each other and what happened, what’s interesting is that all of our little brands that were small at the time started growing, and they started growing, and they started growing. All the sudden we were at the next tier.
And when we got to the next tier all the sudden all these new people started being aware of us and started answering our calls and doing things, and Mike’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I met this guy who used to be untouchable.” And he brought him in and brought them in and all the sudden we’re at the next level. And we started growing again and growing again.
And the next thing we know, four years later I get a phone call from Tony Robbins assistant, they’re like, “Hey I’m sitting in a room and I got Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Jeff Walker, all these guys are sitting in a room with Tony Robbins and he thinks that you guys are the biggest internet nerds in the world, he’s obsessed with it and he wants to know if he can meet you in Salt Lake in like an hour.”
What? Tony Robbins? I’ve emailed him 8000 times, he’s never responded even once, I thought he hated me. Not that he hated me, it’s that he had so many gatekeepers, he had no idea who I was. But eventually you start getting value and you collectively as a level of the dream 100 becomes more and more powerful. Eventually people notice you because you become the bigger people. And each tier gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
So my biggest advice for you and for everybody is understanding that. Yes, it’s good to have these huge dreams and big people, but start looking around. There are so many partnerships to be had just inside this room. How many deals have you done with people in this room so far?
Nick: Quite a few.
Russell: More than one, right.
Nick: Yeah, more than one.
Russell: Start looking around you guys. Don’t always look up, up, up and try to get this thing. Look around and realize collectively, man, start doing the crossings because that’s how everyone starts growing together and there will be a time where I’ll be coming to you guys begging, “Can you please look at my stuff you guys, I have this thing called CLickfunnels. You may have heard of it. Can you please help me promote it?” And that’s what’s going to happen, okay.
So the level of the dream 100 is the last thing, just don’t discount that. Because so many people are like swinging for the fence and just hoping for this homerun like I was, and it’s funny because I remember eventually people would respond to me, that I was trying for before, and they’d contact me. And I was like, oh my gosh. I realized, I thought this person hated me, I thought I was on a black list. I was assuming they were getting these emails and like, “oh, I hate this. Russell’s a scammer.” In my head right. They never saw any of them.
Until they saw me, and they reached out to me and the whole dynamic shifted. So realizing that, kind of looking around and start building your dream 100 list, even within this room, within the communities that you’re in, because there’s power in that. And as you grow collectively, as a group, everyone will grow together, and that’s the magic. So that was number seven.
So to recap the seven really quick. Number one, tell your story way too much, to the point where you’re so annoyed and so sick and tired of hearing it that everybody comes to you, and then keep telling it even some more.
Number two, in everything you’re doing, energy matters a lot. To the point, even above what you think you’re comfortable with and do that all the time.
Number three, make offers for everything. Hook, story, don’t leave them hanging, give them an offer because they’ll go and they will feel more completed afterwards.
Number four, start building a list, it ties back to the first thing. Make an offer, get them to build your list, start growing your list because your list is your actual business.
Number five, integration marketing. Look for other people’s marketing channels and how you can weave what you do into those channels, so you can get free traffic from all the people who are doing stuff.
Number five, create rainmaker projects, find really cool things and bring four or five people together and make something amazing. Share the cash, share the customer list, elevate your status, elevate your brand, and it’s really fun to do because you get to know a whole bunch of people.
And Number seven, understanding the levels of the dream 100. Find the people at your level and start growing with them together collectively as you do that, and in a year, two years, three years, five years Tony Robbins will be calling you, asking you to make his video and it will be amazing.
Does that sound good? Awesome.
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A special conversation I had on stage at the Traffic Secrets event with a friend and a student Nic Fitzgerald.
On this episode Russell talks to his childhood friend, Nick Fitzgerald about helping him go from being in a technician position to being in an entrepreneurial position. Here are some of the inspiring thing in this episode:
Find out how Russell found out his childhood friend was in desperate need of help and what he offered to do for him. How Nick was able to make to Funnel Hacking Live via credit card, and then spent $1800 on a program without telling his wife. And why being on the program helped Nick be able to ask a client for $25,000 on a project, when that was his previous yearly income.So listen here to find out how Russell was able to help Nick achieve his entrepreneurial dreams.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. The next two episodes are a really special one. For our Two Comma club X members and our inner circle members I did an event recently, some of you guys heard me talk about it. It was a traffic secrets event, where I’m getting all the material ready for the book, and start teaching this stuff.
Anyway, it was really, really fun and as I was doing the presentations, the night before when I was doing all the prep work I had this thought. I was like, I want to bring up somebody on stage and it’s somebody who was a friend I grew up with in elementary school, and junior high, and high school, someone who was down on their luck, who was really, really struggling. About a year ago I saw him post something on Facebook and I reached out, and this interview is happening about a year later.
During the process he tells his story about what happened and the transformation and the change that’s happened by being involved inside our Clickfunnels, Funnel Hacker community. So I wanted to share that with you as part of the event, so this first half is going to be Nick kind of telling his story and it’s going to be the story from the bottom of the barrel where they were, they literally made $25,000 a year for 3 years in a row and then the transformation to this year, they’ll do well over six figures. And that’s going to be this first podcast.
And the second podcast episode is, I’m actually going to be doing, I did a live coaching session with him on stage, and I want to share that with you as well because I think there’s a lot of things for you specifically that you can get from this episode too.
So the next few episodes are going to be sharing this really fun conversation that happened late night at the Traffic Secrets event with my friend Nick Fitzgerald, and if you think that name sounds familiar, I have talked about him before on this podcast. In fact, a little over a year ago I did a podcast episode called being a rainmaker that was a personalized podcast that I sent to Nick specifically to help him with what he was struggling with at the time.
So anyway, I wanted to share this with you because it will take you full circle to show you kind of the progress and the momentum and things that are happening in his life, and I think it will be encouraging for you to hear the story because no matter where you are in your journey right now, if you are struggling, doing well, or if you’re somewhere in between, there are parts of this story that will resonate with you. And in the second episode where I coach Nick I think will help everybody as well. So with that said, let’s jump right in and have some fun. I want to introduce you to my friend Nick Fitzgerald.
Alright so I want to set the tone for the next hour or so of what the game plan is. So I have a first initial question that I’m curious about with everyone here. I’m curious, who since they joined the Two Comma Club X program has had some kind of experience with Mr. Nick Fitzgerald? That’s powerful, I’m going to talk about why in a little bit, but very, very cool.
So some of the back story behind this, and then we’re going to introduce him up, and when he comes up I want you guys to go crazy and scream and cheer and clap, because it will be good, and then I want him to sit down so we’ll be the same height, which will be good, it’ll be fun.
So some of the back story, I actually met Nick the very first time in elementary school, and even in elementary school he was a foot and a half taller than me, which is amazing. He was like 6 ft 2 in like third grade, it was amazing. But we knew each other when we were dorky little kids and going up through elementary school we were both doing our things, and we didn’t have a care in the world and everything’s happening. And as we got older he kept getting taller, I stopped growing.
And then we got into high school and he kept growing and he joined the basketball team. I didn’t keep growing so I went downstairs in the basement, literally, at our high school in the basement they call it the rubber room, and it’s this room that smells like, I don’t even know, but it’s under the gym. So he would go upstairs and fans would show up and people would cheer for them, and scream at their games. And all the girls would come to the games. And we’d go down in the rubber room by ourselves and cut weight and put on our sweats and lose weight and we’d jump rope and sweat like crazy.
And we’d sit there, and I remember one day after working out for two hours pouring in sweat, I had my plastic gear on and my sweats on top of that, my hoodie and my hoods and we got the wrestling mats, and literally rolled ourselves up in the wrestling mats to keep the heat in, and we laid there and we were so hot. And I could hear the basketball players in the gym up above having so much fun and people cheering for them. And all the girls were there. And I was like, “Why are we not playing basketball?” It doesn’t make any sense.
But during that time, obviously we were in two different kind of worlds, and we didn’t really connect that much, and then we left our separate ways. And I didn’t hear from him for years and years and years. And then do you guys remember Facebook when it first came out? The first time you got it and you log in and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can connect with people.” And you start searching the friends you know and then you find their friends and you spend a day and a half connecting with every person you’ve ever remembered seeing in your entire life? Do you guys remember that?
So I did that one night, I connected with everybody. Everyone in high school, everyone in junior high, or elementary, everyone in every stage of my life, as many as I could think of. And then I was like, I think that’s everybody. Okay, I’ve connected with everybody.
And one of those people that night was Nick. And then, but I didn’t say hi, I just friend requested and he requested back and I’m like, cool we’re connected. And then after that I got kind of bored with Facebook for like a year or so. Then a little while later I found out you can buy ads on it and I was like, what, this is amazing. So we started buying ads and everything is happening. And it’s crazy.
And then what happened next, I actually want Nick onstage to tell you this story because I want you to hear it from both his perspective and my perspective, I think it’d be kind of interesting. Yeah, I want him to come up first. So let’s do this real quick. As you guys know Nick has been a super valuable part of this community since he came in. I’m going to tell the story about how he got here and some of the craziness of how he signed up when he probably shouldn’t have and what’s been happening since then, because I know that you guys have all been part of that journey and been supporting him. How many of you guys are going to his event that’s happening later this week? He just keeps giving and serving, he’s doing all the right things, he’s telling his story, he’s doing some amazing stuff.
So my plan now is I want to talk about the rest of the story. I want to tell you guys what I told him a year ago and then I want to tell you guys my advice for him moving forward, because I feel like it’s almost in proxy. I wish I could do that with every one of you guys. Just sit down here and coach you. But I feel like he’s at a stage where some of you guys aren’t to where he’s at yet and some of you are past that, and some of you guys are right where he’s at, and I feel like the advice that I really want to give him, will help you guys at all different levels. So that’s kind of the game plan. So with that said, let’s stand up and point our hands together for Mr. Nick Fitzgerald.
Alright, this has some good music. That was like music from high school. Look how tall I am. I feel like….okay, so I had him find this post because I wanted to actually share a little piece of it. So this, I’m going to share a piece of it, I want to step back to where you were at that time in your life. So this was July 7, 2017, so what was that a year and a half ago, ish?
So July 7, 2017 there was a post that said, “Long post disclaimer. I hate posting this, blah, blah, blah.” So at the time my family was about to go on a family vacation. We’re packing up the bags and everything, and you know how it is, you do a bunch of work and then you stop for a second and your wife and kids are gone and you’re like, pull out the phone, swap through the dream 100 and see what’s happening.
And somehow this post pops up in my feed and I see it, I see Nick my buddy from 20+ years ago and I’m reading this thing and my heart sinks for him. Some of the things he says, “I hate posting things like this, but I felt like need to for a while. Being poor stinks. For those friends of mine who are ultra conservative and look down consciously or not, on people like me, I can honestly tell you that I’m not a lazy free loader who wants something for nothing. I’m not a deadbeat who wants Obama or whoever to blame now, to buy me a phone. I’m not a lowlife trying to get the government to pay for my liposuction. I’m not a druggie who eats steak and lobster for dinner with my food stamps. I’m a father of four, a husband, someone who lost everything financially, including our home when the time came to have your healthcare in place or to get fined, I went through the process.
“Based on my family size and income, we were referred to the state to apply for those programs. We couldn’t get coverage for ourselves to the exchange in other places, we qualified for Medicaid. After the process was complete, the state worker suggested we try to get some other help, some food stamps.” It kind of goes on and on and on and he says, “In 2016 I made $25000. $25,000 plus our tax returns for the previous year. So a family of 6 living on $25,000 a year is being audited for receiving too much help, too much assistance.” And it kind of goes on and on and on with that.
He says, “I’ve never abused drugs or alcohol, I’ve never even tried them. I’m just a guy trying to live the American dream and provide for his family. It’s unfortunate that we look down on those who are trying to better our lives, even if it leaves them from receiving help from assistance in place to help them. Look down on me if you want, I don’t care. I know the truth. My family is healthy and sheltered and that’s all that matters. I don’t wish these trials on anyone else…” and it kind of goes on from there.
So I want to take you back to that moment, what was, talk about what you were experiencing and what you were going through during that time.
Nick: I didn’t expect this. I’m a friendly giant, but I’m a big boob too. Back at that time, I had started what I thought was, I started my entrepreneurial journey. I was working in film full time, working 12, 14, 16 hour days making $200 a day, just killing myself for my family. Going through the process of, I’d lost my job because I wasn’t going to hit my sales, I was a financial advisor, and I wasn’t going to hit my sales numbers. So you know, my ticket was stamped.
So I said okay, I’m going to do my own thing. And in the course of all that, it was time to get your health insurance and those things, and I went through the proper channels, like I felt like I should. And I was referred to the government for the programs, based on the numbers. And as a provider, a father, an athlete competitor, I felt like a failure.
We’ve all, when you have to rely on somebody else , or somebody else tells you, “Hey, we don’t think you can do this on your own, come over here and we’ll take care of you.” That’s basically what I was told. So it was hard to accept that and to live with that reality. So we did, and I worked hard and it was a blessing really, to not have to worry about how much health care costs or have some of the things to supplement to feed our family and stuff. So it was great and it was wonderful.
But then I got the email from the state saying, “Hey, you’re being audited. We’re just looking at things and we’re not sure. You’ve been getting too much help.” So at that point I’m just sitting there frustrated because I’m working my butt off, just trying to make things happen, become someone involved in the film community in Utah. And I was, and everyone knew me, and I had a reputation, but I still was a nobody in the eyes of the government.
So I went to Facebook to whine, looking for what I wanted, which was a pat on the back, “There, there Nick, you’re doing…we know you’re a good dude and you’re working hard.” That kind of thing, and I did…
Russell: I was reading the comments last night. “Oh you’re doing a good job man. Good luck.” Everyone like babying him about how tough life can be.
Nick: So I got what I wanted, but it still didn’t change anything. I still had to submit my last two years of tax returns and all of the pay that I’d got and everything like that, so they could look at our case number, not Nick, Leisle, Cloe,Ewen, Alek, William. So it was just one of those things.
I got what I wanted, then comes Russell to give me what I needed, which was….
Russell: I saw that and I’m like packing the kids bags and everything and I was like, “ah, do I say something?” I don’t want to be that guy like, “Hey, 20 years ago…” and I was like, ah, I kept feeling this. Finally I was like, “hey man, I know we haven’t talked in over 20 years…” This was on Facebook messenger, “we hadn’t talked in like 20 years. I saw your post today and it sucks. And I know what’s wrong, and I can help. But at the same time, I don’t want to be that guy and I don’t want to step on any toes. I know we haven’t talked in 20 years, I have no idea if this is even appropriate. But I know what’s wrong, I can help you. And no, this is not some cheesy MLM I’m trying to pitch you on. But if you’re interested in some coaching, I know what’s wrong.” And I kind of waited and then I started packing the bags again and stuff like that.
I’m curious of your thoughts initially as you saw that.
Nick: It’s funny because my phone was kind of blowing up with the comments. So I would hear the little ding and I would check. And then I saw that it was a message from Russell, and we had said like, “Hey, what’s up.” And had a few tiny little small talk conversations, but nothing in depth personal. So I saw that he sent a message, so I’m like, “Sweet.”
So I look at it, and I was half expecting, because I knew he was successful, I didn’t know about Clickfunnels per se. I knew he had something going on that was awesome, but I didn’t know what it was.
So I was wondering, “I wonder what he’s going to say, what he has to say about things?” But I read it and it was funny because when you said, “I don’t want to overstep my bounds. It’s been a long time, I don’t want to step on toes.” Kind of thing, Russell, we all know his athletic accolades and stuff. I was a great basketball player too, I was in the top 200 players in the country my senior year and stuff like that. So I’ve been coachable and played at high levels and been coached by high level guys. So when I read it and he said, “I know what’s wrong and I can help you.” I was just like, “Yes.”
That was my reaction. I just did the little, um, fist pump, let’s do this. So I replied back and I thanked him for reaching out and stuff, and I just said, I think I even said, “I’m coachable. I will accept any guidance.” And things like that. Because up until that point in my life, especially in sports, if a coach showed me something, I would do it the way he did, and I would kick the other dude’s butt. I didn’t care. I played against guys who made millions of dollars in the NBA. I dunked, I posterized on Shawn Marion when he was at UNLV my freshman year of college. I started as a freshman in a division one school in college. So I would take, I’ve always been that kind of, I would get that guidance, that direction, I can put it to work.
So I was just like, “Dude, Mr. Miyagi me.” I’m 8 days older than him, so I’m like, “young grasshopper, yes you can teach me.” That kind of thing. So I welcomed it and I was excited. I had no idea, because again I didn’t know what he did. I just knew he had a level of success that I didn’t have. And if he was willing to give me some ideas, I was going to hear him out for sure.
Russell: It was fun, because then I messaged him back. I’m packing the car and Collette’s like, “We gotta go, we gotta go.” I was like, ah, so I get the thing out and I was like, “This is the deal. I’m driving to Bear Lake, it’s like a six hour drive. I’m going to give you an assignment and if you do it, then I’ll give you the next piece. But most people never do it, so if you don’t that’s cool and I’ll just know it’s not worth your time. But if it’s really worth your time, do this thing. I need you to go back and listen to my podcast from episode one and listen to as many episodes as possible, and if you do that I’ll make you a customized episode just for you telling you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it. But you have to do that first.
“And I’m not telling you this because I’m on some ego trip, but just trust me. The problem is not your skill set, you have mad skills, you’re good at everything. It’s all a problem between your ears. If we can shift that, we can shift everything else.” Then I jumped in my car and took off and started driving for six hours. And then the next day, or a day later you’re like, “I’m 14 episodes in.” he was still listening to the crappy one’s, according to Steven Larsen. The Marketing In Your Car, he was probably thinking, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard, ever.”
But he did it. I said do it, he did it. And he kept doing it and doing it, and so two days into my family vacation I had Norah, you guys all know Norah right. She’s the coolest. But she won’t go to bed at night, she’s a nightmare. Don’t let that cute face trick you, she’s evil. So I’m like, I can’t go to sleep, so finally I was like, I’m going to plug her in the car and drive around the lake until she falls asleep.
So I plug her in the car, strap her in and I start driving. And I’m like, this could be a long, long thing. She’s just smiling back here. I was like ugh. I’m like you know what, I’m going to do my episode for Nick. So I got my phone out, I clicked record and for probably almost an hour, it was an hour. I’m driving around the lake and I explain to him what I see. Did anyone here listen to that episode? I’m curious.
I’m going to map out really quick, the core concept. Because some of you guys may be stuck in this, and the goal of this, what I want to do is I want to map this out, and then what’s funny is last year at Bear Lake, so a year later we had this thing where I was like, we should do a second round where I do a year later, this is the advice now. And I wrote a whole outline for it and I totally never did it. So I’m going to go through that outline now, and kind of show him the next phase. So you cool if I show kind of what I talked about?
Nick: For sure.
Russell: Alright, so those who missed the podcast episode, who haven’t been binge listening, you’ve all failed the test, now you must go back to episode number one, listen to the cheesy jingle and get to episode, I don’t know what it was. Okay, I’ve said this before, if you look at any business, any organization, there’s three core people. The first one is the person at the top who is the entrepreneur.
The cool thing about the entrepreneur is the entrepreneur is the person who makes the most amount of money. They’re the head and they get the most amount of money. The problem with the entrepreneur is they also have the most risk, so they’re most likely to lose everything. I’ve lost everything multiple times because I’m the guy risking everything. But the nice thing is entrepreneurs that write their own paychecks, there’s no ceilings. So they can make as much as they want. They can make a million, ten million, a hundred million, they can do whatever they want because there’s no ceiling. So that’s the first personality type.
The second personality type over here is what we call the technicians. The technicians are the people who actually do the work. And what’s funny, if you look at this, people who go to college are the technicians. What do they do, they look down on entrepreneurs, they look down on sales people. “Oh you’re in sales. What are you a doctor?” For crying out loud in the night. But they look down on people like us. Because “I’m a doctor. I went to 45 years of school.”
What’s interesting, there’s technicians in all sorts of different spots right. I actually feel bad, I shouldn’t say this out loud, but at the airport here I saw one of my friends who is an amazing doctor and him and his wife were leaving on a trip and we were talking and he said, “This is the first trip my wife and I have been on in 25 years, together by ourselves.” I’m like, “What?” and he’s like, ‘Well, we had medical school and then we had kids and then we had to pay off medical school and all these things. Now the kids are gone and now we finally have a chance to leave.” I was like, wow. Our whole lives we’ve heard that medical school, becoming a doctor is the…..anyway that’s a rant for another day.
But I was like, there’s technicians. And what’s interesting about technicians, they don’t have any risk. So there’s no risk whatsoever, but they do have, there’s a price ceiling on every single person that’s a technician, right. And depending on what job you have your price ceiling is different. So doctors, the price ceiling is, I have no idea what doctor’s make, $500 grand a year is like the price ceiling, that’s amazing but they can’t go above that. And different tasks, different roles, different position all have different price ceilings.
But there’s like, this role as a technician makes this much, and this one makes this much and you’re all kind of these things. I said the problem with you right now, you have these amazing skill sets, but you are stuck as a technician in a role where they’re capping you out, where the only thing you can make is $25k a year.
Remember I asked you, “What have you been doing?” and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been networking, I’ve been learning, I’ve been getting my skills up, getting amazing.” I’m like, “That’s amazing, you’re skills are awesome, but your ceiling is $25k a year. No matter how good you get you are stuck because you’re in a technician role right now.”
I said, “you’ve got a couple of options. One is go become an entrepreneur, which is scary because you’ve got four kids at home and you don’t have money anyway.” I am so eternally grateful that when I started this game, my wife, first off, we didn’t have kids yet, my wife was working, we didn’t have any money but I didn’t have to have any money at that time, and I’m so grateful I was able to sometimes, I was able to risk things that nowadays is hard. For you to come jump out on your own initially and just be like, “Boom, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m selling this stuff.” That’s scary right, because you’ve got all this risk.
So I was like, that’s the thing, but it’s going to be really, really hard. I said, “there’s good news, there’s one more spot in this ecosystem. And the cool thing about that spot it’s that it’s just like the entrepreneur, there’s no ceiling, now the third spot over here is what we call the rainmakers. The rainmakers are the people who come into a business and they know how to make it rain. This is the people who know how to bring people into a company. Leads, they bring leads in. They know all this traffic stuff they’re talking about. These are the people who know how to sell to leads and actually get money out of peoples wallets and put it into the hands of the entrepreneurs.
These people right here, the rainmakers don’t have ceilings. In fact, companies who give the rainmaker the ceiling are the stupidest people in the world, because the rainmaker will hit the ceiling and then they’ll stop. If you’re smart and you have a company, and you have rainmakers, people driving traffic, people doing sales, if you have a ceiling they will hit and they will stop. If you get rid of the ceiling and then all the sudden they have as much as they want, they have less risk than the entrepreneur, but they have the ability to make unlimited amount of money.
I said, “Your skill set over here as a technician is worth 25k a year, but if you take your skill set and shift it over here and say, “I come into a company and I’m a rainmaker. I create videos, I create stories, they’ll sell more products, more things.” Suddenly you’re not worth 25,000, now you’re worth $100,000, you’re worth $500,000. You’re worth whatever you’re able to do, because there’s no ceiling anymore.
And that was the point of the podcast. I got done sending it, then I sent it to him and I sent it to my brother to edit it. And I have no idea what you thought about it at that point, because we didn’t talk for a while after that. But I’m curious where you went from there.
Nick: So the first thing, you know, being told I was really only worth $25,000 in the eyes of the people who were hiring me, that was a punch in the gut. That sucked to hear. Thanks man. It was just like, I literally was working 12, 14, 16 hour days, lifting heavy stuff, I did a lot with lighting and camera work, not necessarily the story writing stuff, but you know, for him to put it so perfectly, that I was a technician. I thought going in, when I failed as an advisor and I started my own company, or started doing videos for people, and being so scared to charge somebody $250 for a video, being like, “they’re going to say no.” That kind of thing, and now I wouldn’t blink my eyes for that.
But you know, it’s one of those things for him to tell it to me that way, just straight forward being like, “You are, you’re learning great skills and you’re meeting amazing people.” I worked with Oscar winners and Emmy winners and stuff in the movies and shows that I worked on, but again, I was only worth that much, they had a finite amount of money, and I was a small part of it, so I got a small piece.
So listening to all of that, and then hearing the entrepreneur, the risk and stuff. I’m really tall, I’m 6’9” if you didn’t know. I’m a sink or swim guy, but because I’m tall I can reach the bottom of the pool a lot easier. When I jumped in, we had lost, as a financial advisor we had lost our home and we lost all these things. So I was like, I have nothing left to lose. Worst case scenario, and I had never heard that mindset before. We were renting a basement from a family members, our cars were paid off. Worst case scenario is we stayed there and get food stamps and that kind of thing. There was nowhere to go but up from there.
So for me, I was just so excited. I’m like, I want to be a rainmaker, I want to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t know where to find the people that I could do that for. So I was in this thing where I was still getting lots of calls to work as a technician, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t want to put myself, my body, my family through me being gone and then when I’m home I’m just a bump on a log because I’m so wiped out, all that kind of stuff.
So that was my biggest first thing, the action point for me. I started thinking, okay how do I transition out of this? How do I get myself out and start meeting the right people, the right kinds of clients who do have budgets and things like that, and how do I make it rain for them. That’s when I made that shift from working as a technician. I told myself I’m not going to do it anymore. The last time I technically worked as a technician was about 9 months ago. It was for a friend.
So I made that shift and it was just amazing. Like Russell was talking about earlier, when you start to track it or when it’s part of your mindset, things start to show up and happen. You meet the right people and stuff. So those things just started, just by listening to that one hour long thing, I started changing and then the black box I got, Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets and started going through that as well. And it was just like, you see in the Funnel Hacker TV, that moment where the guy goes, “RAAAAA” that’s what happened with me. It was like a whole new world, Aladdin was singing. He was Aladdin and I was Jasmine, with a beard.
Russell: I can show you the world.
Nick: Exactly. But that’s what really, literally happened with me.
Russell: That’s cool. Alright this is like summertime, he’s going through this process now, figuring things, changing things, shifting things, he’s changing his mindset. We go through the summer, we go through Christmas and then last year’s Funnel Hacking Live, were we in February or March last year? March, and so before Funnel Hacking Live we kind of just touched base every once in a while, seeing how things are going. He’s like, “Things are going good. I’m figuring things out.”
And then Funnel Hacking Live was coming, and I remember because we’re sitting there, and I think he messaged me or something, “Funnel Hacking looks awesome I wish I could make it.” I was like, “Why don’t you come?” And you’re like, “I just can’t make it yet.” I was like, “How about this man, I guarantee you if you show up it’ll change your life forever. I’m not going to pay for your flights or your hotel, but if you can figure out how to get there, I’ll give you a free ticket.” And that’s I said, “if you can come let Melanie know, and that’s it.”
And I didn’t really know much, because you guys know in the middle of Funnel Hacking Live my life is chaos trying to figure out and how to juggle and all that stuff. So the next thing I know at Funnel Hacking Live, we’re sitting there and during the session I’m looking out and I see Nick standing there in the audience. And I was like, ‘I have no idea how he got there, but he’s there. Freaking good for him.” And I have no idea, how did you get there? That wasn’t probably an easy process for you was it?
Nick: No. Credit cards. It was one of those things, I looked at flights. As soon as we had that conversation, it was funny because I was, I can’t remember what was going on, but it was a day or two before I responded back to his invitation. And I was like, I’d be stupid to say no. I have no idea how I’m going to get there. I think I even said, “I’ll hitch hike if I have to, to get there.” Can you imagine this giant sasquatch on route 66 trying to get to Florida.
But I told my wife about it, and this is where Russell might have this in common. My wife is incredible and super supportive and she let me go. And we didn’t have the money in the bank so I said, “I’m going to put this on the credit card, and as soon as I get back I’m going to go to work and I’ll pay it off. I’ll get a couple clients and it will be fine.” So I booked the hotel, luckily I was able to get somebody who wasn’t able to go at the last minute and I got their hotel room, and I got the lfight and I came in and I was in the tornado warnings, like circling the airport for 5 hours, like the rest of you were.
So I got there and I just remember I was just so excited. Walking in the room the very first day, the doors open and you all know what it’s like. I don’t have to relive this story. I remember I walked in and the hair on my arms, it was just like {whistling}. It was incredible, just the energy and the feeling. And I was like, t his is so cool. And then the very first speech, I was like that was worth every penny to get here. If I left right now it would have all been worth it. And you all know because you’re sitting here, you’ve felt that too.
So that was my, getting there was like, “Honey, I know we don’t have the money, we have space on the credit card, and when I get home I swear I will work hard and it will be okay.” And she’s like, “Okay, go.” So I did.
Russell: So now I want to talk about, not day one, or day two, but on day three at Funnel Hacking Live. How many of you guys remember what happened on day three? Russell sneak attacked all you guys. I was like, if I start going “Secret one, Secret two, Secret three” you guys will be like, “Here it is.” Sitting back. I was like, how do I do the Perfect webinar without people knowing it’s the perfect webinar? And I’m figuring this whole thing out, trying to figure that out. And we built a nice presentation, create an amazing offer for this program you guys are all in.
And as you know, all you guys got excited and ran to the back to sign up and now you’re here. But you told me this personally, I hope you’re willing to share. But I thought it was amazing because you didn’t sign up that night. And I would love to hear what happened from then to the next day, and kind of go through that process.
Nick: So this is my first Clickfunnels, I was all new to this whole thing. I was so excited when the 12 month millionaire presentation came up and I was like, “This is awesome.” Then I see it in the stack and I’m like, “I’m seeing the wizard, I can see the wizard doing his thing.” And I was just so excited, and then the price. And it was a punch in a gut to me, because I was so, listening to it I was like, ‘This is what I need. This is what I want, this is what I need. It’s going to be amazing.” And then the price came and seriously, the rest of the night I was just like….
The rest of the presentation and everything after that I was just kind of zoned out. I just didn’t know what to do. Because I knew I needed it so badly and I’m like, that’s almost twice what we’re paying in rent right now. You know, it was just like, how am I going to justify this when I’m on food stamps and Medicaid and all this kind of stuff. You know, “yes, I’m on that but I dropped this money on a coaching program.”
Russell: “From this internet coach.”
Nick: Right. And so I’m having this mental battle and get back home to my room that night and I didn’t go hang out with people. I just was not feeling it. And I remember texting my wife on the walk back to the room. And I took the long way around the pond, just slowly depressedly meandering back to my room. And I’m texting her and I’m telling her how amazing it was and what the program would do and all that kind of stuff, and she’s like, “That sounds great.”
And I’m purposely not saying how much it’s going to cost, just to get her excited about it, so I can maybe do a stack with her right. “For this and this….” See if I could try it. I didn’t, I failed when it came to doing that. I told her the price and she’s like, “That’s a lot of money. How are you going to pay for it.” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” And I’m like, “The only thing I can do, because I have to sign up while I’m here, and pay for it while I’m here. I can put it on the credit card and then we will figure it out.”
So we talked a lot and I talked to my dad and it was the same thing. He was like, “Man, that’s a lot.” Just the scarcity mindset that a lot of us have with our family members and support system who aren’t, don’t think, who aren’t the crazy ones.
So I went to bed and I got emotional, and I slept so so bad. Just didn’t sleep well that whole night. And again, I talked to my wife again the next morning, and I just, we just said, “It would be awesome. But I can’t do it, so I’m just going to work hard and figure something out and then if it ever opens up again, then I’ll be in a position to do it.” So I left my room that morning with that in my mind. I made the mistake of keeping my wallet in my pocket though, because I’m here.
I again made the long walk back and kind of gave myself a pep talk like, “Don’t worry about that kind of stuff. Just more value out of it, meet more people.” So that’s when I left my room that morning, that’s where my mind was.
Russell: What happened next?
Nick: I walked into the room and Kevin Hansen, who I had, it’s funny, he does a lot of editing for Clickfunnels, and he and I had actually met independent of Clickfunnels before. It was one of those things like, “Oh you do, oh my gosh.” and it was like 2 months after we’d met. So I was talking to him, just chitchatting, and I just had right then in my mind, it was like, “Walk over to the table and sign up. If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it.” And it was just one of those things, because I’d given myself that speech, that whole five minute walk across the property.
So I finished up talking with him and I just said, “I’ll be right back.” And I walked straight over to the table, got out the credit card, wrote it all down, and I’m like, I don’t even know what my limit is, so I hope whenever they run this that it goes through. I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I did and I got that little silver ribbon that we all got. And again, {whistling} chills. Like I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. I put it on my little lanyard thing and I was just like, I couldn’t believe it. The adrenaline and all that stuff of, “I’m doing it. And my wife is going to kill me when I get back home.”
So that’s, then I went and got my seat and I was just floating, you know. I was so amped, I could have “Steven Larsened” it and screamed over the noise of everybody else and it would have been very, you would have heard it. So that’s what I did that morning. I was like, ‘Not going to do it, not going to do it, not going to do it.” I walked in, 60 seconds done. You have my money.
Russell: So I’m curious, when did you tell your wife? This is like a marriage counseling session, huh?
Nick: yeah, do you have a couch I can lay down on?
Russell: A big couch.
Nick: yeah, really. So I got home and I didn’t tell her, at all. I didn’t. I said, the clock is ticking. I have 30 days until that hits, or 20 days until the credit card statement comes and she’s like, “Wait, why is there an extra $2000 bucks on here?” So I just, I said, I’ve got some time because my wife, she’s 5’3”, she’s dainty, little petite lady, but she’s not scary I guess. But this is the first time I was really scared to tell her something in our marriage.
So I just said, I’m just going to hit the road hard and see what I can come up with to cover at least the $1800 and the hotel, for what I racked up at Funnel Hacking Live, and then that will get me another 30 days to figure something out. So I went and I never told her until the credit card statement came and she saw it. She’s like, “What’s this?”
But what happened before that, I don’t know, do you have something after that or do you want me to go to the next part? Okay, so me going to work and being like, “I gotta find it.” and it’s funny that night at Funnel Hacking Live, I went on Facebook and I created some half thought through offer where it was like, “Hey if I can get like 5 people locally where I’m at to do a monthly low number where I create a couple of videos for a monthly retainer, that will cover it and I can figure it. But nobody nibbled on it.
So I got home and I started just trying to figure stuff out. And I had met another lady who had a company and she uses Clickfunnels for her course. And it was funny, I talked to her before I went to Funnel Hacking Live, and we were talking and she was like, “Do you know Clickfunnels?” And I was like, “That’s so crazy. I do.” Because I’d never met anybody else that had. So I got home and I shot a little video with her, it was a test to do some modules for her course and she loved it and it was great. So we were talking about, she had like 20 videos she wanted to do and we were talking about budget, and I just said, “you know what, for that much, for that many videos and all this kind of stuff, it’s going to be $25,000.” And she didn’t even blink. She’s like, “Perfect, that’s great.”
Thank you, you guys. You’re going to make me cry. Thank you. And that was like maybe two weeks after I got home that that happened. And I left her house and I tried my hardest not to do a jump heel click going down her driveway, out to my car, and I got around the corner and I messaged Russell like, “dude, you’ll never guess. I just closed my first 5 figure deal and this is what it was…” and he was like, “That’s so cool.” You know.
But it was the whole plata o plomo thing, I would never have the guts to ask for something like that, I know that I should and that my skills and what I can do are worth that and more, and it’s been proven to me again and again since then, but to ask the first time, that first time you have a big ask and you’re just throwing yourself out there, and if she would have said no…Now what am I going to do? Because I had actually done another pitch where I did like a webinar pitch where I had a stack and slides and stuff because it was for a Chamber of Commerce, and I wanted to charge them 2500 a month to do like 4 videos a year.
And I did the whole thing like, “If you do it, it’s $2500 a month, or if you do it all right now it’s this…” that whole you know, and they passed on it. I was like, ugh. So it was just one of those things where being around y’all, that was my first experience being around entrepreneurs, really. I have friends who have had businesses, but I felt weird for wanting to create my own thing or being selfish because I have four kids. Like why don’t you go get a real job? All those conversations that you hear and have with yourself, especially when things aren’t going great.
But it was like okay, I have to get it done or I have to drop out. And I just, even in that short amount of time I received so much value from the people I was beginning to meet, and then as the content started coming out I was like, “There’s no way I could live without this after having a taste of it.” So that was my, I had to get it done and it worked out.
Russell: Amazing, I love that story. So coo. Alright, so since then, how many of you guys have watched his….are you daily or almost daily Facebook Lives?
Nick: Pretty much, almost daily. I’ll miss some…
Russell: How many of you guys have watched his daily Facebook lives, he’s doing what we’re saying right. He’s doing it. He’s doing it. I see it, I see it coming in my feed. It pops in my feed over and over. He’s doing what we’re talking about. He’s attracting people, he’s telling stories. All the stuff we’re talking about, he’s been doing it. But part of it, he had to have that emotion, that plata o plomo moment and then he hit it and it’s just like, he’s been running and running and running and running. And it’s been so insanely fun to watch the progress and the growth.
Some of you guys know he put out an event that’s coming up this weekend and sold out in 5 seconds. He’s like, “I sold out, should I make it bigger?” and I’m like, “No people should have responded to you faster, it’s their fault. Sell it out because next time it will be easier to sell it out again and easier to sell out again.” But he did it by giving tons of value. Telling stories, telling stories, telling stories, providing more value to you guys, to other entrepreneurs, other people in the community and people are noticing. All the stuff we talked about today, he’s doing it. Consistently, consistently, consistently doing it.
That was so cool. I don’t even know where to go from here. Alright I know where to go from here. Before I move into this, was it scary?
Nick: All of it scary? Well, this is what, back to my competitive days, I don’t care who, I’d played against the best players in the country at high levels. And I didn’t care if you were going to the NBA, being recruited by Duke, once we got into the lines I didn’t care who you were, I was going to make you look silly. I would hold, you wouldn’t score a point on me, or I would just like out work you and if you wanted to get anywhere I was in your face the whole time.
And so this was a whole different game for me. I remember Myron talking about in his speech at Funnel Hacking Live, you have to stay in the game long enough to learn the game, and I was new to this game. Like brand new, less than 12 months when I went to Funnel Hacking Live. And it was terrifying because, not necessarily because I didn’t think I could do it, I was just worried when, how long it would take. Like am I going to go and just spin my wheels and it’s going to be 15 years, 2099 and I’m wheeling up across to get my reward from him in his wheelchair, just like, “Hey buddy.” You know, that kind of thing.
I just didn’t know how to make it happen quick. That kind of stuff. So I was definitely scared, not necessarily of failing, because I had failed before, I was just scared how long it was going to take.
Russell: one of the best moments for me was this summer, him and his family were driving home from, I can’t remember where, they were driving through Boise, and he’s like, “Can we swing by and say hi? My kids want to meet you, my wife wants to meet you.” That’s always scary when you haven’t met someone’s wife or kids and you’re like, what if they hate me.
And I remember I started thinking, oh my gosh. He spent all his money coming out here, and then he bought the thing, she might legitimately want to kill me. I have no idea. I was a little bit nervous. And I came and met them and the kids, it was super cool. I remember the coolest thing, your wife just looked at me and she said, “Thank you.” And I was like, how cool is that? Just the coolest thing. Thank you for convincing, persuading, whatever the things are to do this thing.
I think sometimes as entrepreneurs we feel the guilt or the nervousness of, “Should I sell somebody something? Is it right, is it wrong?” You have to understand when you’re doing it, it’s not a selfish thing for you. It’s like, how do I get this person to take the action they need to do. Because most people won’t do it until they make an investment. It’s just human nature. They’ll keep dinking around and dinking around, whatever it is until they have a commitment, until they make that covenant, like Myron talked about earlier, people don’t change.
So in any aspect of life, you want someone to make a change, there’s got to be something that causes enough pain to cause the change, which is why we have the program. We could have priced the program really, really cheap but I was like, “No we won’t.” We legitimately wanted to make a plata o plomo moment for everybody. You’ll notice, when the program signup, not everybody who signed up is here today. Some people fell away, some of them left, things happen and I totally understand, but I wanted to make it painful enough that we get people to move.
And there are people in this room, I’ve joked about, Nick probably shouldn’t have bought that. If he would have asked I would’ve been like, “No dude, don’t. What are you thinking? Why would you do that?” as a friend this is weird, but I’m so grateful. Are you grateful you did?
Nick: Absolutely.
Russell: Where’s Marie Larsen, is she still in here? I talked about this in the podcast. She was in the same situation, she should not have signed up for it, it’s insane. I saw this text she sent Steven, she’s like, how much did you have in your bank account when you signed up for it? $70 in the bank account, $1800 a month bill she signed up for. And then it started happening and she was freaking out how it’s going, if you guys haven’t listened to the podcast, Lean In, yet I told the whole story. But it got nervous month one, then month two happened and she’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to leave. I can’t afford this.” And she’s talking with Steven and Steven’s like, “Well, you could leave and walk away, or you could lean in.” so she decided, “Okay, I’m going to lean in.” So she leaned in, and I’ve watched as her business over the last 3, 4, 5, 6 months is growing and it’s growing and it’s growing because she leaned in. Tough times will come, every single time it comes, but those who lean in are the ones who make it through that, and who grow and who build huge businesses.
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Some almost-incoherent thoughts on my way home from trick-or-treating.
On today’s episode Russell talks Halloween, and about trying to look at everybody in the world the way he looks at his youngest daughter, Norah. Here are some of the insightful thing you will hear on this episode:
Find out why Halloween is not longer Russell’s favorite holiday. Hear why watching Norah laugh caused Russell to change his perspective on how he sees other pepole. And find out why Liz Benney was nervous to sign on to have Russell coach her when she found out he was a religious person.Listen here to find out why Russell believes we need to serve everyone at the highest level possible without casting judgment on them first.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to a late night Marketing Secrets podcast. It’s Halloween, I just got done trick or treating, and I just dropped off Blake, who has been filming behind the scenes of everything this last week, at the hotel. I’m driving home and I wanted to share with you guys some thoughts.
Alright everybody, this is probably less of a marketing thing, and more of a life thing. I hope you don’t mind if I share this, but it was on my mind a little bit as I’ve been having so much fun with my kids.
So we had Halloween tonight, which it’s crazy. I used to love Halloween, it used to be my favorite holiday by far. I think I’ve recently transitioned from Halloween being my favorite, to now the 4th of July. Just because the fireworks, the age of my kids now, fireworks I think are more fun.
But last year, I didn’t know that was going to happen. Last year my kids started wrestling, so wrestling practice happens until 5:30 every night, we get home at 6:00. So last Halloween, that’s what was happening. We get home from wrestling practice, race home, and in my head I’m like, I’m going to wear my new Batman costume, which if you guys haven’t seen my Batman costume, it’s amazing, but it takes like an hour at least to put it on.
So I’m racing home and I’m like, I don’t have time to put my Batman costume on, and I’m kind of bummed because I wanted to wear that, I was so excited for it. I get home and the kids are eating and everything is crazy and all the sudden the doorbell rings, and I’m like, “Oh trick or treaters.” So we run to the door and it’s my daughter’s friend, and she’s all, “Can Ellie come trick or treating with me?”
And I don’t even know how to explain what happened, it broke my heart. And I didn’t want to, I was like, “No, this is my holiday.” And my wife’s like, “No, this is the kids’ holiday.” And I was like, “No, no.” and it broke my heart, so we let her go with her friends. And then the boys wanted to go with their friends, so I dropped one of our twins off. So it ended up being one of the twins, Norah who fell asleep in the car as we were dropping the other kids off, and then Aiden.
And we went out and I remember it was the most depressing day of my life, I’m not going to lie. I took them trick or treating and I fell asleep in the car, because me and Norah were sleeping the car while Collette took the other one’s out, and I was just like, so bummed because this is my holiday and my kids stole it from me.
But alas, I finally grew up and realized that it’s their holiday. So this year I was more prepared for it, I was like this is going to be good. They went with their friends, we were okay with that. I took Norah out, it was really fun. She is still a super cute age, so at least I got one baby who still loves me. All the rest of them are out with their friends.
Anyway, so that’s what just ended tonight, and I’m not going to lie, I’m beat up and worn out. And my beautiful wife is such a good sport. We had Blake come and film the whole thing and she’s not a big fan of being on camera all the time, but come one we’re doing vlogs, and we need to document us dressing up. And she even got a costume and everything just for it. So she’s amazing to put up with my, with me.
I can’t imagine being married to me. Can you imagine being married to me, that would be so annoying. But I love her and I’m grateful for her. So for any of the spouses of the crazy entrepreneurs, thank you for putting up with your spouse because I know it’s not, it can’t be easy. I can’t even imagine. So I’m grateful for my wife and I’m grateful for all the wives and the spouses. I always tell people you can only be as successful as your spouse will allow you to be, and Collette’s an amazing sport for doing all that even though I know she doesn’t want to.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I actually want to talk about yesterday. So yesterday…..
Hey, sorry to jump in the middle of the podcast episode, but I’m at home and I actually finished recording this whole episode and then I got home and the rest of it just didn’t make that much sense. And then I tried to rerecord it and it didn’t make much sense. So I’m jumping on again, a third time, to try and finish out this episode because it’s something really powerful and profound that I wanted to share, but for some reason I can’t explain it. It’s one of those things where you experience something and then you try to explain it and then it doesn’t really make sense. It was like you had a moment.
So I’m just going to share with you the moment and then the insights, and then again, it may not make any sense to you but hopefully it will give you guys a little glimpse of what I experienced yesterday.
We went to this school carnival at the kids middle school, and we get there and all the kids run off and they’re doing a million things with all their friends, and then me, Collette and my little Norah had a chance to go and hang out. And then we went out to the field and she wanted to go run across the field and I was like, “Okay, let’s go.” So we start running, and we ran all the way to the goal posts, and we ran back and as we’re running, she’s just laughing hysterically, and she’s so cute. And I look over and I just see her face and I see her laughing. It’s just one of those moments when time just froze.
I was like, this is such a cool, it’s a cool experience to see your little daughter laughing and happy. And the experience I’ve been trying to explain to you guys and I’m just struggling to get out, as I was watching her laugh for a split second, I had this really cool realization, where I realized once again that everybody in this world was once a kid, just like Norah. Even the people that drive us crazy, people I love, people I admire, people I look up to, all of them not that long ago were kids just like Norah, running around without a care in the world.
On the same side, people I love and admire and look up to, but also the other side, people that drive me nuts, people I don’t agree with, people that I don’t agree with them personally, or I might not agree with their political beliefs or religious beliefs or whatever. But the gift I was given, and I don’t know how to explain this to you guys, but as I was looking at her I realized everyone once was a child like her.
And it made me just look at people differently for a little bit. I started realizing that the people that drive me nuts, they’re just little kids, they were a little kid not that long ago and they may believe different than me, but it’s because of their life experience or because of the things that they experienced. It could be their parents screwed them up. Or it could be the group of people they got into, or maybe I’m the screwed up one. I don’t know. But it just made me have a different level of love and appreciation for everyone in that moment.
And I wanted to just kind of share with that with you guys because I think so often we give people such a hard time, people that believe differently than us. I know the political seasons are probably coming again soon. I don’t track it close, but man, when the last political stuff happened it was like war every single day and everyone was hating each other.
It’s like, oh my gosh step back and realize the reason why someone is on the left or someone is on the right, they didn’t care about that 10, 15, 20 years ago, or however long that they were little kids like Norah, but because of how they grew up, or because of their parents or situation, all sorts of things, that’s why they believe that way. You may feel that they’re wrong, or I may feel they’re wrong, but at the same time it doesn’t mean they’re bad.
Same thing with religious beliefs, same thing with all aspects of our lives. I don’t know, after seeing her in my mind I was like, I want to be more tolerant of people. I want to be more loving with people. I want to respect them for who they are because they’re all children of God, just like little Norah here running around.
Then I started thinking about our callings. Everyone who is listening to this podcast, if you’ve been following me for more than 5 minutes you know that I don’t believe business is just about selling stuff. I believe that we are called to these callings, what we’re doing are actual callings. Like me and our team building Clickfunnels and training entrepreneurs isn’t just because we’re trying to make money, we feel like there’s a higher calling.
In fact, at the Dry Bar Comedy Club, where Andrew Warner interviewed me for two hours on the Clickfunnels startup story, he asked that. He’s like, “Do you guys believe that this is inspired by God?” and I was like, “Oh yeah, 100%. No doubt in the slightest. We definitely feel like this is a spiritual thing for us. We’re doing our best to serve the people we have at the highest level that we’re able to.” We’re by far not perfect, we screw up so many times, and we don’t always give the best service all the time. You know, sometimes we have customers that leave angry or upset or whatever, but man we try hard. If you guys knew how hard I try at every angle every direction.
And I just think about this, as we’re serving we shouldn’t care about what people believe, you know what I mean. We should serve selflessly, serve without worrying about that. It’s interesting, and I hope she doesn’t mind me sharing this, but one of my close friends and someone I admire and look up to so much is Liz Benney, some of you guys know Liz.
It was interesting when I first met her and she joined our coaching program, this is probably 3 or 4 years ago now, and she told me this. So Liz and she’s got a beautiful wife Christy, and you guys know that I’m a Mormon, I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and she told me when she was applying through our thing, there’s a video of me telling the story about how God changed my life, and I talked about God in this video. And she told me she was scared to apply because she’s like, “What if, Russell talked about God, what if he won’t want to work with me, or what if he looks down on me, or what if whatever?”
And man, who knows there may be a time in my life, I don’t know, who knows? Hopefully not. I hope I never have been or would be that way, but you know she came in and I was like, I don’t care what you…that’s not my purpose. My job is to serve in the best of my capacity anybody who’s willing to listen to my voice. And I shouldn’t be pushing people aside because of sexual orientation or because of political beliefs or religious beliefs or anything. That’s not my choice.
I have so many things that I struggle with, I should not be the one trying to fix people’s things. That’s not up to me. My job is, hey Russell, this is your sphere of influence, this is the platform you’ve been given. Everyone who comes to you, serve them at your highest level regardless of any of those things.
And I almost feel like if I was to try to cast judgment or doubt or whatever on people for whatever the thing is they’re struggling with, man, I think about all the things I struggle with. What if the mentors and the people I was seeking help from didn’t want to help me because I’m a Mormon, or because I believe this way, or because I’m struggling with this addiction, or this problem, or this thing. I don’t think we have the rights or we shouldn’t be the ones who are doing any of those things because we’re not perfect ourselves right. So why should be the ones coaching everybody on all these things? I feel like we’re given these platforms to serve anyone and everyone who comes to us, at our highest level, no matter what we’re able to do.
And I think yesterday in that moment with Norah, as I was looking at her and seeing her laugh, and I just got this weird love for everybody where I was like, oh my gosh, I just need to…any prejudices, anything like that that I have in my mind, I just need to get rid of them and look at everybody through this lens of oh my gosh, this is someone who is just trying to figure this out. Figure out this whole game the same way I am. And I can’t cast my preconceived notions or judgments upon them, it’s not my job, not my role. My role is to serve each person.
I look back at Liz, I had a chance, it was fun…I hadn’t heard from her for a while and she Voxed me yesterday and was just telling me about everything she’s doing, the people she’s serving, how much success she’s had and how many people’s lives she’s changing. And it was such a special moment. I’m so grateful that first off, she was willing to apply even though I know she had fear. She told me there was fear of that.
I’m grateful that people on my team didn’t cast any judgment. I’m grateful I didn’t cast judgment. I’m grateful that we looked at her as we look at anybody and just said, look we’re going to do our best to serve her at our highest level because she’s special, she’s got a gift, she’s got the ability to affect other people’s lives. And I think that if we start looking at everyone around us that way, it will help us to not judge them because of their political beliefs or judge them because of their religious beliefs or judge them because they believe something or do something different than we do.
Everyone’s got their own demons inside themselves and until, what’s the parable? If you read the bible there’s a parable, you know whoever is perfect among you, cast the first stone. And I’m like, I’m not perfect so I’m not casting any stones. Because I don’t want those things coming back at me. Instead it’s in your sphere of influence, serve the best you can.
So anyway, I don’t know if that makes any sense or if that helps at all. I hope it does. I just know for me, I had this really rare, amazing glimpse seeing my daughter and in this instant I saw everybody as her. And I was like man, everyone here 10 years ago, 15, 20, 30 however many years back was just like Norah is now. And I love Norah so much and I was like, I need to love everybody that much because if I do I can truly have an impact on them.
And if I’m not careful when I look at people through this other lens, it’s going to hold myself back. Anyway, it was really a reminder for me just to understand y mantle, my calling, my job, my profession, my career, whatever you want to call it, that I’m called to serve all people and anyone who can hear my voice and is willing to come towards me, I’m going to do my best to serve them at the highest level I can, regardless of everything else.
So I’m grateful for everyone, grateful for you guys who are listening to this, I’m grateful also for your willingness to go out and get your message out there. It’s a scary thing, and as you will find, two things you will find as you start putting your message out there…It’s funny, Steven Larsen shared one of them yesterday at the telethon, he’s like, “As soon as you go hit publish, the second you go out and start doing your thing, instantly every character flaw you have is going to smack you in the face. That’s the best thing about business, as soon as you start putting yourself out there, all your character flaws come like, boom, right in front of your face.” It’s scary.
That’s number one. Number two then, the critics come fast, and they want to silence you as quick as they can. But man, I’m grateful for you guys who are willing to step up every single day in spite of those things, in spite of the fact that starting a business will bring every character flaw you have to the surface and you’re going to be super, hyper aware of it. Things that weren’t that big a deal before suddenly become a big deal because you are the leader, you are the person who’s putting yourself out there. And number two, the critics when they come, it can be scary. I will get critics from this podcast.
I will get messages from people who are like, “I can’t believe you talked about God in the podcast. I came to listen to marketing, not…” I will get that, I guarantee it, I get it every single time. But it’s like, it doesn’t matter. This is my message and I’m sharing it, and I’m sharing it and I’m grateful for you guys that are willing to do those same things as well, because it’s scary, it’s rare, but man when you do it, it’s why you’re here.
So know that, keep being bold, keep being brave, keep putting your message out there. Get rid of any judgments or things you have out there because that’s not your role. Your role is to serve at your highest level to all people who will hear your voice. And if you do that, you serve selflessly, you’ll be able to have the impact you really want.
So there you go. For all those who I offended today, I’m so sorry. For those who heard my message and understand it, thank you and I hope that you’re able to look at people the same way I had a chance to see people yesterday when I was looking at Norah. So thanks everybody, appreciate you all. Have a great night and we will talk to you again tomorrow.
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Step #1 in the process of writing the new Traffic Secrets book.
On this episode Russell talks about the process he does while writing his books. Also find out when the launch date will be for his latest book, Traffic Secrets. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear on today’s episode:
Why Russell started over while writing the Dotcom Secrets book. Find out why doing an event after deleting the first draft of the Expert Secrets book helped him come up with a better framework. And find out how he is beginning to write the Traffic Secrets book, and when you’ll be able to get your hands on a copy of it.So listen here to find out what Russell goes through to write a book, and why you should consider buying the previous two books again when Traffic Secrets launches.
---Transcript---
Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I am pumped to be here with you guys today. I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about the event that happened last weekend.
Alright everybody, so last night we just got back from the Traffic Secrets event. Yes, you heard me right, the Traffic Secrets event. What? Which is really, really exciting. And now I’m actually heading to the dentist. I’ve got a little window. I’m definitely late for the dentist, but that’s what he gets for being a dentist. Just kidding, I like my dentist a lot, he’s a cool guy. But I gotta get my teeth drilled or something, so it’s one of those things.
But I just want to tell you guys about last weekend and why we did it and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Those who know my journey, know my story over the last few years, know that a long, long, long time ago, like ten years ago I had an idea I wanted to write a book. But I feel like you have to earn a book. It’s not something that’s just given to you, you have to earn it. So I bought the domain name dotcomsecrets.com, because I was like I want to write a book called DotCom Secrets dot com, because I’m going to teach people the secrets of the dot com thing.
Anyway, looking back now I probably would have named it something different. But that was the name, and I wanted it to be a book. And then it sat there for like a decade where it wasn’t a book, it was just in my head.
And then one day I was out to dinner with my buddy Chad Wolner, and we were at Carl’s Jr eating while we were watching our kids play on the little playground thing. And he said something very profound to me, he said, “Do you know the difference between you and Tony Robbins and Brendan Burchard?” I’m like, “No what?” and he’s like, “I feel like your content’s better, you’re helping more people, you’re doing all this cool stuff, but they seem more legitimate than you because they’ve written more books.” I was like, “What?” At first I wanted to curse him out and then next I’m like, “Crap.” If he’s thinking that, one of my close friends, what is the rest of the world thinking?
Alright, if I want to legitimize what I’m doing I need to write a book. And this is about the same time that we’re working on Clickfunnels. So these two projects are happening simultaneously, because that’s the smart way to do it, write a book and launch a software company at the exact same time.
So I start the journey, and we start writing the book, and I spent a long, long, long time and I wrote the whole first draft of the book, and after I wrote it I looked at it and I was like, “I’m not proud of it.” And I told this at the Traffic Secrets event, one of the life lessons I got from my dad. I remember one time he asked me to go clean the car, and this is, I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, and I went and cleaned the car and came back, “Dad, okay it’s clean. Can you come out and look at it so I can go out and play?” and he’s like, “Well, are you proud of it?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” And he’s like, “Well, if you’re proud of it, then you’re done.”
And I’m like, “Crap.” And I’m like, “I’m probably not proud of it.” So I went back down to the car and I started cleaning and re-cleaned the whole thing, and this time I made sure I was proud of it. I went back up and I’m like, “Okay dad, the car’s done.” And he said the same thing, “Are you proud of it.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Okay, then you’re done.” He didn’t even come look at it.
Life lesson right there. Boom. So fast forward now, twenty years later and I’m reading the manuscript of the book that I’m about to go send to the publisher, and I was like, “I’m not proud of this.” So I decided to just get rid of it. So I got rid of the script and I thought, you know, the problem was, all the stuff was in there and I don’t know, it didn’t make sense, wasn’t in the right order. There was like this chicken and the egg concept, what comes first? They have to know this before they know this, and all these things.
So I thought the best way to do this was to actually teach a live event because then I can explain it and see it in people’s eyes, see what makes sense, and see what things are out of context and stuff. So my little coaching program at the time was called Dotcom Secrets Ignite, some of you may have been in that. I said, “Alright guys, everyone come to Boise, we are going to teach this event called Dotcom Secrets.”
And I ended up getting about a hundred people to show up to Boise and for three days I taught the concept of the book. And what’s interesting, as I was teaching it I was like, “Oh crap, you need context. This doesn’t make sense. I need to explain this.” So I taught the whole thing, and after I got done I rearranged the outline and changed everything around until it was like, oh, here’s the book. Then I started over and rewrote the book and then boom, we have Dotcom Secrets, which I’m very proud of.
So that was the first book and then I was like, “I will never write a book again.” There was so much pain associated. Of all the projects I’d ever done, that was the most amount of work and the least amount of money made from a project. Because books don’t make you a ton of money. They make you good money if you do it right, if you do it through a funnel the way we do. But it wasn’t insane.
I’m used to funnels where you launch it and they do a few million dollars out the gate. This one, you know, sold a ton of books, but it wasn’t short term, huge monetary success. But looking back at it now, five years later, it’s been huge monetary success. Because it was the indoctrination piece that got people to understand funnels, which then created the desire and the need for Clickfunnels.
Anyway, so I get the book done, and I’m never going to write a book again. And then like a year later I’m at this mastermind meeting, which is actually happening again this weekend, it’s kind of funny. It was Joe Polishes mastermind meeting and I’m going and I get invited to this dinner the night before with a couple of people. So I’m at the dinner, and sitting across from me at the dinner is this guy named Dean Graziosi, some of you guys know Dean.
I had been a fan of Dean’s for a long time, we’d met once or twice. He was the dude who was on infomercials for twenty years. I used to watch his infomercials and study him, and write the scripts out because I was a marketing nerd. And just loved what he was doing.
So I’m sitting across from him and we’re talking and having all these conversations. And in the middle of this conversation about something completely different, I had this realization that was like, “You need to write a book and it’s going to be called Expert Secrets and somehow Dean’s going to help you. I’m not sure if it’s going to be an infomercial or something. But you need to write this book.”
I’m like, oh crap. I don’t want to write a book. But I had bought that domain two or three years earlier, so I remember I went to bed that night and Dave Woodward was staying with me and I was just like, “I’m writing another book.” And he’s like, “What?” and we start talking about it and he’s freaking out, we’re freaking out. And so that started the journey.
So guess what I did? I wrote an entire copy of the book, I was so excited. That was this time of the year, right now we’re in October. So then fast forward to the next summer, so it means I had spent six months writing this book. So that summer, I think it was June or July, I was at my family reunion and I was supposed to be going through the final edits of the draft to be able to send to my publisher. So I’m reading the drafts and as I’m reading it, I’m like two or three pages in and I had the same realization, “I’m not proud of this.”
And I was like, no, I spent too much time on this. So I was like, it’s not right. And back then I was snapchatting, so I got on Snapchat Live and I said, “everyone, I’ve been writing this book for the last six or seven months, and I’m not proud of it.” So I highlighted the entire book, live on Snapchat, then deleted it and resaved the file, so it was gone, gone. It was the only copy I had. And I was like, “It’s gone.”
And everyone was freaking out. I got people messaging me like, “No, Russell. I will pay you a thousand dollars to read that manuscript.” And I’m like, “No, it’s gone forever. I’m not proud of it. I don’t want it leaking out to the interwebs and people would be like, ‘oh that’s Russell’s book.”
So I decided after that, I was like, “I need to do an event like last time.” So I called up my now, mini-inner circle at the time and said, “you guys, we’re doing an event in Boise next month. Boom, come to this event.” And I didn’t know where I was going to go, but I just knew that the event had a schedule, therefore I must figure out how to teach this concept in a really short period of time.
And at the same time I was going to Kenya, so we’re flying to Kenya. On the flight to Kenya, on the gravel roads in Kenya and on the flight home from Kenya I am reading, mapping out, studying, planning, plotting, scheming, building out the framework for this book. And if you’ve read my books you know I doodle out every concept. So I’m doodling every single concept, putting them in chronological order, trying to get it the best I can.
I land in Boise, coming home from Kenya, our flight got delayed by 36 hours, so it was a day late getting home, and my event was the next day. So I land, go to bed, wake up in the morning and I go to this event to teach the concepts again. I teach the Expert Secrets concepts over two days, and what’s fun, the same thing. I’m teaching stuff and some things make total sense to people, other things they get stuck and I have to reteach it, and redo the framework and I’m trying….
I remember one concept that I thought was going to take 10-15 minutes to explain, we ended up spending 3 hours on it in the group because we figure it out and how to make it simple and simplify it.
Anyway, when that was done, then I took the outline and retweaked it and boom, I went back to writing and I wrote the Expert Secrets book. So there’s pass number two.
So this time, and again I was like, “I will never write a book. I forgot how painful writing books are, and this was horrible. I’ll never write a book.” And literally, in the middle of the Expert Secrets launch, day two or day three, I get a message from John Reese who said, “Hey, would you be interested in buying Traffic Secrets from me?”
And I was like, oh my gosh. This could be the trilogy. I could get a hardbound trilogy box set. I was like, this would be the greatest thing in the world. Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, Traffic Secrets, and then my podcast, which you see is Marketing Secrets, and Marketing Secrets is like the daily what’s happening in the world right now, thoughts on top of the conscious mind. And the other books are like the foundational cornerstones, that are the evergreen pieces that never change.
And I was just like, “I have to buy this.” And emotionally I bought it, which means you spend a lot more money than you should. But I knew that that was book number three.
So now fast forward, we’re a year and a half past the Expert Secrets launching. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it’s changed a lot of people’s lives and it’s helped people’s funnels grow, which is really, really good. And now I’m sitting here and trying to figure out this third book. And I was like, “should I start writing?” and I’m like, “No, I must do an event first.”
So I called up all my Inner Circle and Two Comma Club X members and said, “You know what, I’m going to offer something I wasn’t doing before and we’re doing an event and it’s going to be amazing.” So the next thing we know, now we’re in….
Sorry my car is super loud, and I’m super late for the dentist.
So next thing we know, I’m in Arizona and for two day we’re teaching the Traffic Secrets book. And it was fun, it was the same concept. Monday I came in and started doodling it out, had the framework, the doodles the things. I spent Monday, Tuesday and all day Wednesday doodling, sketching, putting together a process, putting together a framework, and then Thursday morning stepped onstage and started teaching the Traffic Secrets book.
And I taught it Thursday and taught it Friday and yeah, it turned out good. And now I know what shifts and changes and things I need to move around. And now the writing process begins, but it was really, really cool.
So I wanted to share with you guys because that is my process. I know a lot of you guys are struggling, how do you teach content? How do you write books? How do you blah, blah, blah? And for me it’s all aobut like, first off I basically gotta write an outline, here’s an outline of what I’m going to create. Number two is I build the framework, for me the frameworks are these doodles. So I doodle out here’s the framework of what I’m trying to teach, the conceptual thing.
And then for me now, what I’ve found, the shortcut is get a bunch of people in a room and teach it. And if you teach it, it’s cool because people sitting in a room don’t have context. So it’s like if you explain something and they’re like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need to explain that earlier in the book or it’s not going to make sense.” So that’s kind of how I do my process.
So I’m going to do another episode in the near future about frameworks, because Steven Larsen and I were talking about, he’s like, ‘The thing you’re the best at is building out frameworks. You’re like the framework king. Everyone needs to become framework kings because when you have the framework it’s easy to teach off. But how do you actually build the framework?”
You know my process has been going back twenty, forty, fifty years in the past, learning from the best direct response marketers of all time, figuring out what the frameworks are, bringing them to modern day, and then creating frameworks now all of us can go and use in our world, in our businesses, and things like that.
So anyway, it’s just kind of interesting, so I wanted to share that with you guys and hopefully give you some ideas. For those who are stressed out, “Russell can write a book because he’s Russell.” It’s like, no Russell struggles writing books more than anybody. So what he does is this process and how it works.
Anyway, I hope that helps. With that said, you guys, I’m almost to the dentist. I’m going to bounce. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you guys are getting excited for the third book. I have to have to the publisher by May 1st, we’re also re publishing Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets. I’m going to be adding about a hundred pages to each book, and we’re republishing them as hardbound books and it’s going to come when we launch next September, I think it’s my launch date. They’re going to come in like a box set, which is the coolest thing ever. It’s like the Star Wars trilogy, only cooler. Or Lord of the Rings trilogy, but even cooler. It’s the Secrets trilogy.
Alright you guys, be sure to get prepared and excited and ready to buy this when it’s ready because you’re going to love it. It’s going to be amazing, I promise you I’m killing myself to make sure the books are great for you guys. Appreciate you all, thanks so much for everything and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.
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On today’s episode we get to hear the final portion of Russell’s presentation at Dream 100 Con. Here are some of the awesome things in this final piece:
Hear as Russell goes into detail on how to dream 100 several different platform choices. Find out why you need to pick just one platform to obsess over at first, instead of trying to do all of them. And Find out how Brian Dean at Backlinko.com does SEO using the dream 100 as well, even though that’s not what he calls it.So listen here to have everything you need to know about dream 100 from the final episode dedicated to Russell’s presentation at Dana Derricks Dream 100 Con.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the third and final part of my presentation at Dream 100 Con. I hope you’ve been enjoying so far. If you’re just jumping in right now, go back and listen to episode one and two, this is all part of 90 minute presentation I gave at Dana Derricks Dream 100 Con where I was going into the Dream 100 and how it works inside of your business. It is the foundation for all traffic. It’s the foundation for how we grow and how we scale companies. It’s the foundation for everything.
And it also happens to be the first two chapters of the new Traffic Secrets book. I hope you guys are getting some anticipation and excitement for the book that will be coming out next year. It’s going to go deep into this stuff, but this is a really good foundation to help you guys understand how the Dream 100 works, and how it fits in context with the other platforms and ad networks, and everything like that. Without any further ado, I’m going to jump into the third part of this presentation from Dana Derricks’ Dream 100 Con. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll see you guys after the intro.
Alright, so now that you kind of have that context, I want to talk about, I want to go into these channels here and talk about growing these different channels.
Each channel, when you start going through these you have to understand each channel is a little bit different, the way that they all work. So the first one is Facebook, we’ll talk about that.
So Facebook for me is closest to like a talk show. It’s interesting, when you look at when new movies come out…in fact, it’s going to be fun, as we go through all these I want you guys thinking about this. All of us see these things every single day, but if you start seeing what’s happening in the real world and see how it correlates with what we’re doing today, it should get you really, really excited.
So when the Expert Secrets book was coming out we’re trying to figure out, how do we launch this thing? How do we get it out there to the whole world? And one night I was watching late night TV, I can’t remember what show it was or whatever, I can’t remember what actor. But basically there was a movie coming out and the actor was on the show, let’s say it’s Ben Affleck. So Ben Affleck was on Jimmy Kimmel talking about the movie, they show a little clip of it, and then boom. Then Ben Affleck went to the Today Show and then Good Morning America, and this does this circuit and hits all the different talk shows talking about the movie and then that Friday the film goes live and they sell a ton of tickets.
So what does Hollywood do? They do the same thing. They go and find a distribution channel, they get this person in front of all of it, and they do two things, number one, they work their way in. They get Ben Affleck, or whoever the celebrity is in the movie, to get on the show and actually talk about the show, so they work their way in. But they also go and buy their way in, okay. During the break there’s all sorts of commercials for the show as well. So they’re buying their way in, they’re working their way in, in front of core audiences. They know we’re going to buy the movie to get all the hype and buzz. And then they go and people show up to the movie and hopefully it’s a big blockbuster.
So I’m watching this and I see this whole thing happen, I watch the movie blow up in sales. And I’m like, gosh, I wish I could get on all these shows. I would love to be on the Today Show and Good Morning America and all these things, but unfortunately traditional media thinks I’m a big internet nerd and that I’m just trying to sell stuff and they don’t like people like me. At least that’s the story in my head, it’s probably not true. But that’s my belief right. So I’m like, I can’t get on these shows, that’s frustrating.
Then I was like, wait a minute. Facebook is similar to talk shows. People have built these huge distribution channels, what if I went and just did what Ben Affleck just did, but I do it on everyone’s Facebook channels. So the first step we did, me and Dave sat down freaking out, Steven was there at the time too. We sat down and said, “Let’s build a Dream 100 of everyone on Facebook who’s got big huge Facebook following.”
We sat down and built a huge dream 100 just….actually not true. This is a mistake I made that I want to teach you guys through too. We built our initial dream 100 and the first time it was like everybody and then the goal was to go do talk shows on all these people’s Facebook channels. What was interesting is that, we had some people who had huge email lists, and we did Facebook lives on their Facebook platform, and they got like 4 people to show up and it was a huge waste of time.
One thing I want you to understand, this is like a really simple, but really powerful concept, people who listen to podcasts, they listen to podcasts. People who read emails, read emails. People who read blogs, read blogs. People who watch things on Facebook, watch things on Facebook. People kind of pick their platforms. I’m curious, just in this room alone, how many of you guys get the majority of your media through YouTube? How many of you guys get the majority of your media reading blogs or through like medium.com? How many get the majority of your media through podcasts, that’s what you like to consume? How many get the majority of your media through Facebook Lives?
It’s really fascinating. So what we found, I was trying to this dream 100 strategy with someone with a big email list, but they had no people on Facebook, it was a huge waste of my time. So for you, if you come back down, it’s really figuring that out. Like, “I’m just going to do the Dream 100 on this platform because this is the platform where these people live. If I’m going to get people on Facebook to follow me on Facebook, that’s where they’re all going to be at.
So again, we came back here with Facebook, we did our own Dream 100, built out a huge Dream 100 of everyone who had a big Facebook following and started calling them up and said, “Hey can Russell come on your Facebook page and do an interview with you?” It was like a virtual book tour. We had a ton of people say yes, which was really cool.
So I was on all these different people’s channels doing Facebook Lives, “Hey this is Russell.” And I got interviewed by Tony Robbins, by Grant Cardone, by a bunch of you guys here in this room, we did a ton of them. I remember we were doing like 10 a day for like two weeks, it was really exhausting. But we did the whole circuit of that. So I worked my way into all of these different shows.
The second thing we did, and this was kind of a cool, unique strategy. We got agreements from all the people doing Facebook Lives, for me to actually go into their ads account and buy ads. So then I started buying my way in.
So Tony Robbins gave us access to their ad account, where I could plug in, and John on my team could actually take our interview and boost it. That’s how we got 3.2 million people to see the interview with Tony, because we were buying ads and growing it up. So I both worked my way in, and I bought my way in to grow that thing. I did the same thing with Grant Cardone, and every single person’s audience.
And if you look at that effect from that whole thing, we sold tens of thousands of copies of the book, then my Facebook channel, because I’m being interviewed by Tony, by all these people, so in the thing you see my head and his head, my channel grew by over a hundred thousand subscribers during that time. So my channel started growing, my channel started getting bigger.
So for each of these, I’m going to kind of go through some of the strategy behind each of these, but I want you guys to understand, most of you aren’t going to go and build a channel on all of these. I would pick just one right now. If you’re trying to do podcasting and Facebook lives and blogging and insta….all these things, it’s going to be like super diluted and this is going to be really hard for you guys to do it.
So pick like, and I would recommend whatever platform you’re the most obsessed with is the one you should plug into. If you love listening to podcasts all day, you should be a podcaster, because you’re going to understand that medium so much better. If you love Facebook Lives, you should be doing Facebook lives. Initially at least, pick the one medium that you like the best and start focusing on that. As you start growing you can pick the second one or the third one, but if you triple down on one, it’s going to be way better for you, I promise you that.
So I’m going to go through the core ones here and then I want you guys to kind of think through it for yourself what you want to do. Okay, now each, in fact let me come back to the first image. For each of these different platforms, my goal again is the same thing from right here. I’m building my own podcast show, I’m building my own FAcebook following, I’m building my own instagram. Pick the platform you want to focus on, but just pick one right now. Then the question, the thought is, how do I buy my way in, how do I earn my way into that one.
So if it’s Facebook Live, I build my Dream 100, okay can I get these people to interview me on their page? That’s going to build my platform, if not can I buy ads to their people, that’s going to build my platform? Can I buy my way in? Can I work my way in? Or can I do both?
If I’m doing a podcast, same thing. In fact, how many of you guys have ever listened to the Art of the Charm podcast? The Art of the Charm Podcast. It was one of the top podcasts in all of iTunes and the dude who started it, his name was Jordan Harvenger, it’s interesting because for some reason him and his business partners got in a fight or something and he left that podcast and then he started his new podcast called the Jordan Harvenger show, and I’d never listened to that other podcast, but all the sudden I started hearing him. All my favorite podcasts I was listening to, he was popping up on the first one, and the second one and the third one. And everybody is interviewing this guy.
I’m like, “I’m so confused.’ And on every one of them they’re like, “how did you build the biggest podcast out there, number one or two on all of iTunes?” and he said, “Well, we launched a show and then I went to every other podcaster and I did interviews with them, and then my call to action was if you like me, go listen to the Jordan Harvenger show. And what’s interesting is people who listen podcasts listen to podcasts. So I leveraged all the podcasts in my dream 100 listeners to go and fuel and build up my podcasts.”
If you go listen, that’s all he’s doing. Interview after interview, after interview, just building these things up. You could do the same thing now, find out all the other big podcasts and buy ads to build a platform, but all he’s doing is try to build his platform for round two. So look at somebody who built one of the biggest podcasts in the world, how he builds his second one is the same thing we talked about. Build your platform and come back and earn your way in, work your way in, or buy your way in, or both.
So whatever platform you’re picking, that’s kind of the process. So let me come back to here. So that’s the talk show. So again, if you’re going to do Facebook, you’re like, “Number one, I’m going to focus and double, triple down and build a huge Facebook following, that’s my goal.” Cool, so you build your page, come back and say okay, “I’m going to work my way in, I’m going to buy my way in. I’m going to Dream 100 all my people, who from these people can I work my way in? Who can IJ buy my way in?” and that’s how you start growing up the channel.
Alright, number two direct mail and email. So old school, if you think of the old school method of this, and you can learn a lot looking at the old school as you’re looking at what’s new. So many of you guys obsessively study direct mail? Me and Dana probably, a couple of people. So I don’t know, I still love the old guys the best. When Dana was joking about me and him getting in bidding wars on EBay, that’s actually a true thing.
Every Sunday night I sit on my bed in EBay and I have like 12 searches that are always preloaded, one’s Dan Kennedy, one’s Gary Halbert, all the old school people, I’m searching for the new thing to pop up and I buy everything. It’s really fun because I love the old stuff. It’s my favorite because there’s so much you can learn that relates back to what we’re doing today in our world.
So direct mail is just like talk shows, if you look how Hollywood does the talk show circuits, it gives us the model of what we should be doing. The same thing is true with direct mail. So you look at direct mail back in the day, this is how the whole thing worked. Initially with direct mail, what you would do, this is you and direct mail is similar to the dream 100, there are lists out there.
If you look at the history of direct mail, initially what people would do is they would go and just try to mail everybody right. They would try to get the phone book out, and just get a whole bunch of names and send them out stuff. How many think that is efficient or effective or anything? It’s really bad.
In fact, it’s funny when I was first learning about direct mail when I was 12 I remember them talking about this whole concept and it was similar to email where basically they’re like, “I get a list of 100 thousand people, you mail them out a letter and 3% of people respond, this is how the money works, and you make a bunch of money.” So as a 12 year old kid I got all excited.
So I wrote a sales letter on blue paper because that’s all we had in the printer, my parents printer. For my birthday I asked for stamps, I’m such a nerd, so my parents gave me 36 stamps because that was the equivalent of what they were willing to spend on my birthday present. I took my 36 stamps, I wrote out a one page sales letter on the blue paper, because that’s all we had, then I folded it in half because I couldn’t afford envelopes, I put a sticker on it and I hand wrote out 36 addresses. And I didn’t know where to get a list, so I literally got my phone book and I opened it up and I was like, “That guys getting a letter.” And I wrote his name in, I flipped it over, “That guys getting a letter.” And I found 36 people randomly from the phone book in Salt Lake City, Utah and I took those letters and I mailed them.
And I was just like, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be huge. If 1% buy…” I’d do the math and I was so excited. My sample size was 36 and I mailed these letters out and nothing happened. Not a single person responded, and it was really heartbreaking. But it was really hard to read, black ink on blue is really hard to read. And I was like, “I wish my parents had white paper.” But for some reason they didn’t. Who knows?
So that was traditional, when direct mail first started, people just tried to mail the phone book. And there’s only one campaign in the history of the world that ever actually worked with the phone book, and it was a campaign that Gary Halbert did called the Coat of Arms Letter. Who has ever heard this story before? Ah, the old school stories are the best.
So I actually had a chance to meet Gary Halbert, I interviewed him once before he passed away. But he is one of the most amazing people in our industry ever. In fact, if you go to the garyhalberletter.com you can still see all of his old newsletters that he’s published for the last decade before he passed away. They’re all there and you can read them. And just reading them, you’ll learn more about marketing than you will almost any other way.
So the Gary Halbert letter, anyway, as I’m studying Gary’s stuff he tells this story about the Coat of Arms, it was actually an interview with him and my first mentor, Mark Joyner and he’s telling this story. So what he did is he tried a whole bunch of different things and he found this family crest, like a coat of arms thing, and it cost him like 30 cents to like photo copy it and like put it out to people. What he did is like, “This has got people’s names on it, I could actually use the phone book.”
So he took all the Johnson’s in the phone book and mailed out this one page sales letter, have you read the letter? It’s so good. Anyway, it’s like a super personal like, “Hey, this is Gary or whatever, I have the same last name as you and I found the family coat of arms, it’s really cool. Check it out. I actually got a whole bunch of them printed for myself and my family and stuff. I saw that you have the same last name, you’re also Johnson, I’m Johnson. If you want I could send it to you for like $5. Just send me cash in the envelope and I’ll send you out your own coat of arms.”
And what’s interesting, I won’t go too deep in this, but he found with the bigger names like Johnson or Smith it didn’t work, but with the smaller names like Brunson or Derricks, where it’s a more unique name, it killed it. And he was literally getting the phone book, ripping them out, a dude’s typing in all this stuff, and mail those out. They’d write the letter for the Derricks family, or the Brunson family.
What’s funny, this is the coolest part of the story. I wish he was here to tell it. His dad at the time was kind of like most of our parents. I remember when I first got started in this business I was making like a quarter of a million bucks a year and my mom was like, because I was still in school at the time, and she’s like, “Well Russell, when you get done with school what’s your job going to be?” I’m like, “Mom, this is my job.” And she’s like, “No, no, no when you’re done with that, what are you going to do when you want to grow up.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a legit thing, this is real.”
And it’s funny, if any of you guys know David Frye, David Frye is my second uncle or something like that, he’s also in our industry. I found out years later that he was doing the same thing I was doing. So I called my mom like, “uncle David, he’s doing what I’m doing.” And she’s like, “Oh, well he does really well. Okay, you can do that.” And that legitimized what we do because somebody else she knew was doing it.
But Gary had the same thing with his dad where his dad was like, “When are you going to get a real job? When are you going to do this thing?” So Gary, what he told his dad, he’s like, “Dad, I want you to put on a nice shirt and tie and I’m going to pick you up tomorrow because I want to show you something.” And his dad is like, “Why?” he’s like, “Just please dress up nice, I’m going to take you out.” So he goes and picks up his dad the next morning, and he drives over to the bank, and they walk into the bank and there’s like the bank tellers there and stuff, and then there’s this stairway.
He’s like, “Come here dad.” His dad is like, “What are you doing?” and he’s like, “Come over here.” He’s like, “We can’t go up there, that’s just for employees.” And he’s like, “No, come here dad.” So he takes this thing, and they walk up the stairs and go on the second level of the bank, and they walk around the bank and there’s like 60 full time people there, 60 people who are opening up envelopes and are pulling out 5 one dollar bills, putting them in a bank bag and cashing them. Boom, 60 full time people.
And he tells his dad, “this is the people of the bank who work to put our cash into the bank full time.” And he’s like, “Those are the sales for the month?” “These are the sales for today.” That letter at its peak was getting like 10,000+ responses a day of people sending in $5 a time. And they had full time people just doing that, counting the cash. And his dad was like, “Okay, you can keep doing this.” It legitimized it for his father.
So that’s kind of what direct mail is. For most people, the phone book concept does not work. Having a phone book doesn’t work, but for that one….there’s a picture of a phone book, I don’t know. Okay, that doesn’t work, but if you look at the progression, what happened then, people started here, they were testing all sorts of stuff. And what happened is people started getting buyers, and they started building buyer lists.
So this person over here, this dude would be like, “Hey, I don’t have a phone book but I’ve got this list right here. These are a whole bunch of people on my list, let’s say there’s 30,000 people that have bought something from me, so you can mail the phone book of like a billion people and cross your fingers and hope or if you’re selling something similar, I sold 30,000 people garden hoses, if you have something that someone who bought the garden hoses would want, you can rent this list.”
So people come and they rent this list and they would mail it out. And then somebody else over here would have a list that was based on a business opportunity. And this guy would have a list based on health and weight loss. And soon people would build up huge directories, like here’s all the different lists that are out there. Have you ever heard of the SRDS, it’s this huge directory of every list known to man that people actually rent it. And in every market you can find here are a hundred or a thousand people that have buyer lists of people.
So the first phase was like the phone book list, the second phase became buyer lists, then the third phase, people kept saying buyer lists are good, sometimes they’re better and sometimes they’re worse, and these buyer list people would be like, “well, here’s all my buyer lists in the last 10 years.” And in there you’ve got tons of people who have moved and all sorts of stuff.
So they came up with this algorithm that figured out how to get the best possible people on the list. So the algorithm is this, RFM, any direct response nerds know what RFM stands for? I know Dave knows, anybody else? Recency, how recent have they bought something? Somebody who bought something yesterday is more valuable than somebody who bought something three years ago. So recency.
The second one is frequency. How often did they buy? How many of you guys are hyper active buyers? How many of you guys have bought more than one thing from me about funnels? Guess what, you’re more likely to keep buying from me. “But Russell, I already bought everything on funnels.” No, it doesn’t matter. You’re obsessed. You’re obsessive compulsive like me, you buy the thing and then the next thing and next thing and you can’t stop. That’s better. I want people who buy frequently, that’s a better buyer.
So if they bought recently they’re a better buyer, if they bought frequently they’re a better buyer, and what’s the M stand for? Monetary value. How much they spent? The dude who gave me $30,000 is worth more than the guy who gave me free plus shipping.
So you start doing that, say, “I want to rent your list of 30,000 people, but I only want people who have bought in the last 30 days and bought at least 2 things from you and spent over $1000.” And now you get the cream of the crop, the gold and that’s who you would go out and you would mail from the list.
So that’s kind of how the old school worked. Other cool things we learned from the old school as well, if you would go and let’s say I read this dude’s list, I get these people and if I would just send a letter to them randomly it would do good, but what would do better is the invention of this thing called the lift letter.
So the lift letter is a one page paper from the person they know. They know, let’s say this is Lady Boss and they know Kaelin, so there would be a one page letter from Kaelin and it’d be like, “Hey, I just met Russell, he’s got this really cool weight loss program that works really, really good for dads. So you are one of my Lady Boss women and you want your husband to be a little skinnier, you should get Russell’s program, it’s amazing…..” a one page lift letter that would be on top of it, and then underneath the lift letter would be my entire sales letter selling my program.
So we learned this, having lift letters is better. So how does that correlate to us today? Well it correlates today, understanding that if I’m going after someone with email, I want to find people who have email lists that are good. People that have, that are growing lists, recency, frequency, monetary value. I tell you what, if I can do a JV partnership with somebody who their potential buyers, all their customers have spent $1000 with them or $5000 with them, I’m going to spend more time on that dream 100 person because I know that their list is worth way more.
If I know, man, this guy just did a product launch, he’s got $5000 new buyers, oh my gosh, that buyer list is hot. When we used to be in the product launch game, we’d launch a product and we’d sell 10,000 copies of it and for the next like 60 days our list was hot. Anything we promoted they would buy, because they were recent.
So it’s like, you’re finding partnerships, looking for people who actually have lists that are these things. A lot of people who like, when we launched the Expert Secrets book, they had done really good on the Dotcom Secrets book launch, I was all excited for them to promote and sell and guess what? These people hadn’t added anyone to their list in like 3 years, and they didn’t email them very often, and they did horrible on the launch, the second one because they weren’t always doing these things.
So when I’m looking for JV partners I’m looking for people who have recency, frequency, and monetary value inside their list. That’s a much more valuable partner for me than someone who isn’t. I also look at this, the lift letter right. The reason why JV’s do so good, if you get the Dream 100 and be like, “Dude, Dana wrote this book, it’s insane. It’s 400 bucks, it doesn’t make any sense, but this book is amazing. If you come on this webinar with me, he’s going to explain the whole thing, it’s going to be awesome.” That’s going to be way better than me running a cold Facebook ad to Dana’s audience.
So if I can get him to do the lift letter, him to endorse it, promote it before they come on, everything goes up. That’s why Dana when he did his Facebook ads made zero dollars in sales on his webinar. Did the same thing with the JV partner who did a lift letter and warmed him, $260,000 in sales. That’s the difference.
So we learned so many good things from direct mail. Email is the same thing. The second phase in this for you guys, you need to go and sit down and be like, “who are the emailers in my business?” Because people who read emails, people who open and click on emails are people who open and click on emails. I’m going to find the emailers, I’m going to build a dream 100 list and then I’m going to do one or two things.
I’m going to work my way in or I’m going to buy my way in. If I work my way in it means I’m going to try to dream 100 them, get them to promote my stuff as an affiliate, and they say no or whatever, I can see if I can buy my way in. I’m going to go and see if I can buy an ad in their newsletter, if I can pay them up front. This weekend in my secret illuminati meeting, I was hanging out with the guy that owns Tapping Point Solution, do any of you guys know….I probably shouldn’t tell the members of the illuminati I might get killed. Alex, Nick…do you guys know them at all?
So they have a company called Tapping Point Solution which is like this really cool thing, but what they do when they do dream 100 stuff is they have, their entire business is based on affiliates promoting their stuff, but they don’t pay affiliates commissions at all. What they do is they pay affiliates $1.50 for every single click that they get, no matter what. So they’re able to go to the affiliates, and they’re not necessarily working their way in, “Hey, let’s split the money 50/50.” It’s like, “Okay, how many clicks can you send? I’ll give you this much per click. You guys in?” and they’re like, “sure.’ And that’s how they do it. They’re buying their way into every single one of their dream 100 list.
So there’s different ways to structure this as you start learning about this. The reason why I’m kind of showing you guys this in detail on each platform is because one of the biggest things I want you to understand is I want you understand the concepts are the same for all of these. It’s picking the platform, building my channel, doing the dream 100, working my way in, buying my way to grow my platform.
And it’s going to be similar on every one of these, and if you understand that, this is what makes your business bulletproof. Because someday Facebook is going to get squashed, or email might get banned. I had a bunch of friends who made a ton of money back when fax blasts were real, you could rent a fax list and you could queue it up and you’d have your sales letter printing on like 35,000 people’s stuff that night. And then the FTC came in and made Fax Blasting illegal and that dried up. So email could be illegal tomorrow, we have no idea.
Blogs could like, who knows, things could be shut down, but if you understand these concepts it doesn’t matter. As new platforms come out, if you understand, “Hey I wanna go big in Twitter, or Twitch, or Pinterest, or whatever it is.” The same process, the same concepts are the same.
So you build your channel, find the dream 100, work my way in, buy my way in, boom that’s it, direct mail. Number three radio podcasts, same thing I talked about. If you want to build a podcast channel, that’s it. Build the channel, build the platform, then you go dream 100, go to the iTunes directory, go to Stitcher, go to all the big directories, search your phrases, figure out who your people are, and go start dream 100ing them. Or go back in time, maybe if I come here to my customer journey, my best ones if I go sales funnel radio, everyone on Steven’s podcast probably wants sales funnels. So that’s an easy one to do.
But if I can go backwards in time in the podcast directory and be like, “Okay well, there’s only like 3 funnel podcast, who else do I go?” I gotta go backward s in the customer journey. Who’s got a podcast on business growth? Who’s got a podcast to chiropractors? Who’s got a podcast on anyone else who may potentially be a customer going backwards. So don’t just do the obvious of, “Russell’s there’s only three people who have a funnel podcast.” Okay, that’s right here, now go backwards in the timeline. Who else needs a podcast. Go warmer to the traffic, then go to the colder traffic and go back and forth. But you should be able to get at least a hundred people from any podcast directory for what you’re in.
So don’t tell me, “There’ sonly 3 people.” It’s because you’re being lazy. You gotta go backwards in time and think, hot traffic, warm traffic, all the way to cold. So that’s podcasting, the same thing.
YouTube is like a sitcom. How many of you guys watch TV? Dave and I were talking about this last night. So YouTube is a little different beast right. It’s not like…I can buy my way in really easy, I can find here’s all of Tony Robbins videos and I can buy ads.
I can go and find infusion Soft, they can be my Dream 100. How many of you guys have ever watched an Infusion Soft Tutorial on YouTube? What happens right before that? Right before the Infusion Soft Tutorial pops up is me being like, “Are you trying to figure out how to use Infusion Soft? It is confusing software, but guess what there’s this really cool tool called Clickfunnels, so before you watch this tutorial I’m going to show you something that’s way simpler than the crap you’re trying to figure out, click down below.” It’s really fun. Same thing with Lead Pages and Hubspot and Unbounce and all my competitors.
So they’re my dream 100 in YouTube because I want to pop in front of everyone in their tutorial videos and explain to them why the software they’re using is the devil and why I am their savior. So it’s really, really fun.
So I dream 100 my competitors there, but how do I work my way in on a YouTube channel? How do people do it through sitcoms? How do they do it through different TV shows? Well think about it, how many of you guys have ever seen a show, they call them a crossover show, where two different casts of different shows will be on a show together? Why do they do that? Hmmm, why would they do that? Maybe this show’s got a big following and this show’s got a big following, they’re all a bunch of attractive characters. People over here on ER love the ER staff, and over here they’re like the Simpsons and like the Simpson’s staff, whatever it is, they do a crossover show where somehow the characters connect.
Then the people of this show see this, people love the show and all the sudden they cross pollinate, and now both channels get bigger. Dave was pulling this morning a bunch of different shows that did that. The Flash and Super Girl did a crossover show so that both audiences find out about the other shows. Fresh Prince and The Jefferson’s did it. Simpsons and 24, Law and Order and Homicide. Dozens and dozens of shows. This is how they cross pollinate TV shows.
So for you, how do you do that? You dream 100 the crap out of YouTube and find out who are all the people you eventually would love to have their audiences, and then you do crossover shows. You do some kind of video together and you do the crossover.
Now again, initially obviously I would love to find someone with a billion person YouTube following and do a crossover show, they’re probably not going to do it. So the only way a crossover show is going to work where you’ve got similar platforms. So if you’ve got 10,000 people on your YouTube, I’m going to Dream 100 everyone in my market that’s got 10,000 people , we’re going to do a crossover show, I’m going to get a bunch of their people, they’ll get a bunch of my people and now my show grows to 15,000. Then I’m going to go and say, “Who’s my next thing?” and do a crossover show over there and boom, keep doing that. And keep ascending myself up the dream 100 until eventually you got a hundred thousand, and then a million and you can keep growing from there.
So doing videos together is how you do the crossover show. Same thing comes true with Instagram. Instagram happens, I dream 100 it. I can go buy swipe ups on the people that are on my dream 100. I can buy ads from the people on my dream 100, then I can also do partnerships with them. Like yesterday I was in, or two days ago I was in Jackson hole in a helicopter, and how many of you guys know who Dave Hollis is? Dave and his wife are amazing, and she’s got like a billion followers, he’s got less but growing fast.
And he was in the helicopter and he was like, “Hey I’m in the helicopter back here with Russell Brunson!” And then he tagged me @Russellbrunson and I got a whole slew of thousand plus people from his following that then followed me. Just like that. Right now when Steven Larsen said, {inaudible}, I was filming him and I tagged Steven Larsen and gets what’s going to happen? He’s going to get a whole crap-ton of my people who are going to come over to his thing. I’m doing little mini crossover shows on Instagram. I did a whole bunch with Dana, like 3 or 4 with Dana.
So invite people to go do cool things with you, then they’ll tag you and all the sudden I guarantee you will wake up with a whole bunch of new instagram followers if you even know how to log in to Instagram. Yeah, you don’t even know. I bet they’re there. It happened to Todd at Funnel Hacking Live. Guess what? I tagged Todd in something, he had like 3 followers, he woke up the next morning with like 700 followers and he’s like, “I should probably do some instagram now.”
So you’re finding cool people and hanging out with them, that are already doing that, and then very quickly people will start sucking, and you’re doing that same kind of thing. So I’m working my way in and I’m buying my way in. In fact, all you guys should Instagram me right now and tag me, you have my permission. You need me to dance or something? Whatever you want to do, tag the crap out of me, because I want all your people to follow me as well.
So I’m working my way in, I’m buying my way in and I’m working my channel. Same thing happens with blogs. In fact, how many of you guys want to know how SEO works? In like 2 minutes? SEO. How many of you are like, “I wish I could be number one in Google for my term.” Dream 100 is actually how you do SEO as well, which is fascinating. No one ever believes me until I tell them this, then I show them and they’re like, “What?” Boom, mind blown.
The dude who I think is the best SEO coach right now, a guy named Brian Dean at Backlinko.com And if you look at Brian’s strategy it is literally dream 100. So this is what he does, he goes into the Google, and he figures out, “Man, it would be awesome to be ranked for….” He types in a phrase, “sales funnels.” And he clicks search, boom, and it’s like, “Dude number one, lady number two, person number three.” And here’s the top ten right.
He’s like, “That would be my dream spot. I want to be number one.” And he’s like, “Who is the dude that is number one.” So he clicks on this thing and goes over to this page, and it’s like, “here’s the dude who’s number one for Sales Funnels.” And he’s like, “There’s an article, that would be awesome if that was mine instead.’ So there’s a couple of things you could do. There’s a couple levels of dream 100 here.
One level is like, “I want to be right here. Let me contact this person and see if I can buy an ad on his page.’ So what I do is I build a dream 100 of every single person who is in the top ten in Google for the keywords I’m dreaming about, and I can buy my way in where I just go and buy an ad directly on their page. In the past, back when we were doing more Biz Op stuff, I found the top three people here, and literally paid them to throw a pop on their page that people opt in to my newsletter. And I was not, I didn’t work for this, but I was paying per opt in to get all the people who came to Google, searched for the thing, came for the thing, and they opt in. It was like the best leads ever.
Let me step back, that’s one way to use Dream 100. But if you look at what Brian teaches at backlinko, which is super cool. He takes this page, and he’s like, “Why is this page ranked number one? Why does Google actually like it? There’s got to be a reason.” So he does some stuff, he’s like, “Okay, this page has got, let’s say it’s got a 3000 word article, in the article he said the world sales funnels like 6 times, used these keywords, and here’s some other keywords…” He kind of diagrams, what was that?
Then what he does, he takes this and there’s different sites you can do to run a background thing, and he runs it through it and says, “How many people are linking to this site.” And it says, “This site has 682 links coming back to it. Here’s all the links coming back and pointing to this page.” So we know that Google’s algorithm is based on two things, what’s on the page, and then who are all the people pointing back to you.
So what Brian does, what he teaches all his students, he says, “This is your dream 100.” He doesn’t say that, but that’s what it is. He then takes this list of dream 100 and he then emails every single person. He’s like, “Hey dude, your email or blog is amazing. I saw you’re linking to my buddy over here. I wrote an article as well. His is only 3000 words, mine is 6. If you’d like, I’d love for you to link over to mine as well.” And then he gets this dude now to link to his article, it’s even better, then this dude, and this lady, and this person, and this person. And soon all the people who are making this thing pop to number one start linking here. And within the week he’s number 10, and then 7, and then 3, and then 2 and then he’s just getting more links. That’s SEO, all dream 100.
Does that make sense? This process you guys, it’s the same over and over and over and over again. And then the last one on here I just put other, because this is true with every platform. If you guys learn to Twitter, what do you do? Do the Dream 100 list. How do I work my way in, how do I buy my way in? That’s the game. I want to be big on twitch, I want to be big on Pinterest. Whatever platform you want to be in, whatever next new platform is coming out, this is the game. Building your own channel, figuring out how to work my way in, how to buy my way in, and growing your own platform.
So that is it. What I recommend for all you guys, like I said 30 minutes ago, don’t do all of these right now. It will suffocate you and it will be really hard. Pick one, which platform do you want to be the best at. Do you want the biggest email list, do you want the biggest Facebook following, biggest YouTube…pick one, I don’t care which one it is, but pick one, the one you like the most, the one you want to geek out, the one you want to go deep on the most and start building there and that’s going to start building your own platform.
Then as you start growing, then you move to the last phase. This is like where in our company we’re at, but we didn’t get here until 2 years ago, so don’t think you have to do this today, but long term the goal is to get what we call Conversation Domination. How do I do this on all the platforms?
Start building your team out like, here’s our Facebook Dream 100, here’s our email dream 100, here’ sour podcast, here’s our YouTube, here’s our Instagram, here’s our blog. That’s what we’re doing out of our office. We got people in charge of all these things. Going deep, building dream 100 and then realizing we want to grow our Facebook following, people on Facebook like being on Facebook so let’s build our Facebook dream 100. How do we work our way in, how do we buy our way in, and let’s get them to come to our platform.
Let’s say I want to build my podcast following. We know people who listen to podcasts, listen to podcasts, so let’s build our dream 100 in the podcast, let’s work our way in, let’s buy our way in and build our platform there. If you want to be big on email, on YouTube, it’s the same process over and over and over again. And it’s not that difficult. It’s pretty simple and a lot of fun.
And I believe that is the last phase of it. So if we kind of scroll here, I’m going to go back to the beginning real quick and walk you guys through the 7 of these. So the foundation for this whole thing is this, it’s really understanding this. There’s three types of traffic. Traffic you control, traffic you earn, and traffic that you own. That’s the foundation.
So after you figure that out, then come back and be like, “Who is my dream customer?” Then you become obsessed with them so I can figure out where they’re actually at, because I can’t go and buy that traffic or work my way in unless I can figure out exactly where they’re at in their life and how to communicate with them at that point.
So we have our dream 100 customer journey. So now we have an idea, we love our customer, know exactly who they are, we’re obsessed with them, who’s got them already? Let’s go find those people and let’s go build a dream 100, and start building our well before we’re thirsty. Let’s build our ecosystem out there, then we’re going to start focusing on all these people. Where’s the traffic I control, traffic I don’t control, put it in those pages and then mush it back into traffic that we own, and from there it’s understanding the distribution channels, understanding the platforms, each of the channels. It’s going to be similar, with little tweaks, little differences, but do that to build it out. Then as we grow we move to full on conversation domination as we start growing across all the platforms.
And that you guys is how we do the dream 100 in our company.
Alright everyone that is it for the third and final part of my presentation for Dream 100 Con. I hope you guys enjoyed this presentation. I thank Dana for putting on the event and allowing me to come and speak at it. I’m glad that I was able to share with you guys because hopefully it gets you excited for the traffic secrets book.
Now I have one favor, if you’ve enjoyed the last three episodes, I would love for you to take a screen shot on your phone and then go and post it on Facebook or Instagram, or any of the other networks you use. If you’re tweeting or pinning or whatever else, feel free to post it there. Be sure to tag me so I can see that you’re listening, that’s how I know you’re cool. And then after you’ve tagged me, then also use hashtag Marketing Secrets, and let other people know about this episode if you got value from it. Thanks so much you guys, appreciate you all, and we will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.
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Today we have part 2 of 3 where Russell speaks at Dream 100 Con about traffic and how to build your list. Here are some of the things you will hear in part 2:
Find out the difference between hot, warm and cold traffic, and why you need to change how you get your word out to them. Why you need to build out your dream 100 list by knowing who everyone else is in your market and what they are doing at all times. And find out how phones are like TVs in 1965 and how you can use that to your advantage.So listen here to part 2 of 3 of Russell’s super informative presentation at Dream 100 Con.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope yesterday you enjoyed part one of three from my presentation at Dream 100 Con. Today I want to give you part two.
So we’re going to drive in today into the next section of the presentation. I hope you’re taking notes and starting to piece together how this process and how this concept can work inside of your company. With that said we’re going to queue up the intro and then jump right into part number two of my presentation at Dream 100 Con.
Okay, now one thing I want to explain as you’re doing this is, these are little landing pages right here. The landing page or the funnel for each of these is going to be a little bit different because they’re different parts in the journey. In fact, Dana this is the reason why your stuff works really, really good on Dream 100 and sucks on Facebook ads. It’s not because the offer doesn’t work, it’s because right now your offer works really good at this phase right here. Someone needs traffic? Boom, dream 100. So you have a list of people trying to get traffic, he dream 100’s them, it’s really, really good.
But if he’s going to come back here to somebody that they don’t even know they need traffic, they just got their first website set up and they’re trying to figure out how to sell something, that person needs dream 100 more than anybody, but if he says dream 100 they’re like, “I don’t know what he’s even talking about.”
As you move further out the person, they don’t understand your language patterns, so you have to rephrase how you do it. So every single step back in this timeline, my landing page, my funnel has different ways that I explain things.
If you’ve read the Dotcom Secrets book, I talk about, there’s basically….how many of you guys know what I’m drawing here? There’s hot traffic, there’s warm traffic, and there’s cold traffic. So the hot traffic, they know this thing, those people are super easy. You just have to push them over the edge and they’re in. “I know about traffic, I know about everything. The dream 100? Sweet, that’s more traffic. I’m in.” That’s hot traffic, so that’s how you speak to people.
People down here that are warm, you have to speak to them differently. They don’t even know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they don’t have. So you have to speak to them differently. And people that are really cold, you have to speak to them differently.
Jean Schwartz, how many of you guys study the old school copywriters? If not, they are the best. All the good stuff is from the old school. So Jean Schwartz, old dead dude who’s a genius, he said, he was talking about this concept right here. He said, “If your prospect is aware of your product and realizes it can satisfy his desire, your headline starts with a product.” So if he knows about your product, “I was at Funnel Hacking Live, I was onstage and I heard about Dream 100, Dana was there.” or “I was on a webinar and my buddy introduced me to Dana on this webinar and talked about this thing.” Like, they know what the product is, it’s really simple. “Hey, just buy my product. Buy the thing. Buy Clickfunnels.”
If someone knows about Clickfunnels, I can just pitch the Clickfunnels. Now move back. If they’re not aware of your product, only the desire itself, the headline starts with the desire. So if I’m here, here I’m selling the product. Here I’m selling the desire. So if I’m like, “I want to grow my company.” That’s my desire. So if I’m speaking to someone in my world about desire, my headline, my hook, my pitch is not going to be like, “You need a funnel.” Because they’re like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But if I’m like, “I got a way to double your business in the next 30 days.” That’s their desire, “Well, what is it?” Then I can introduce them to like, “There’s this weird thing called a funnel.”
“Who wants to get 10 times more traffic to your website without buying a single Facebook ad?” That’s the desire they have, now you can transition them into Dream 100. And then you come back here to the cold prospects. If he’s not aware of what he really seeks, he’s only concerned with a general problem your headline starts with the problem and crystallizes it into a specific need. So here’s the problem, the problem is like, “I need somebody to give me money.” That’s where the traffic comes in or whatever.
So this is kind of what I’m looking at. Now, one more example. As you’re going here with hot traffic, people that are close to the thing, if I walk up, like you guys right now, if I came to you guys and said, “Hey guys, I figured out a new funnel. This funnel is amazing. I can plug it into any business and it’ll add an extra zero to your bottom line.” How many of you guys want that funnel right now? Boom, everyone’s in. Because you guys are all here in the awareness spectrum, you understand where it’s at.
So for me and for you guys, as a business owner, the first thing you want to do because this is the biggest problem I have. I’ll explain this and people are like, “Cool.” And they start over here. You don’t do that. How many of my Inner Circle members are in here? I tell you guys this all the time. The first thing you do is ignore everything and grab the pile of cash that’s right there. Just grab it, take it and then run with it. That’s the first step.
Don’t be like, I’ll get this in a minute, let me step over it really quick and let me try to figure out how to get these cold people. No, grab the pile of cash first. That’s step number one. So that’s the first thing. Do that until the market runs out and it’s done. And most of your businesses, you can get to multiple millions of dollars a year only grabbing the warm traffic, so focus there. Find Dream 100 partners who, their list, their customers, their platform understand what the product is and then you just have to push them over. It’s easier to sell, it’s more fun. And you get the money fast.
As you start growing and scaling, then you have to move this way on the spectrum. So next are warm people. For example, I could go to, and Anissa Holmes is in my Inner Circle, she’s a dentist, dental guru from Jamaica right, so she’s got a bunch of dentists, and what are dentists? They have a desire to grow their practice. They have no idea what a funnel is at all. So I can go and create a special landing page for Anissa and for the dentists and in here talk to them like, “Hey how many of you dentists want to actually grow your company?” “Oh we want to grow it.” And Anissa can be like, “this is the secret. I don’t tell many people about this, but there’s this really weird thing that this guy named Russell came up with and it’s called a funnel, and I’ve been using it in my practice and it’s been amazing. We’ve grown this huge thing.”
And then all the dentists are like desiring this funnel. Then they come in, I can explain it to them, and we can move them towards me and they’ll buy funnels like crazy.
The third phase of this now is cold, and the lipmans test to figure out if your offer will sell to cold traffic is, picture….how many of you guys went to Mall of America like next door here? That thing is huge, right? So imagine this, you go there during lunchtime, you go to the food court, and there’s 8 thousand people running around, you get a chair, you step on top of htat chair in the middle of the food court, you stand up and said, “Hey everybody..’ and they all stop and look at you and you’re like, ‘This is the deal, I got this really cool funnel you can plug into any of your businesses and it will give you an extra zero at the end of it. How many of you guys want it?”
Everyone at the food court is like, “What is he talking about? Is he selling funnel cakes? Did he say funnel cakes? I think he did, that sounds awesome.” They’re not going to make any sense. So if I speak my language patterns to the cold markets like that, it’s going to completely crash and burn. But if I stand on the chair and I say, “How many of you guys want a free money making website?” Everyone’s like “Ahh!” and they’re freaking out right. I can get them to come over here and be like, “Cool, here’s your free money making website, it’s called a funnel.” And they’re like, “What? What’s a funnel?” And then all the sudden I can start moving them up this thing and warm them up, move them from cold to warm to hot.
Two of our biggest affiliates right now, all they do is they target cold traffic. And they’re doing this, they’re on the thing screaming at the top of their lungs, “I’ll give you free money making websites. Free money making websites.” And the cold world is standing up and going crazy because of it.
So that’s what’s happening to that side of it. But do you notice as I go further and further back, my messaging has to change. The landing page changes the funnel changes, everything’s changing as I’m going this direction. So initially you’re just going to go right here.
Then the other side of this, after someone’s come in and they bought funnels, then we start thinking, what are all the other things someone’s going to buy? So if they bought funnels, they may buy traffic, they may graphic design, they may buy all the different things that they need, after they got a funnel. So start looking at that side. Let me make sure I got my doodle right here. In fact, I will pop it up right here. Here’s the finished one.
So the other side I’m looking at, these are potential dream 100 partners and things like that. This right here, as someone’s come through this world and if they’re not already using my software, my platform, my product, my service, then I’m going to do an opportunity switch, trying to get these people to come backwards and come to me.
So if you’ve read the Expert Secrets book, we talked about there are three core markets, Steven Larsen calls them the three core desires, which I think is really cool. There’s health, there’s wealth, and there’s relationships right. And you look from there, every one of your products and services fall into one of these three. And if you break down one more thing, then there’s a submarket typically. And then from there there’s all these different niches that are coming off here right.
So what’s typically happening on this side of the value ladder, is somebody, boom, they’re in my world, they’re making money online, they’re using funnels, maybe they’re using some crappy funnel software, like every other product out there on planet earth. So I’m looking at that, and they’re in my submarket and they’re using, I don’t even know the names of them, let’s say it’s 10 minute funnels, or something like that, they’re using another product.
So my job then is to have to opportunity switch those people back into my thing. Or maybe they’re in our world, but their selling stuff on Amazon. So they understand what funnels are, but they’re selling stuff on Amazon. So maybe they’re right here, so if I do a dream 100 with somebody who this is their customer base, at this point in the timeline they’re making good money on Amazon, the way I present it is going to be different.
“hey Amazon is awesome, but I’m going to show you an opportunity switch. Instead of doing this one right here, let’s switch you to this other opportunity right here.” So my joint ventures, my dream 100’s, all those things are coming from switching them back into my opportunity as opposed to just trying to pitch them on my solution.
So this is, I want to kind of help you guys think about this, this is your customer’s journey. I haven’t heard too many people talk about this and very few people think about this. But for you guys, I would be spending time doing this. Sitting down like, “Here’s my customer, what am I selling? What are they buying before they come to me? What are the things they’re buying after me? What are those kind of things?” It gives you a good landscape of where you fit in the ecosystem for this person, for their life.
The better you understand your customer, the easier this whole game becomes. For me whenever I’m thinking about my dream customer, that person in the middle, if you’ve heard my story before-When I was 12 years old I started ordering junk mail like crazy. I was obsessed with it. I would get all the work at home junk mail that would come in. Every single day I’d get a stack of 20-30 letters and I would come home from school, I was in 7th grade, and my parents would hand me my stack of junk mail. I would take it in and start reading it.
So for me, whenever I’m trying to figure out what my dream customers would want, I picture little 12 year old Russell, my parents called me Rusty back then, so I’m picturing Rusty sitting on his bed, reading this junk mail, and I’d rip it open and read the headline, and then throw it away, then open the next one and be like, “Oh, whoa, oh my gosh.” And if it got me to the point where I have to have this, I’d go and beg my parents to borrow their credit card, that’s how I knew it was a good offer.
So for me, I’m thinking about myself, 12 year old Russell sitting in the bed, would this thing I’m offering them, would this get them to want to go beg their parents for their credit card? That’s my test.
How many of you guys have bought something from me in the past? It’s because it passed that test. I sat there, “Would 12 year old Russell buy this?” and if I’m like nah, we don’t sell it. But if I’m like, yeah, I would totally go beg my parents for the credit card. That’s the test, that’s how we get them in.
So become obsessed with your dream customer. The more you understand them, the more you understand where they’re coming from, where they’re going, what their goals are, what they’re trying to get away from, where they’re trying to go to. The better you understand this about your customer, the better you’re going to be able to serve them, be able to sell stuff to them, also you’re going to be able to better understand where in the dream 100 they fit.
If I’m looking at this and I say, “Okay, who’s my dream 100? Alright I’m going to start here, this is the big pile of cash, who are the closest partners I have, where our customers are easily going to figure it out?” So usually my first dream 100 goes from here. What’s the stuff they have right before they need me? Stuff right after they need me? Those are going to be the easiest ones to sell.
Then after I saturate that, then I go to the next level. What are the next two or three levels here, things that are coming before me? So I’m moving more to warm. And what’s the next things here, this direction? I start moving out, I tweak my dream 100 campaigns to focus on that. And it keeps going out from there.
Most of you guys luckily, in most of your businesses, you can make a couple million dollars a year just doing these two here. But if you want to get to ten million dollars, you’ve got to come out to about here. And right now, we’ll pass a hundred million dollars this year, and right now we are a continual focus of going further and further and further out. Because eventually you run out of customers, you’ve saturated everything. How many of you guys see 40-50 ads of me a day, every single day?
I can’t show you that many more ads you guys, I’m trying but it runs out. So eventually you have to keep going further and further out. I just want to kind of paint that picture so you understand long term if you want to keep scaling, that’s what it’s about. It’s getting better at language patterns. This way, this way, getting better at teaching to the warm and to the cold. But don’t skip that, get the big pile of money first before you shift to the next one and move out from there. Make sense? Sweet.
Okay, now that you’ve got this vision of who is my dream customer, then the next question we ask ourselves is who has my dream customer? And this is where in my mind the Dream 100 picks up. Who has my dream customer?
So the first phase, and Dana talked about this yesterday, the first phase in this is I need to first off, build a list. How many of you have built out a list of your dream 100? How many of you guys haven’t yet? What are you doing here? This is your first thing, on the plane ride home you should be doing this.
You need to actually build your list, which means sit down with a piece of paper and write out your list. Some of you guys have like, “how do I find my list? How do I know who my dream 100 partners are?” I get that all the time. “I just don’t know how to find it or figure it out. How do I find these people?” And if you have to answer that question it means you’re not obsessed enough about this guy right here, or girl.
When you become obsessed with your dream customer, you put yourself in their spot. For me, when I’m thinking about things I’m like, “okay, if I were my dream customer and I went to Google, what would I be searching for and how would I say it?” I’d be searching for this phrase and this phrase and start searching. And as I start searching, guess what starts popping up? All these options start popping up on both sides of it.
So I go to the pages, I subscribe to the email lists. I go to the podcasts, I subscribe. I’m becoming insane. I need to get a really good vision of the ecosystem that already exists. Every one of your markets, there’s already an ecosystem that exists. Don’t think you’re coming in and inventing something new. There is an existing ecosystem.
If you read my forward to the Dream 100 book, do you have the Dream 100 book here? Does anyone have the book? This is key. Some of you guys thought I was saying, oh yeah, Russell uses this for traffic. But it’s more than that. Listen to what I said in the forward here.
“As the CEO and cofounder of the fastest growing blah, blah, blah……..It’s difficult to narrow down one thing that’s really propelled us to where we are more than anything else, but it’s not. It’s the Dream 100. The Dream 100 is the foundation for our entire company. At Clickfunnels we don’t just leverage Dream 100 approach for traffic, we use it for everything.”
Did you guys catch that when you read the forward? We use it for everything. “How do we pick what markets we want to go into? The dream 100. We use Dream 100 to research different markets, niches and narrow down to the one that suites us best. How do we decide our blue ocean strategy? We use dream 100 to find the red oceans and carve out our place in the market. How do we create our offers and figure what we’re going to sell? We use dream 100 to model offers that are working in our marketplace, which takes the headaches and the hassle out of blind guessing.
“Everything we’ve done has come back to mastering the dream 100 and specifically knowing how to compliment as opposed to compete. That is how you build your foundation. From there you just get traffic by again tapping into dream 100 and the rest is history.”
I want you guys to understand, when we’re doing this and I’m deciding what market to go into, or how do I destroy this market? Or how do I conquer the whole thing? My first goal is, I have to understand the ecosystem. I had a guy that came to one of our coaching programs and he’s like, “I’m going to be a real estate guru.” And he’s all excited and he starts telling me. I’m like, “Cool, who are all the people in your dream 100?” and he’s like, “I don’t know.” I’m like, “How about Robert Kiyosaki?” and he’s like, “Who’s that?” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? You don’t know… How about this guy, this guy?” And I named off like 30 different real estate gurus and he hadn’t heard of any of them.
I’m like, “Dude, you’re going to get screwed. You’re going to get destroyed.” And he’s all excited, “I’m going to teach people how to flip houses, have you heard of this before?” I’m like, “Dude, that’s what everybody…what? How in the world…How do I know more about your market than you?” I envision, this is this huge ecosystem that I’m stepping into and I need to come in there and be like, that guy’s teaching that, they’re teaching this, they’re…..and I understand, here’s everything that’s happening, so I have a really clear picture and I’m like, where….How am I different? Where do I carve out my space in this ecosystem? How do I create my very own category that I can control, that I can own?
There’s a really good book that I have my entire team reading right now, it’s called Playing Bigger. Only like two people I’ve recommended it to. It’s called Playing Bigger and the whole concept of the book is about creating your own category, which is very similar to what we talk about with new opportunity and things like that.
But if you look at any market, there’s always one category king in every single market, which sucks up like 90% of the business and everybody else fights over the last 10%. Look at us in the sales funnel world, we’ve sucked up 90% of all the business, we’ve got all these little “me too’s” trying to compete for the last 10%. But we own the market; we are the category king.
Look at Apple, they are the category king of multiple things. They’re the category king of phones, they’re the category king of music, they’re the category king of all these things. They suck up 90% of the business and everyone else fights over the scraps.
For you, if you read that book it teaches you about category design. How you design your category so you can be the person. So I walk in the ecosystem, I want to look around and be like, which category hasn’t been taken yet? If I come in and be like, “Oh cool, they’re flipping houses, I’m going to do that too.” Then you’re just another me too and the best case scenario if there’s already a category king, you’re fighting over the scraps with everybody else.
So I’m walking into this ecosystem trying to find all the different players, all the people, everything my dream customer is seeing right now every single day in their news feeds. I want to get a very good perspective and I want to figure out, how am I going to create my business? Because the whole foundation comes from that.
So if you don’t know yet, it’s time to start doing the research, start becoming intimate with your market. Because if you don’t know what all the different messages are bombarding who you’re trying to serve right now, it’s going to be really difficult for you to try to compete in that world.
But for me I’m in there, and I know what everybody’s talking about all the time. That’s the key. So the first thing is understanding that ecosystem, and then the second step that Dana talked about is starting to dig your well before you’re thirsty. You gotta go in there and start figuring it out, start building a relationship. Start sending packages, start sending gifts, go to events, meet people in your market, getting to know them, calling them on the phone, buying all their products, subscribing to their podcast and listening to them.
I listen to conservatively, on the low end, an hour a day, some days three or four hours a day of podcasts. People are like, “Russell, what are you trying to learn in their podcast? Are you trying to pick up the next marketing thing?” I’m like, “No.” I know all the people in my ecosystem, I’m listening to what all of them are saying so I can have my finger on the pulse, so I know what’s happening. I know who’s talking about what, what’s happening, where they’re going, what their ideas are. So I can make sure I can create and continue to dominate my category.
And then I’m sitting there thinking, okay well, JLD is talking about this, and over at Mixergy Andrew Warner is talking about this, and I look at all these different people. I’m like cool, now that I know where I fit in the ecosystem, I see what everyone is doing. Now it’s easy to be like, “Oh me and JLD could do cool things, because he’s on Entrepreneur on Fire, what if I helped him do a funnel thing with his people, now it’s this really good compliment between us.” Okay, I’m not competing with him, but I can compliment what we’re doing.
Any wrestlers in the room? A couple of wrestlers. So in wrestling, just so you guys, if you’ve never wrestled before. In wrestling, when we come, for those that don’t see it, don’t know wrestling, it’s probably weird watching it. But I come out and I shake someone’s hand initially and we start the match and we’re head to head. We’re competing against each other. Now, the person who wins the wrestling match is not the person who goes head to head the best. Wrestling is all about angles.
When we’re out there doing hand fighting and doing all sorts of stuff, the goal of what I’m trying to do is get someone to step so I can get an angle on them, and then I can attack them. So I get them to step, it opens up a little hole and then boom, I shoot and I take them down. I’m finding my angle.
It’s the same thing in this dream 100 stuff. I’m not going head to head with people. I’m looking at everything, building my own category and saying cool, this category, this thing I control, I own, I can partner with everybody on this now. Everybody fits in somehow because I designed it the right way initially. Now all these people in the ecosystem become partners, and we can complement each other as opposed to going head to head and competing. So you’re figuring out this thing.
Again, it’s coming back to figuring it out, consuming everybody’s stuff, reading the blog posts, listening to the things, getting their emails and watching what’s happening, becoming intimate with your market, and at that point when you start approaching people you can figure out exactly how what you do fits in with what they’re doing.
We may or may not be working on a really cool software product based around this whole concept. And what’s really cool in this thing, is you literally, you plug in your whole dream 100 and it has a facebook newsfeed of what all your dream 100 is doing. So in the future when this is live you’ll be able to login and you’ll see everything. So here’s someone posted a podcast or a blog post, and you’ll see a whole newsfeed of everyone in your dream 100, everything they’re doing at all given times, so you’ll always have your finger on the pulse in your market.
I can’t tell you how important that is, understanding those things. Alright so dig your well before you’re thirsty, that’s the first step. And like Dana said, that’s when you start building a relationship, serving people. How can you actually help these people? Not with the intention of them doing something, but ahead of time, doing something really nice for them.
When I first met Tony Robbins the first time, how many of you guys thought when I saw Tony Robbins, I started licking my chops like, “Oh my gosh, if he promotes me it’s going to be the greatest thing in the world.” Everyone does. And guess what happens, everyone that comes into Tony’s world, they meet him for like 5 seconds and they pitch him on the first thing that comes out of their mind. What happens to all those people? They disappear, they come off the thing.
So what I did instead. I met Tony and I was like, “Ahhh, this guy is amazing.” And I freaked out a little bit. And then I was like, “How can I help get Tony’s message out? I know that’s what’s most important to him.” And for the next decade of my life, ten years, ten years of my life I went back and tried to figure out how to serve Tony. I spoke at his events for free, I’d cover my own flights, my hotels. I did, uh, I helped with new products, I did multiple consultations on the phone with his team members who were stuck at this and that. Trying to help them, coach them, for an entire decade. I helped and I served and I never asked for anything once ever. I just did it.
And then guess what happened ten years later? Then I hired him to have him come on our stage, I wrote him a huge check twice to come on our stages, a bunch of stuff like that. And then when my book came out, I was like, “Hey Tony, I wrote another book, I’m so excited.” I was like, “Is there any way you could do an interview with me on your Facebook page?” He was like, “Yes.” “Really?” Did the interview and we got 3.2 million people to watch the interview and sold thousands and thousands of books.
But I didn’t just come up to Tony day one right. I was building the relationship. And so many good things came from that relationship. Tony introduced me to like 10 other people who introduced me to like 10 other people. If you come with a serving attitude, just like Dana said yesterday, if you come with that serving attitude it will make you one of the cool people in the market place to get passed around to everybody.
If you come in and you’re pitching people from day number one, nobody passes you around. “Oh that person just pitched me. That guy’s annoying. That person, beware of them all the time.”
If you come in and just serve and give and do all that kind of stuff, then I’m like, “Ah man, you should meet so and so and so and so.” And I start plugging you into my network and instantly you infiltrate the entire dream 100? And again, if you’ve created your business in a spot where you’re your own category king, now it’s just like, what’s the logical connection so we can all work together in this thing, and boom, everything blows up really, really fast.
So dig your well before you’re thirsty. Now I’ve been doing this whole process, right. I’ve been mapping out my dream 100, is this a laser? Yeah. Alright, here’s the laser, that you can barely see. So I list out my dream 100 and I write out all the different names of the people. Now that I have the names of the people and I’m plugging into their stuff, I’m listening to them, figuring out what they’re doing, now my goal is to figure out, of all these people who are the people that I can buy my way in? And who are the people I can work my way in?
So there’s two different things, how do I buy my way? And how do I work my way in? Let me see if my next image is the one that explains this, it might be. Yeah. Okay, so I come over here and let’s say, my dream 100 on there has got a whole bunch of amazing people, let’s say there’s Tony Robbins, there is John Lee Dumas, there’s Andrew Warner, there’s Richard Branson. All my different people here.
So I go through and let’s say I’m listening to Andrew Warner’s podcast, he’s the guy who runs Mixergy. So I’m listening to his podcast, I’m like, “Cool, he interviews entrepreneurs, that’s cool. I could potentially work my way in, I could get on his show, get an interview and get him to spread the message, but he also has ads, so I can buy my way in as well, and I could buy ads on his show.” Maybe with someone else I’m like, “they have a show and they don’t interview people, but they do sell ads on it.’ Maybe I see a Facebook live, or I’m looking at their email, I’m looking at all the different communication channels and I’m categorizing and saying, “What are the people that I think I can work my way in to get them to do it for free? And who are the people where I’m probably not going to work my way in but I can buy my way in?”
With Tony Robbins, even though it took me the decade to get Tony Robbins to ever promote me, during the interim guess what I did? I targeted every Tony Robbins fan on Facebook, on YouTube, on Twitter, on Instagram and we’ve been running ads to his entire, I’ve been buying my way into his network, buying ads to his people, for the last 5 or 6 years.
So just because Tony is not going to say to me or to most of us initially, because of the way the network is setup I can still buy ads in front of those things. So I’m always looking, can I buy my way in, or can I work my way in?
And then the goal of both of those things is to get them to become traffic that I own. I know when Dana is talking about Dream 100, his focus point is on working your way in, getting on the shows, doing the jv, having them send emails to your list, doing those kind of things. That stuff is amazing, that stuff takes more effort, more time, but it’s free. Other stuff costs more money, it’s kind of like, how many of you guys have more time than money? How many of you guys have more money than time? Who has more time than money? Who has more money than time?
“So where do I focus at first, Russell?” If you have more time than money, focus on working your way in. Try to get on the show, do those things, get them the email, build a relationship, you have more time. If you have more money, a lot of times it’s easier just to buy your way in. How many of you guys have a decade to try to court Tony Robbins before you’re going to drive traffic? It’s a lot of work right. But you can go tonight and start running ads to all of his following.
So it comes down to that. So if you don’t have money yet and you’re getting started, focus on working your way in. How do I get…what are the people in my dream 100 that have a platform that I can come into and I can leverage to get people to join my platform, that’d be my focal point.
If it’s like, I’m busy, I have a bunch of things, I just want to focus on the other way. Then just do the traffic control and buy your way in all those things. And ideally you’re going to be doing both.
It’s funny, this is the first time I’ve taught this and I know there’s all these things that like I know I’m teaching, I’m going to talk about this later, but I need it for context for now, so I’m just trying to make sure I don’t screw this up. I’ll keep going from there.
Any questions about this part at all yet. Each step is kind of layering on top of each other. So we’re finding our dream 100, we’re figuring out who we can buy way in, who we can work our way in with a goal again, of transforming everything to our own platform, and building our own platform.
Alright, so that’s how we start creating our dream customers. If we go back to the very beginning we have three types of traffic, figuring out dream customers journey, who has our dream customers, and how do we get these dream customers from these other platforms and move them onto our platform and get them on our list, have them listening to our podcast, have them….whatever platform it is that you’re trying to build, we’re trying to use the dream 100 to get their customers into it.
Just like Dana did right here with the goat feed yesterday. The empty one and it’s all about dumping a little bit in from every single person, so it builds your platform and the bigger your platform gets, the bigger platform you can leverage and it keeps growing like that.
Alright the next phase here. Now I want to start shifting so you guys can understand distribution. So distribution is this game, this is how it works. Last night in the hotel room I was watching Shark Tank. How many of you guys still watch Shark Tank? Cool. It’s interesting if you watch Shark tank, if you look at how they all do their deals, someone brings a deal to them, all the sharks, if you notice this, in their heads, they don’t say it out loud, but as you listen to their questions and which deals they pick and they don’t pick this is all they’re focusing on.
Each of the sharks has a distribution channel that they understand. Laurie’s really good at QVC, Damon is really good at retail, Cuban is good at pretty much everyone thinks he’s cool and he just plugs into whatever he wants. But everyone’s got a channel that they’re really, really good at, a distribution channel.
So the deal comes in and it’s like a clothing line and all the other sharks are like, “I’m out, I’m out, I’m out.” And Damon’s like, “I’m in.” because he knows the distribution channel, and he grabs the distribution channel, he plugs it in, and boom, the retail takes off.
Laurie, she’s like, amazing deals come by and she’s like, “This won’t work for QVC, it’s out.” Comes in and she’s like, ahh, have a distribution channel where she takes the deal, plugs it in, and boom it explodes overnight.
So distribution is the key. That’s why you’re trying to build your own platform, your own platform is your own distribution channel. It’s the most valuable thing. Steven Larsen said it yesterday, the most valuable thing in your business is your customer list, it’s your distribution channel. When all is said and done it’s the only thing that matters.
If you look at all the companies, the big tech companies that get bought and sold, it’s all based on their distribution channel. I remember when I first got started, the first time I ever saw a company get bought for over a billion dollars was when eBay bought Skype. It was like, I don’t know, 3 or 4 billion dollars. I was like, what? I was thinking, did they buy….Skype didn’t even have a business model at the time, they weren’t making any money. EBay was like the biggest company back in the day.
Do you guys remember back EBay was the most amazing thing and like all day long you were just trying to snipe auctions all day? It was the company right. Myron remembers. There was like sniper software where like 25000 people all bid on one thing, and then the software was like, buy at the last second. It was really fun. Then they ruined their business and now it’s all boring.
But EBay bought Skype and I was like, they had the best tech people on planet earth, they could have cloned Skype in about a week. But they didn’t do that. Why did they spend billions of dollars instead? Because Skype had the distribution channel, they had the list.
Why did Zuckerberg want to buy Snapchat? Because Snapchat had the distribution channel at the time. Why did he buy Instagram? They had the distribution channel.
If you look at all the big acquisitions, it’s not about the technology. Technology is easy to clone and to beat, it’s because of the distribution channel. That’s the magic. Every business, if you look at the actual value, what they evaluate things on, it’s the distribution channel, the list. So if you start understanding that, everything we’re doing is like, who has the distribution channels? Those are my dream 100 partners.
Now, I talk about this at Funnel Hacking Live. Some of you guys may remember me talking about this. Gary Vaynurchuk says something in a little clip that was super cool, he said, “If you look at TV in 1965 it’s the same thing that our phones are today.” Do you guys remember me talking about this, who were there?
In 1965 there were only like three channels. There was ABC, CBS, and NBC, and it was funny because when I was talking to Tony Robbins, the first time I met him was over ten years ago now, and it was after his company had kind of collapsed. He was like trying to figure out the next step and that’s when he met all the internet marketing nerds and we kind of helped him with some stuff.
But what’s interesting is I was talking to him about it, he said, “Look, when I got started there were three channels. If you flip to any channel, guess who was on every single commercial? This big, huge giant selling his stuff. It was easy, the distribution channel was three things. We just bought all the ads on every single channel and I became Tony Robbins. Now what happened is distribution got fragmented. Cable came out and all the sudden there’s not three channels, there’s like 300 hundred channels. I can’t buy them on all of them, there’s all these niche channels. I go over on ESPN and it doesn’t convert for some reason, I go over here and it doesn’t convert. And I ran out of money because I couldn’t keep up with this whole distribution thing. It was really, really confusing.”
So that’s why they were struggling at the time. So what Gary said, when he said the phone is like TV 1965, for me it was this huge aha. This is the key. So if you look at this, back when TV first came out, the distribution was it got TV’s into people’s homes. Then there was the channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and on each channel were the different shows.
So that’s what you need to understand, these things kind of match what we’re doing today. So today this is the distribution channel, our phones. I don’t think I would have always believed that, but two years ago in Clickfunnels, I mean, we did see a lot of traffic, and prior to two years ago the majority, 60-70% of all traffic in our network came from desktop, and now it’s flopped. The majority of all traffic coming across all 65000 customers accounts, I mean millions and millions and millions of visitors a day, the majority, 60 or 70% is all coming from phones.
So this is the future, it’s going to continue to grow, it’s not going down. We were in Kenya hanging out with these kids and none of them had computers, but guess what they all have? This. I guarantee you as our kids get older, they’re not going to have computers, this is the thing.
So if you look at this, this is the phone from 1965, there’s a lot of different apps. If you look at the apps, again, it’s the category king right. The apps that take up like 90% of all the bandwidth on the phone are a couple of things. It’s Facebook app, it’s messenger app, it’s Instagram, it’s YouTube, it’s Pinterest for some people. There’s only 5 or 6 apps and that’s it.
So for us, you have to understand, everyone’s got their phones. It’s like the TVs, it’s been done. The apps are there, they already have billions of people on the core apps that are there, so the job that we have right now, just like back here is for us to become Happy Days or the Tonight Show or whatever. We need to be building our own show on these platforms. And that’s the big aha, that’s understanding distribution.
So these things are in people’s hands, the channels are already there, we just have to create our own shows and build the distributions. It’s easier today than it’s ever been because everyone’s got their phone and there’s nothing like, back in the day you had to get NBC to decide your show’s awesome. Today any of us could start a show, you just click a button and boom, your platform is alive. So understanding the distribution is right there.
Hey you guys, thanks so much for listening to day number two, session number two I should say. Hopefully you’re enjoying this so far. Alright, tomorrow I will release the last of the three part series here for my presentation at dream 100 con.
You guys, this is the foundation for all traffic. I hope you are getting excited by it. And hopefully you’re getting pumped for the Traffic Secrets book that will be coming out later next year. I don’t want to say my only goal in this is to cause massive FOMO, but I’m not going to lie, I want to cause massive FOMO through the book, because I’m working my butt off on it. And so I figure if I gotta work this hard, then you need to desire the book as much as possible. So just remember this is scratching the surface of what will be happening inside the Traffic Secrets book. Hope you’re enjoying it and we’ll see you guys tomorrow.
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On today’s very special 3 episode series Russell speaks at Dream 100 Con about traffic and how to build your list. Here are some of the awesome things in this portion:
Find out how Russell got started building his list, and what he learned about spam free emailing. Hear why everyone around him made half a million dollars a month with Adsense while he was still just building his list. And find out how Russell figures out and narrows down who is dream client is with a simple diagram.So listen here to part 1 or 3 of Russell’s super informative presentation at Dream 100 Con.
---Transcript---
Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to a special three part series of the Marketing Secrets podcast. Over the next three episodes I’m going to be sharing with you guys clips from a presentation I did at Dan Derricks Dream 100 con.
I told you guys before that I’ve been working on the Traffic Secrets book and testing my material, so the first time I ever taught parts of this publicly was at Dana’s event. So I wanted to share it with you. It’s not the whole process, just a piece of it, but hopefully it will get the wheels in your head spinning about how Dream 100 works, how you buy your way in, and work your way in and how customer life line would work, and a whole bunch of other amazing things.
I’m doing this as a tease, to get you excited for the Traffic Secrets book that’s coming out next year. So that’s kind of the game plan. Hopefully it gives you guys some ideas. This is part one of three, when we get back from the intro, we will start right into that presentation. So thanks so much you guys, I hope you enjoy behind the scenes from my presentation from Dream 100 Con.
To begin with, I just want to thank Dana. It’s been so fun, I’ve been talking about Dream 100 for the last decade or so, and almost nobody ever listens to me, except for Dana. And then Dana took it and has taken it to such bigger, such a big mass level. It’s so funny, yesterday I was watching as he talked about Chet Holmes, who is kind of the originator of the Dream 100, and Chet was a personal friend of mine who passed away a few years ago, and his daughter has actually taken over his company since. I messaged her yesterday to let her know that you guys are here in this room, talking about a concept that was pioneered by her father, which is really special for her and for Chet and for everything.
I’m just so grateful for everything Dana’s put together, and doing this. Isn’t he just one of the coolest humans you’ve ever met on earth? He’s always giving and always serving.
Alright, to kick today off, I actually wanted to talk about something and get it on film so that when I pass away someday you guys can watch this and then fulfill what I need to be done. Does that sound good?
So I have a friend in our community, his name is Mark Holverson. Does anyone know Mark Holverson? A couple of you guys. Mark Holverson’s an amazing human being in our community, one of my peers and he passed away last weekend of cancer, which was a really tragic thing. But what’s interesting is, right after he found out he had cancer, about five years ago, he was onstage speaking at an event like this, and Vince Reed actually published it on his Facebook page and I had a chance to watch his whole presentation. And it was right after Mark found out he was going to pass away.
And during his presentation he talked about legacy and where he was going and all sorts of stuff. And it just got me really inspired. And I’m not going to pass away, that I know of, so don’t think that that’s what I’m saying here. But I was thinking about, if I was to pass away how do I leave this whole thing? What would I want my legacy, at the end of this?
I’ve heard other people say, “My goal is to get a million people at my funeral, that’s my biggest thing.” I don’t really want. In fact, I don’t any of you guys to be at my funeral. I want my wife and kids and family to do that. But the day my funeral is over I need all of your guy’s help. So everyone’s got to remember this, someone’s going to be here and remember this part of it, and I need you to take this part out. So the day my funeral is over, I want to build out the biggest Dream 100 campaign of all time.
Every single person I’ve ever had a chance to influence or impact I want to invite them to the last ever Funnel Hacking Live. I want to get, Dana, if you’re still alive at this time, I want you to be in charge of this whole thing. But I want Dream 100 voxes going out to all the biggest influencers, all the people, and I want to throw the biggest party ever.
This actually happened a little while ago, there was a guy who was a legend in our industry, his name was Marty Ellison, he owned a company called Board Room. Anyone ever heard of Board Room? And he owned that company and when he passed away, his partner Brian Kurts did something similar. They threw a huge marketing party, it was called the Titans of Marketing Summit. They had all the best speakers come in and speak. And I remember listening to that event, that course and I thought, when I die this is how I want my legacy to end.
So we’re going to do a big, huge Dream 100 campaign, we’re going to get everyone in the world to come to the last Funnel Hacking Live ever, and then I’m going to have all my friends and colleagues come and speak about what we’ve all learned on this journey together. So that’s my game plan, I’ve got it on video now, so that someday you guys will know my wishes. So that’s the game plan, does that sound good?
There’s a little twang that keeps happening, is that from….anyway, I don’t know if it’s from I’m talking too loud.
Okay, one other story and then we’ll get to the good stuff. So this is going to hopefully help you guys understand the importance of what you’re learning here at the Dream 100.
So I had a chance, I actually flew here from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was in Jackson Hole at a secret Illuminati, maybe it was the Bilderberg, I don’t know a secret group of marketers who all got together for like three days and we did a whole bunch of manly stuff, which anyone who knows me, I’m not very good at manly stuff. We were shooting guns, I took last place. We were fly fishing, I caught the least amount of fish. We went hiking, all these things that I don’t normally do, but it was fun because I hung out with all these guys who were all amazing in their own spirit, in their own businesses.
One of the guys who was there is a guy named Tom Bilyeu. How many of you guys know who Tom is? Oh good job, a bunch of you guys do. So Tom, he started a company called Quest. Who has ever had a Quest bar before, Quest nutrition? So he started this company and it blew up to a value of over a billion dollars before he sold his portion of the company and retired. Now he’s doing Impact theory and a bunch of other cool things.
But he built his company up to over a billion dollars, and as I’m asking him, “How did you start this thing up?” And he explained how he started the entire company. And what’s cool, after he told me I talked to Dave about last night, and Dave’s like, “let me see if he said it anywhere else.” And Dave found an interview, an actual quote of this. So I want you guys to hear this. This is a quote from the podcast where he explained how he launched Quest. But what’s interesting is he did the same thing that you guys are all doing here in this room today. So this is what Tom said about launching Quest.
He said, “We had a very different approach that got a lot of people excited, not just about the product, but they felt good about the way we treated them. We went old school (old school dream 100) researching several hundred health and fitness influencers, then sending them hand written letters and free samples. This was all about showing an understanding of what others were trying to achieve, that Quest was interested in helping them connect with their audiences. When people are building community they have real sense of service to that community. We would send them a free product and say, ‘if you like it, tell people about it. And if you hate it, tell them about it too.’
“Not trying to steer people’s comments, gave us a pretty good reputation. Some didn’t like it and said so. But the vast majority loved it and were grateful that we showed an understanding of who they were and what they were trying to do so they spread the word.”
The foundation of his billion dollar supplement company all started here with the dream 100. Is that awesome? Okay so this is the foundation, you guys, for all these things.
Alright, so what Dana’s talking about is true. Okay, so some of the, what I’m going to be talking about for the next couple of hours, so you guys can context. I’m in the middle, well not the middle, the beginning of writing my third book, which is called Traffic Secrets. So there’s Dotcom Secrets, there’s Expert Secrets, and this is the last and final book in the trilogy, and then I’ll never write a secrets book again, because I’m out of them. But the third one is called Traffic Secrets. So I’ve been working on the framework for the whole thing.
And I messaged Dana about two or three months ago, “Just so you know dude, this is so good for you.” Because the entire framework for the Traffic Secrets book is based on the Dream 100. So a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about is the foundation of everything that is going to be inside that book. But I spent all day, the last month or so, working on the outline and getting things done. And then yesterday I was sitting in the back of the room doodling out all the key frameworks for the book. And I got them back this morning at 4:30 in the morning. So I’m really excited they got done in time.
So I’m going to be going through seven different images that are kind of the framework for the book, but it’s also the framework for how we do the Dream 100. There are, well you’ll see. It’s taken it to a whole other level. And hopefully this will give you guys, those who are beginning will give you guys a really good foundation. And those who are advanced, it’s going to give you the next five or six steps in the process. Does that sound like fun?
Alright cool. So I’m going to start off, this is the very first core thing that you have to understand to really understand Dream 100, understand traffic, understand everything. There are three types of traffic, this is the framework for the entire book, the entire concept, if you can understand this everything else becomes really easy.
So there are three types of traffic. The first type of traffic here on the top left hand, is traffic you control. This is traffic where you’re going to buy your way in. So if you think about that, how many of you guys run Facebook ads in here? So you don’t own that traffic, right. Zuckerberg owns all that traffic. He built the platform, he owns the thing, but he gave us the ability to come and to buy some of that traffic. So we can buy some of that traffic and we can control it, we can send it wherever we want to. We send it to buy a product, buy a service, listen to a podcast. We can control that traffic, but we don’t own it.
How many of you guys have ever gotten a Facebook account shut down before? There’s proof you don’t own it right there. We’ve lost hundreds of them, so don’t feel bad. It’s just part of the game.
So traffic control is the first thing. So whenever I got any kind of thing I’m buying, it’s traffic that I control. The second type of traffic is traffic that you earn. This is where you’re working your way in. The first one you’re buying your way in, the second one you’re working your way. So for this it means, you’re getting traffic, you’re not paying for it, but you’re earning it. You’re getting on a podcast interview, you’re doing a Facebook live with somebody, you put out really good content and people share it. You’re earning that traffic.
How many of you guys, the majority of your traffic comes from traffic that you’re earning? And how many of you guys, the majority of your traffic you’re buying? About 50/50 split.
So it’s important to understand, there’s traffic you control and traffic that you earn. The third type of traffic, and this is the best and most important is traffic that you own. My entire goal of our business, if you look at everything we’re doing from a traffic generation standpoint, is to convert traffic I can control, traffic that I earn, into traffic that I actually own. Because if you own the traffic, that’s the secret sauce. When I own it, I can do whatever I want with it.
You can be like zuckerberg and you can rent it to people, you can do a product launch and sell your own products. You can do affiliate stuff, you can do whatever you want. But the goal is to own the traffic, that’s the big thing. You own the traffic, we own the platform, that’s how you win.
How many of you guys have your own platform, your own list, your own following, your own whatever? How many of you guys don’t yet and you’re like, “That’s the thingy I think I need really bad.” Okay, cool. This is the goal, this is the big secret about internet marketing. I remember when I first started learning this game I was struggling because I couldn’t figure it out. There were so many things that were happening. And this is pre all the stuff that you guys do every day. It was pre-facebook, pre-myspace, it was actually pre-friendster. How many of you guys remember Friendster? Melanie was on Friendster, she’s still buying ads on that one. Just kidding.
That was like the original social network and it was like, this is amazing, and then Myspace came out and crushed Friendster, and then Facebook came out and crushed Myspace, and soon the next thing is going to come out and crush Facebook someday, hopefully. Actually, I love Zuckerberg, I hope he keeps doing what he’s doing.
But l was out there trying to figure out this whole game, and there’s so many things and I could not figure out how this whole game was played. And one day I was at the good old Google searching for probably how to get rich on the internet or some key word like that, like a lot of us start with. And some guy wrote an article and in this article he was talking about, he’s like, “how many of you guys have seen those stories online where people say I made $30,000 in an hour, or 100,000 in a day? You probably thought those things were lies, right?”
I was like, “yeah, I’m sure they’re inflating their numbers.” He’s like, “No, actually those things are true.” And I was like, “Wait, what?” And he started explaining, he said, “This is the way it works. Imagine this, what these marketing people do is they build up a list of a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people and then they send an email to that list, and they just get a percentage, like 2 or 3% of that email to buy, and then do the math. They have 100,000 people, 2% buy a $50 product, how much is that?” It’s whatever the math is, $15,000, and if they send an email out every day, they literally can be doing what they’re talking about.
And me, as a 20 year kid, sitting in my college dorm room reading this article, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the secret. I just need my own platform. If I had my own list of people, that’s the magic.” Now I, unfortunately, went about it the wrong way. So I had that idea and I was like, “This is the key, I’m going to do it. It’s going to be amazing.” So the first thing I did, of course, I went to Google and I typed in, because I wanted my own email, so I typed in “buy an email list” and then I was reading about spam, I want to spam for email address.
So I went to a website and I think it was, spam-free email addresses dot com. I was like, this is awesome. And they were selling DVD’s of email addresses. And you could buy like a hundred thousand, a million, 5 million. I was like, “Oh my gosh. I’m going to buy 5 million, I’m going to start with the biggest platform known to man.”
So I bought, I think it was $67 or $69 for a DVD with like 5 million email addresses. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” And I ordered this thing, it’s coming to me, I’m like telling my wife the math. I’m like, “Collette, okay so 5million people, let’s just say we get 1% to buy the thing we sell, 1% of 5 million,” I’m doing the math, “That’s like 100 grand every time I click send.” And then I’m like, “wait, but let’s just say I can serve only 1% of 1%..” I’m doing the math, I’m like, “Even if we screw this up it’s like $30 grand every time I send an email out.”
And I’m so excited because at the time my wife’s working, making $9.50 an hour, while I’m at school wrestling and trying to not fail. So this thing comes and I get this disc, and I remember I plugged it in and there was this software that would send the emails out for you, and I put it in and I remember queuing it up and I saw the little software of all these like 5 million emails out there. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.”
Now, I didn’t have a product at the time, so I was like making up a product. I’m like, “What would people like to buy.” So I made up an idea for a product, I wrote an email that was probably, I don’t know, 60 words, with a link to my paypal account. Like, “Click here to send me $10 for this product.” And then that was it. I was like, “If people buy it, then I’ll go make the thing.”
So I queued up the email, back then it was pre-high speed internet, so I had to crawl under the desk, unplug our phone line, plug in the internet, bleep, bleep, bleep, all that kind of stuff pops up. I’m like alright, click send. I’m like, “Collette, let’s go to bed. By morning we are going to be rich.” I see like, “Email 1 sent, number 2, 3, 4, 5….” And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is it. This is going to be the greatest day of my life.”
So I go to bed, all night long I’m dreaming of how many sells are going to come in the night, what’s going to happen, how amazing it’s going to be. And I wake up in the morning, and Collette’s getting ready for work because she’s still working at the time, and I’m just telling her, “I haven’t looked at the stats yet, but my guess is you can probably quit after today. If a just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction buy, that’s more than you make in an entire month. This is going to be amazing.”
So I’m all excited, telling her the whole story. And then she’s like, “Okay, I gotta use the phone.” I’m like, “You can’t use the phone.” This is pre-cell phones too. “You can’t use the phone, it’s mailing..” I look at the thing, $65,000 emails have been sent. “you can’t.” She’s like, “I have to call, I have to use the phone.” I’m like, “Ugh, you’re going to ruin everything.” So I crawl under the, pause the mailing thing, I crawl under the desk, unplug the modem, plug back in our phone line, and while I’m still under the desk the phone rings. I stood up and hit my head and I’m like, “Oh, dangit.”
So come out under the thing, answer the phone, and on the other end is my internet service provider cursing me out on the phone. “What are you doing? Why are you sending these?” I’m like, “No, no, no, sir, I didn’t send spam.” He’s like, “No, you sent out tons of spam.” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand, I bought this DVD, it was called spam free email addresses dot com. You can go check out the site, they’re completely spam free.” I explained the whole thing to him.
I still remember he told me, he’s like, “Son, that is the definition of spam.” And I was like, “what? Their spam free.” And he’s like, “How do you think that, that’s not a thing. You can’t buy spam free email addresses.” And I’m like, “But the domain name….” and we were going back and forth. And he’s telling me he was going to sue me and a bunch of stuff, but the last thing was, “I’m shutting down your internet.” And then it was gone.
I hung up the phone and then Collette’s like, “Who was that on the phone?” I’m like, “Oh just some guy who had some questions about the thing. You shouldn’t quit yet though. Let’s just go to work, enjoy it, we’ll recap in the morning or tonight when you get back.” So she leaves out the door to go to work and I’m sitting there, and I can’t even check to see what happened because our internet is now gone. I have no access to even get back on.
So I’m all depressed, I get ready for school, I go to the school and I get to school and I get to the computer lab, and I’m like, “I’m going to check to see what happened.” And I log in, still in kind of a depressed state, and I open my email, and then my email though, I see order notification from paypal, order notification paypall. Boom, boom, boom, boom, probably 20-25 orders had come through for like $10 apiece through paypal. I was like, “Oh my gosh, it worked. I gotta go create a product.”
So I had to go back and figure out what I sold and make something to send out to these people. And I realized at the time, what I did was wrong, I didn’t understand the ethics or how to do it, I did it wrong. But what happened was right. The goal was to get a platform, an email list, to get something. And that was the whole secret to the game.
So after that was done, I went and found a new internet service provider and I spent the next year of my life trying to figure out how I build a list the right way, where it’s not going to end me up in jail. There’s got to be a way to do it.
What I learned is basically this process. I can buy ads, I gotta send them somewhere to join my list, or I can go work my, do things, and get people to come to my website and give me the email, but that was the goal. So I started focusing from that point forward on building my email list. That was my core focus, building a list, building a list, building a list. And I started growing it.
It’s been interesting, that concept of list building became my whole life. I started looking, over the last 15 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve see a lot of people who have built huge companies, are no longer in our industry. Now back at their day jobs trying to survive. And I’ve seen things over and over and over again.
How many of you guys remember back in the day when Adsense first started and it was like Christmas every day? A couple of you guys. So let me paint this picture. So this is in the middle of me trying to build my list, my first mentor, his name is Mark Joyner. He’s like, “Focus on a list, focus on a list.” I’m like, focusing on a list. And all the sudden this shiny object pops out of nowhere called adsense, and what adsense was back in the day, you could buy this software for $97, there was a couple of them, Traffic Equalizer, there were probably a dozen or so that ended up coming out.
You load up software on the computer, you click a button, it would go out there and it would pick a keyword, so let’s say whatever, it would find a keyword that people were paying a lot of money on, go to the internet, scrape all the sites that have written about that, pull them in, and then you publish a site and have like 8,000 pages in like a minute.
And then it would put ads in all the site, and because of the way it structured the pages, Google would instantly index it and you started making money. It was like the easiest, most stupid way to make money. We had teams of people in the Philippians, like 30-40 people, that all day sat there and build another site, build another site, build another site. Just cranking out sites like crazy. Not me, a lot of my friends, they built these assembly lines of people doing that.
I had friends making a half a million bucks a month or more just cranking out crappy little sites. And it was amazing for about a year, year and a half. And so I’m watching all these people make so much money, and I’m over here building a list, building a list, and stressing out because I’m seeing all these people make all this money. I’m like, “I’m just going to do that, that’s easy. It takes no effort at all.” And my mentor, Mark, was luckily like, “No dude, focus on building a list, this will go away.” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. This is the greatest thing in the world. It’s going to change….$500,000 a month..” How many of you guys would that radically shift your life right now?
Yeah, I was just like, “And they’re doing nothing, providing zero value to the world. They’re just clicking a button over and over and over again. I could get a million button clickers. I’m going to be the first adsense billionaire.” And he’s like, “No, build a list, build a list.” And I’m like torn. And luckily for me, I’m really coachable. So I’m like, “Fine, I’ll build the stupid list.” So I’m doing this, and sure enough about a year later, boom, the algorithm changed, Google found all the software that was building the sites, deindexed every single page, and I had friends go from half a million dollars a month to zero over night. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” But guess what I had? I had been building my list and it didn’t affect me.
Now anyone who knows my story, who here thinks that I’ve always done everything right in my business? Only Dave. I haven’t. So what happened is I built my company up really, really big, and then I bankrupted it almost. Luckily both times I didn’t. The second time I built it even bigger and then I almost bankrupted, I’ve told those stories before, at Funnel Hacking Live.
But what’s interesting, the thing that got me through the ups and the downs every single time was this platform I’d built, this list. I got to the point where everything is collapsing around me, I could still send emails to my list and people would buy because we have a relationship, and it kept us through the down times. So when you do this and build a platform, it’s the key.
I still see today, it’s unfortunate, I still see today people in our industry who get the next object where they’re like, “Oh, I can do this thing.” And they start buying Facebook ads to sell this, and doing this, and doing things like that, but they’re not focusing on the fundamentals. The fundamentals are what will protect you over the long haul. The reason why I’m still in business 15 years later, and a lot of the people I know that have made a crap ton of money along the way aren’t, is because this has been my focal point, building the platform, building the platform.
So why do you need a platform? The platform is the key for so many reasons. How many of you guys watch the Apprentice, back when it was still on? How many of you saw the season where Arsenio Hall was on the show? How many of you guys have no idea who Arsenio hall is? Okay, for the younger generation, Arsenio Hall was a dude that had his own late night show. He’d come out and get everyone excited and be like, “woo, woo, woo.” And get everyone pumped up, and he was the man on late night for, I don’t know, a decade or so.
So then his show got cut, and then he’s like normal Arsenio Hall, no one heard from him, and then 20 years later he pops up on Celebrity Apprentice because at one time he was a celebrity apparently. It was fascinating, they’re on celebrity apprentice, competing with all these other celebrities. And there was this one task that was like a fund raising task, where they had to go and raise money.
So they’re all going through and trying to raise money for their charities and Arsenio is back there, he’s got his rolodex of people and he’s calling the first person, the second person, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and what’s interesting, while all the other celebrities were doing deals, Arsenio couldn’t get anyone to return his call, couldn’t get anyone to pick up the call or anything. And it shows him that night, sitting on the couch and he’s all depressed and frustrated and upset, and they’re talking about it. And they’re like, “dude, you’re Arsenio Hall, how come you can’t get any money?” He’s like, “I don’t know man. When I had my own show, everybody returned my call and now nobody will.”
And when I heard that, I was like, “Oh my gosh, what a lesson that is.” Some of you guys are starting the dream 100 right now at the very beginning, you don’t have this platform, and it’s tough. It’s tough initially to get people to return your calls, to say yes, to look at your vox, whatever those things are. At first it’s hard right.
But when you have a platform, everyone returns your call. When I first met Tony Robbins back in the day, my platform was little tiny. I even became friends with Tony, we hung out for 10 years, and Tony never promoted me, we were just kind of, I got to know him, a couple of times we hung out and helped consult him, that was while my platform got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Last year we launched Expert Secrets book, I was like, “Hey Tony, will you help me promote this book?” And Tony’s like, “Russell’s platform is huge. Yes, Russell. I would love to.”
There are few people in our world right now that I couldn’t pick up the phone and be like, “Hey can you help me do this deal?” Because they know my platform is huge. And because of that, they will say yes. So the dream 100 gets better and better and better as you build your platform. At first it’s going to be more difficult, but as you focus on this building your platform, it becomes easier and easier and easier, because the bigger your platform is, the more likely people are to return your call.
So this should be the focus, again, if I come back to this. Everything you focus on is this, traffic you control, buying ads, traffic I earn, earning ads and we’re going to go deeper into this in a minute, but the goal of both of those is to turn it into your own platform.
Now platform can mean a lot of things. When I got started, all a platform was, was your email list. I still think focusing on email is one of the most important things because if an email service provider shuts you down you can move your email list to another. So that’s an asset that can follow you.
But your platform is also different things like, how many of you guys are on Instagram right now? Your Instagram following is a platform. How many of you guys have a podcast right now? Your podcast listeners are a following. How many of you guys have a Facebook following? YouTube subscribers? All those things are platforms. So what I’m going to be talking about, and I’m going to break this down, the platform doesn’t always have to be one thing. In fact, usually there’s a platform on each of these different channels that we’re going to talk about. And you should be building more than one.
But the biggest problem I have with other ones is like, the reason I like email so much is because, again, if you get shut down you can move it. If Facebook shuts you down, you’re done. If YouTube shuts down your channel because you did something aggressive, you can’t do much about it. So always focusing on email is one, but then a secondary and more as we go through is a big piece of it. So that’s the key, building your platform.
Alright, so that’s the first step here. Step number two, so now that you have got this stuff figured out, and I’m going to go deeper into this. All these things will kind of layer upon each other and the end will be this beautiful picture like, oh crap, that’s what it is. This is so much easier than I thought.
Okay, so this is the first part. What I want to do, I want to kind of, before we go deep back into this part right here, I want to go deeper on this right here. So you have your own platform, what most people don’t think through, all they’re thinking about is themselves initially. Like, I’m going to build a platform, have a big email list, a big podcast, a big whatever… That’s our focus, because that’s who we are as entrepreneurs. We like significance, we want a big, huge following.
But what I wish I would have done, from day number one when I first got started in this business is spend more time thinking about the person. Who do I actually want on my list? If you read the Dotcom Secrets book, the very introduction in here I talk about you finding your dream customer. I talked about for me, I had 5 or 6 years in my business and one day I woke up and I was depressed. I was so upset, I wished, I remember sitting there in bed, laying there thinking, “I wish I had a boss so they could fire me, so I could separate myself from my customers.” But unfortunately I had built a company, I had built a platform, but the people who were in my platform were not people who I wanted to serve every single day, and it can be depressing. I promise you, if you build the wrong platform, it can be really, really frustrating when you show up one day and you’re like, “I hate my customers.”
How many of you guys have ever hated your customers before? So many of you. Good, I’m glad I’m the only one. It’s tough. If you don’t think through who is my dream customer ahead of time, you’re going to wake up one day with a customer that you hate. So I want you thinking like, who is my dream customer? Who is that person I’m trying to serve?
So what I want to do, I want to talk about your dream customer’s journey. So who is my dream customer? I want to understand their journey. So the first thing I’m going to do, I’m gonna draw a picture here. So this is your dream customer. How many of you guys know who your dream customer is in your mind? You’re like, “I know exactly who that person is.” If you don’t, I encourage you. People are like, “Uh, I want to serve awesome people.” Spend time actually thinking through this. Who do I actually want to serve? Who is that person? What do they look like? What are their fears? What are they excited about? What is the pain that they are trying to get away from, and what is the pleasure they’re trying to move towards?
If you ever studied NLP you learn a really cool thing about the human mind. All humans are doing one of two things, number one they’re trying to move away from pain, and number two they try to move towards pleasure. And what’s interesting, most people are more dominant on one or the other.
I’m curious, how many of you guys make most of your core decision because you’re trying to move away from pain in your life? You’re trying to lose weight so you’re moving away from pain in that. You want to make money here because you want to get rid of your boss. You’re in pain and you want to move away from pain. How many of you guys make most of your decisions based on moving away from pain?
Now the other side, you make choices like, I’m moving towards pleasure. I want that nice car. I want to have six pack abs for the girls. I want to have all these things like that. How many of you guys make your choices moving towards pleasure? Interesting, it’s like 50/50 in this room.
Typically, what I find in an entrepreneurial room, most entrepreneurs make their choices towards pleasure, not all but most of them do. Whereas in the real world, most humans make their decisions moving away from pain. But regardless, you as someone who is going to be serving this dream customer, you have to know what those things are. What is the pain they’re trying to get out of? You have to think about that and figure it out. What is that pain they’re trying to get out of?
If you don’t know what that is, it’s going to be really hard for you to serve them. The second thing is like, what’s the pleasure they’re trying to move towards? What is it that they actually want? What’s that thing that, the biggest desires they have? You have to know that, you have to know everything about that with your dream customer.
The next thing I want you guys to think about and this is going to come into a lot of the dream 100 stuff here in a minute. If you draw a timeline of your dream customer’s life, this is all the stuff that they’re dealing with before you come to them, and this is all the stuff they’re dealing with after.
So as I start building out my dream 100 list, I look at my customer and I’m like, let’s say for me, I sell funnels. Do you guys know that’s what I sell? Okay, so that’s what I sell, so my dream customer, they need a funnel. But what do they need before they need a funnel? Most people more and more are like, “I need a funnel.” But what do they need before they need a funnel. Before they need a funnel they need, so I’m thinking about what’s the thing they need before they get my funnel? And what do they need before that, and before that, and before that? I’m taking them backwards on this journey.
So if they’re going to get a funnel, before they get a funnel they probably need a business maybe. Somebody here got that they needed a business. Maybe they needed a logo, they need branding, they need…..there’s probably things that happened before they come to me and they’re ready for me.
And then after they’ve got a funnel, what are things they need after they have a funnel? They might need traffic, they might need graphic design, they have other things afterwards. So I look at this customer journey, where’s my customer at? So this is the first phase. How many of you guys have ever thought about this before?
Jay Abraham taught me this initially, he said, “Look, if you’re trying to find joint venture partners, or dream 100, the first thing you got to think about is will your product or your service fit in the timeline of your dream customer? And you gotta figure out what are all the services they need before they come to you? And what are all the services they need after they come to you?”
When we identify that, we know exactly who your partners are, right? So if I go to somebody else who is selling funnel software, which is like right here, which is where most people go. If I’m selling weight loss product, why would they promote my weight loss product if they have one too? They probably won’t because they’re selling the same thing. You’ve got to go on this customer journey prior to that, before they wanted weight loss, what else did they get? What did they need? Maybe they had high blood pressure, oh my gosh, if they have high blood pressure, maybe I could dream 100 all the people who have a list with high blood pressure, because that’s something they need before they lose weight.
So I’m looking at this customer journey, like what are the things that are happening before they come to me? And the things that happen after? Because that’s where you’re going to fit in. Your dream 100 partners are going to be better here and here probably, than the other place away.
Alright guys, thank you for listening to the first of the three parts of my presentation at Dream 100 Con. I hope you enjoyed it. Hopefully it’s getting the wheels in your head spinning about traffic and kind of how traffic works. Tomorrow I will give you guys part two. Thanks so much and we’ll see you guys tomorrow.
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Would you rather be like Conor McGregor or Kyle Snyder?…
On today’s episode Russell talks about using your platform in a positive or negative way. He touches on two recent examples, and how they were different. Listen here to find out the differences:
How a recent televised fighting match went and why Russell thinks the two men involved used their platforms in the wrong way. How Kyle Snider was able to be in a similar situation at the recent Wrestling World Tournament, but used his platform for good. And why it’s important to always use your platform in a positive way, and be a good role model for others.So listen below to find out how Russell plans to always use his platform as a way to inspire others.
---Transcript---
Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I want to share with you guys something really, really cool today.
Alright, welcome back. So I am actually in the process right now of getting packed for the Traffic Secrets event, which is happening tomorrow. So I’m mostly done, I have to pack real quick and then I’m heading in. I’ve probably got 2 or 3 more hours at the office before the plane takes off. I gotta finish a couple more sketches and get my slides put together and then the party begins. So for those who are going to be there, I’m excited to hang out with you and share with you basically 15 years of traffic stuff.
And the cool thing about this presentation, this book, it’s not like, “Let me teach you how to run Facebook ads.” Because I honestly feel like there’s a storm coming and things are shifting. So I’m trying to get us as a community prepared for when Zuckerberg decides he doesn’t like us anymore. Because I guarantee you, it’s going to happen. I’ve seen it too many times over the years.
And what’s been interesting, I’ve watched over 15 years and why have we stuck around? Why have we been relevant versus all the other companies that have gone by the wayside during the ups and the downs and the network changes? And the reason is because of what I’m teaching at the event. How I view traffic, how we study it, how we focus on it, how we apply it, and how we implement it is different.
So it’s not going to be like, “Here’s how to run Facebook ads. Here’s how to do interest targeting. Here’s how to do…” it’s going to be bigger. It’s going to be understanding the psychology and the strategy behind traffic. And I think it’s going to be special. So that’s what I’m pumped about. And for those who aren’t at the event, you have to wait til next September to read the book. I’m so sorry.
I have to have to book done by May 1st, to have to the publisher to be able to launch it in September. So that’s the process. This is me testing my material, teaching it in front of a live studio audience before we go and actually create the whole thing, so it’s going to be fun.
Anywho, as I was packing the morning, some of you guys know, some of my wrestling friends, that the wrestling world tournament has been happening this week, which is the equivalent of the Olympics in an off year. So the Olympics are every four years, so the other three years they have a world tournament, which is pretty much the same thing as the Olympics. It’s a big deal and it’s coming on the backside of, and I want to share this just for contrast, but it’s the backside of the Mayweather, not Mayweather, the Connor Mcgregor fight that just happened. Where he fought against a wrestler, who used to fight bears in Russia, and Mayweather obviously got jacked pretty quickly.
And the only thing I’m going to touch upon, because I actually enjoyed the fight, I enjoyed the antics afterward, with the Russian jumping into the stands and beating up everybody, and then the people in the stands jumping in. Not going to lie, really enjoyed that. I had a fun time watching it over and over and over again.
But it was interesting, you watch both those competitors, when all is said and done, how they use their platform, and this is the moral of this episode that I want to share with you. How do they use their platform? Both of them used their platform, not in a positive way. Prefight, post fight, everything has just been this chaos and I don’t know about you, but it’s dark and it doesn’t feel good.
I mean it’s fun, this is the internal struggle in Russell’s head where I’m like, “I love this drama, I love the fact that he jumped into the audience and started beating everybody up.” So much fun right. But man, what a horrible role model for our kids, for people that we care about. It’s insane.
So that was what happened like a month ago or whenever it was. Now I want to contrast that with something amazing that I saw this morning. So the wrestling world tournament was happening and last year America came into the world tournament and we freaking crushed everyone. We beat Russia, it was amazing. This year, and Russia is always like….it’s Russia and America, that’s the two best wrestling teams. And it came back and Russia actually ended up winning the team title this year, it was close though. It was really close. Some amazing matches.
My man, Jordan Burrows, who’s like my wrestling hero right now, who he won the Olympics in London, he’s won the world titles and he was on track…if he would have won this world I think he would have been tied for the most world championships ever in American history. He lost and took third, which was heartbreaking for me. But man, he used his platform for good.
When he got done he talked about, he just….a positive….he’s an amazing human right. And then a couple other matches, this is just for….some of you guys don’t care about this. But for the wrestlers out there, insane. David Taylor went in there and won his first world title, and a tech followed the guy into finals. Tech means you beat them by so many points they stop the match because you beat them so bad. So he came in with a mission, just thrashed everyone.
Kyle Day came in and went through the tournament and won his first world title and not a single person scored on him. Not a single person scored on him the entire tournament, insane. And then Jayden Cox….anyway, it was amazing. Some really good tournaments.
But what I wanted to talk about, because this is what I want to share with you guys, and this is the point of today’s podcast. Yesterday in the finals, there was a guy named Kyle Snider, and Kyle as an 18 year old won the world tournament, which is insane, unheard of. Then the next year, he wins the Olympics, and then the next year wins the world title. And then last year, wins the world title again, but to win the world title he ends up going against this guy who, the guy is insane. I could tell you stories about this guy, but he wasn’t supposed to win. I think the guy came down in weight class or something because he wanted to beat Snider.
The dude is probably the toughest human being on earth right now. And him and Snider meet in the finals, and young kid Snider, who is like a farm boy, goes and beats this Russian dude, who he should not have beat. I don’t know, it was just insane. And it was crazy. So that was the big thing last year, which was amazing.
So this year, obviously the Russians, they just want to beat Snider. That’s their whole goal in life. So it was kind of like, it reminded me a little bit of like of a Connor McGregor fight with all the build up and the talking and all that kind of stuff. And Snider is not really a trash talker, but man, the Russians were. Talking all this trash, that they were going to beat him.
And then they get to the world title and they’re on either sides of the brackets and they go together and finally they meet in the finals and it was the most anticipated match ever. Everyone in the world who cares about wrestling is watching this match because they want to see Snider versus this Russian dude.
The y go out there and finally yesterday it happened, and they go to start wrestling, and the Russian dude, very, very quickly throws Snider to his back and pins him. The match lasts like, I don’t know, maybe 30 seconds max. Not even that, I don’t think.
And me and America and all the wrestlers watching this, just sick to our stomach. Like, “Oh my gosh, he lost.” So you’re wondering, what’s going to happen? What’s going to transpire? For the last 24 hours I’ve been sick to my stomach for him, just knowing what he’s gone through, what he prepared for, all this stuff. And then this morning I open instagram and the first thing I see is a big picture of Kyle Snider doing a quick interview. I’m going to actually play the interview for you, I’m going to have my brother splice it in here, because I want you to hear what he said. And then after that I’m going to come back and then comment on it.
“Wins or loses don’t define me. I mean, I love wrestling and it’s a big part of my life, but I’m not defined by it. It’s more defined by my faith in Jesus. That’s what…no matter what happens to me on the mat, nothing really changes. Whether I win or whether I lose, there’s not a big change in my life, the way that I view myself, the way that I view other people. So I’m thankful for everything, I’m thankful for the gifts that I have and the opportunity to compete. God’s given me the wins that I’ve had, the great wins that we’ve seen, and God’s also given me loses, and I’ll take both of them. You know? Whatever he wants to give, I’ll learn from it and that’s the deal.”
Alright, was that amazing? He could have said so many things. He could have given excuses why he lost, he could have given an excuse about why he got caught and thrown. He could have given excuses, he could have blamed people, he could have been angry, he could have trash talked, he could have done anything. He has this platform, he’s in front of the entire world right now and has the opportunity to say something. And how does he use his platform?
He uses it praise God, he uses it to talk about what he’s learning. He’s using it as a platform for other people to learn from their loses. So, so, so powerful.
So I’m sharing this with you guys for, the main reason is because all of you have a platform, or you are building a platform. And when you have a platform there becomes a responsibility. How are you going to use that? How are you going to help people? How are you going to, when you have the shot, when you’re on stage and everyone in the world is listening to you and you’ve got this split second, how are you going to use your platform?
I want you to think about that. Look at what happened with Connor McGregor and that other dude, how they used their platform, super negatively. I don’t want my kids to see that. I’m going to watch it because I like the train wreck, but man, they’re not role models. I don’t want to be like them, I don’t want my kids to be like them, I don’t want things like that.
Then you look at Kyle Snider, and man, I want my kids to hear from someone like that. I want them to have him as their role model. He used his platform to get his message out there, to talk about God. Every time I’ve seen him on any interview, any anything, in spots where he could have talked about himself or talked about how great he is, or talking about whatever, he always uses it to talk about God. To glorify someone besides himself, to talk through those type of things. You know what I mean?
So when you watch that, it’s powerful. So I just wanted to put it in your mind, you guys are each going to have an opportunity and a shot where you’re going to have your own platform, the question is how you’re going to use that platform. I hope that you guys have been watching because I consciously think about this.
I realize I have been given a gift from God where I have a platform, I have a voice, I have people who listen to me, I have the ability to persuade and to talk and to share and to motivate and inspire and lead people in directions. And I believe that with great power comes great responsibility. Thank you, Spider Man.
But it’s true, how are you guys using your platform? I want to be someone, that when I die someday, everyone says, “Man, he used his platform for good. He was blessed with this amazing platform to be able to influence people, but he influenced them for good. He inspired people, he helped people to want to be better. He helped people to live to their full potential. He helped people to transform their lives. He helped people through charity and through other things, to help other people and he inspired me to want to do that.”
That’s the legacy I want to live. That’s the platform that I want to create. I just want you guys to be thoughtful of that, to consciously think about that as you’re building your platform. As your platform grows, how are you going to use it? Because I 100% believe that if you have good intentions with your platform and you’re using it in the right way, God, the universe, whatever you want to say, whatever you guys call it for yourselves will bless you and will multiply that.
And just make sure, because it’s a sacred responsibility we’re all given. So make sure you use it. Look at what Kyle Snider did in a time when he could have been negative and he could have complained and he could have had a million excuses. And rightfully so, if I would have been the one in that platform I would be like, “Oh, he caught me. It sucks, but I’m going to take him out next time. He’s going down.” Instead he used it to glorify God. He used it as a learning lesson for himself. And used it as a way to help transform other people’s thoughts and minds. Because so many people, me included, sick to my stomach and ready to go fly to Russian and try to beat this guy if he wasn’t so tough. You know what I mean?
But instead of being like, “Yes, let’s get revenge.” It’s like, “Hey God gives me wins, and God gives me loses, and I’m grateful for both because I learn from both.” That little message, how many people will that inspire? How does that shift your thoughts? How does that shift my thoughts? Oh my gosh. There’s times all the time where I fail. And I’m not typically thinking, “Okay, God gave me this loss. How am I going to learn from it?” But that’s how he looked at it and he used his platform to share that with other people because, now look I’m sharing this. We’re going to get 20, 30, 40 thousand people to download this podcast episode and listen to it. That ripple effect of him in the moment using his platform for good, how many more people will that affect?
So for you, it’s the same thing. How are you using your platform? Use it for positive stuff, don’t use it for negative. If you do that, you will be blessed and you will be able to change and affect more people’s lives.
So there you go guys, that’s all I got. Appreciate you all. I gotta hurry up and get packed because I am already behind the clock. I just had to drop this with you guys and share it because I was excited. Thanks so much for everything, all of you guys. You should quit watching MMA, quit watching basketball, football, golf, nascar, and start watching wrestling. There’s amazing stuff happening. Look at these role models. Finally a sport with amazing role models. I’ll leave it there.
There are good role models in every sport, but the best ones are in wrestling. Alright, appreciate you guys, have an amazing day. And those of you guys who will be at Phoenix for the Traffic Secrets event, I will see you soon. Oh and if you got any value from this episode please take a snapshot of it on your phone, go post it on Facebook, Instagram, and tag me so I can see that you’re listening, and do hashtag Marketing Secrets. And if you’re using those other platforms, Twitter, Pinterest, feel free to do it there too. I don’t know how it works on those ones, but I’m sure it’s the same thing. Appreciate you guys letting people know about this podcast. And we’ll talk soon.
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I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but at the end of this I drop a bomb that’ll change how you run ads forever.
On this episode Russell talks about his experiences with Flip Hacking Live, his startup interview at the Dry Bar Comedy Club and why it’s important to get b-roll footage. Here are some of the awesome things he talks about in this episode:
What kind of mistakes he made at Justin and Tara Williams event, and what he would do differently. Why if Russell could start over, he would be a specialist rather than a generalist. And why it’s so important to have tons of b-roll footage when you are ready to launch your product.So listen here to find out how Russell gets tons of b-roll footage, and why, in some ways, it’s better to be a specialist.
---Transcript---
Hey, hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. It is a late night drive and I’m excited to be hanging out with you.
Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing amazing today or tonight or whenever you’re listening to this. It is 11:00 at night and I am driving back to my house and I just want to recap the last couple of days of my life because they’ve been a little bit nuts-o, but exciting and hopefully there’s some cool lessons that will come for you guys from this.
So number one, last week I had a chance to go speak at Justin Williams Flip Hacking Live, which is very similar to Funnel Hacking Live, he may have funnel hacked me and then just changed it from Funnel to Flip. But I will allow him to do that because he’s awesome. So we did that, and then I had a chance to go speak to a whole bunch of real estate investors, which is a different audience, obviously all entrepreneurs I believe can use Clickfunnels. This is a group of people who had never done funnels at all.
It was interesting because I took my normal presentation and I tweaked it and modified it a lot to be better for them, but I still made some errors in what I did. Anyway, it was an interesting learning experience. We still sold well, but I definitely made some mistakes and learned some cool things that I would go back and….I think the biggest takeaway from that presentation and from speaking at that event that I think would be good for you guys is looking at how you position your teaching. Are you a generalist or are you a specialist?
You know, for me with Clickfunnels and my role in this whole game, I have to be a generalist. I’m teaching marketing and funnels for all types of businesses. There’s a lot of my friends who teach one funnel type; they teach just tripwire funnels, or just high ticket funnels, and they go deep on that and they love it. And I envy them because I’m like, “ah, if I could just do that.” Or they’re just teaching funnels for dentists, or just teaching funnels for chiropractors, like very specific with specialist. I’m jealous of that because first off, I think it’s easier because you can, it’s not theoretical, you can be like, “This is the actual funnel that works amazingly well. This is the one you should do, this is the ad you should run.”
To be a specialist you can charge more because of that. Whereas all my teaching has to be general, or “Here’s this concept, and here’s how you use it here, and here’s how you can use it here and here and here.” And it’s way harder.
In fact, I remember when I was starting my career, I remember listening to Dan Kennedy and somebody asked him one time like if was to start his career over again from scratch, what he would do different. And he was like, “You know, I’m a generalist, I’m teaching magnetic marketing to every type of business. If I was to start over, I would specialize in a certain type of business and focus there.” and I was like, “Whatever that’s dumb. I want to teach everybody because it’s the greatest thing in the world.” I should have headed that advice. I’m glad I didn’t because it’s probably, hopefully serving some of you guys. But man, it’s a lot harder to weave in 10 different markets into every presentation I do, and then each market has like 50 submarkets. Anyway, it’s intense.
But that was my cardinal sin I made at Justin and Tara’s event. I did niche it down to be more specific for them, but not enough. And I didn’t, Justin wanted to do a call with me ahead of time and I was like, “No, I got it dude. I’m good.” And I should have done a call because I would have understood, just kind of a better starting point.
So the lesson for you, if you’re going to sell to anybody, make sure you get on the phone with the promoter, the person who’s event it is, and pick their brain and really, really, really understand the customer and how to serve them. I’ve done that in the past and for some reason I got cocky and arrogant and didn’t do it this time, and I regret. I think I ended up closing between, we did a first session and then a re-pitch, about 20% of the room. I think I should have gotten closer to 30-40% had I have customized that presentation better and made it very, very specific like, “Okay, you guys as real estate investors, this is the exact funnel I would use.” As opposed to how I did it, which was kind of more general, “You could do this or you could do this or you could do this.” And trying to weave together things.
So there’s the rule, if you are a generalist and you’re speaking to a certain market, shift your message to becoming a specialist and you’ll do way better. If you’re picking a market right now, specialize. Okay, that’s number one.
So then when that event was done, then we jumped in a plane and we flew to Salt Lake, and then we drove down to Provo because we were putting on our own little show. And so I’m going to tell you what happened and then I’m going to tell you why we did it, because I think….in fact, it was funny, in our last inner circle meeting I was talking about how we’re doing this big event and I was like, “You know, one of my main roles is I want to get a whole bunch of b-roll of the cool location, cool interview. I want to get sound bites and sound clips and all sorts of stuff, I’m going to look for more b-roll.”
Then Brian Burt, who is a super cool guy at our inner circle, he was like, “Russell you have the most epic b-roll on planet earth, the last thing you need in your world is more b-roll.” Yet we spent 100 grand, I don’t know how much we spent on this event, with the sole purpose of getting more b-roll. So that should be a lesson for all you guys.
What we did is we rented out this place called the Dry Bar Comedy Club in Provo. It’s a bar, but it’s a dry bar so there’s no alcohol. But it looks really, the location is amazing. There’s different sets you can do, there’s the stage and the light, and the ambiance, and it just looks insanely cool. So I saw, in fact the back story, the Harmon Brothers, some of the other Harmon brothers that own a company called Vid Angel, if you don’t know what that is, it’s an app on your Roku that will edit videos for you, so it makes rated R movies PG and stuff and it’s awesome.
But then they got in a big fight with Disney and all these people, and a big legal battle. So during the legal battle instead of editing movies, they started streaming their own content at the Dry Bar Comedy Club, which was comedians who had to do clean comedy, which was awesome. So we were watching all this comedy and what was cool is we started seeing these sets, and I was like, “That’s such a cool location, I want to an event somewhere like that.” So that’s thought number one in my head.
Then I was listening to Andrew Warner, who he wrote the Mixergy podcast and he’s the most fascinating interviewer you will ever meet. If you don’t listen to Mixergy podcast, go listen to it for the sole purpose of listening to how Andrew interviews people. So cool.
And I’m listening to one of his interviews, and he normally does it in his studio, on set. And this one time he was interviewing this one entrepreneur at a camp around a camp fire, and he did this whole interview around a camp fire. And I was like, “Oh, I want to be interviewed around a camp fire, telling the Clickfunnels startup story, that would be so cool.” And I was like, “Wait a minute, what if we did it at the Dry Bar Comedy Club?” and then it became a thing, I messaged Andrew and the next thing we know, six weeks later we’re at the Dry Bar Comedy Club.
Then I’m like, “How do we get people there, we gotta make it fun.” So then I was like, “What if we had JP Sears come and do comedy at it?” So messaged JP and I’m like, “What would it take for you to just make fun of me for 30 minutes before this interview so it kind of loosens up the crowd?” Because it’s like, I don’t know, I thought it would be good because sometimes interviews are tough if someone’s having success because you’re like, “Oh screw that person. They’re having tons of success.” So I was like, “It would be more fun if people make fun of me for a while, then it’s like,” I don’t know, with people, it’s the whole reason why we share our back story, and share the vulnerable moments, because if you’re vulnerable with people and share the times that you struggled, and you’ve had the big losses, then when you have the wins people celebrate with you as opposed to like, being annoyed with you.
So I was like, let’s make fun of me, so that way people will be more likely to have a vested interest in my journey and be interested in this whole Clickfunnels start up story. So luckily JP said yes, so when all was said and done, we had JP come on and make fun of me for like 30 minutes, then he did some of his stand up comedy for the next 15-20 minutes, which was awesome. And then we came up onstage and Andrew interviewed me for 2 hours about the Clickfunnels start up story. It was amazing, and I’m sure someday we’ll release the footage of it.
But we got tons of b-roll and there’s so many sound bites and clips, it was just super, super awesome. So I wanted to kind of share that with you guys because of all the ordeal we went through to be able to get the b-roll.
So think about that, if you guys are creating content, like you sitting and podcasting is good, but getting the b-roll is even more important. And I’m going to caveat, share more of that here in a few minutes because it kind of goes to the next level.
So that was the Dry Bar Comedy club, we had a great time, it was a really special evening, I loved it. And I think it was helpful for people and for me it meant a lot. Andrew did an amazing job, JP did an amazing job, my whole team did an amazing job putting it together, and it was awesome.
So then we flew home, Sunday I got home. And then what’s crazy, tomorrow is Wednesday and I’m flying to Arizona to go and speak for two days on the Traffic Secrets book, which is a book I haven’t written yet. But I had all day Monday and Tuesday to sit down in front of, with my brain and a huge, white pad of paper and start doodling out all the sketches to teach all the core concepts I’ve been thinking about for the last year to put inside Expert Secrets. And Doodling and putting them in the right order, organizing and reorganizing them.
I was up all day Monday doing it. And then I went in at 9:00 at night and I was still stressing out, and still working on it. And then Stephen Larsen messaged me and I was like, “What would it take for you to come into the office?” So he came into the office and we were there and then I was instagraming me and Stephen in there like mapping out things and having so much fun. And then Dave was about to go to bed at night, and he went and checked Insta-stories and saw me and Stephen there so he jumped in his car, jumped out of bed, put his clothes on and drove over to the office and we’re all sitting there brainstorming and up til, being there until 2:00 in the morning, which is lame because I had to lift weights at 5:30. So I had 3 hours of sleep last night, which reminds me of why I’m so tired right now.
I digress, so I’m telling you this because I spent two days, got all the doodles done and tomorrow I’m flying out to go present these at a live event, partially because I’m looking for b-roll footage at the live event to be able to use in the promotional video of the book someday. And then one of the guys who works with us doing video stuff, his name is Blake, he was in town and he saw the insta-stories and he’s like, “Oh, I wish would have known, I would have come last night and filmed all the b-roll of you guys mapping this stuff out.” And I was like, “What if we did it tonight.” And he was like, “Yes.”
So where I’m coming home from right now, we were back at the office and we spent two hours just filming b-roll of everything we did yesterday. Literally, me re-drawing out the drawings I did, me re-laying out the drawings, me walking around doing stuff, Blake taking videos from inside the office, outside the office, walking into the office, as many different spots and different places. And we spent two full hours just capturing b-roll to be able to use in a promotional video that we do in two years from now when we start selling the book.
So why am I sharing this with you guys? Because most of us aren’t looking at this as the art that it is. I can have a video of me saying, “Hey my new book Traffic Secrets came out, you should read it, it’s awesome.” Or I could capture the process of creating this thing and showing what happened behind the scenes and how it worked and what we had to go through and the pain and me up all night doodling and sketching these things out and laying out all over the whole floor, all these huge pads of paper. And then going to an event and onstage teaching it and explaining to people and trying to help them understand it. And then sitting down and actually write it.
And you actually get footage of you creating this thing, documenting yourself, documenting the journey. Then someday when you have the sales video to sell the thing, you have all this magic you can go back and use.
So I want just want to put it out there for you guys to start thinking about. As you’re doing cool stuff, don’t just capture you making the content, capture you capturing the content. Get the b-roll, get somebody to, as you’re writing your book, “Hey, can you get the video camera and like get some shots of me writing this book. Get some shots of me working on my perfect webinar. Get some shots of me at the gym losing weight because I’m going to teach people to lose weight.”
All those things, they matter and they matter a lot. If you notice most of the videos we put out nowadays, it’s like 98% b-roll and there’s a voice over storyline talking about something, but the b-roll is what’s sucking you in the video and hooking you in. Pulling you from step one to step two, step three, step four, pulling you through the whole process.
Anyway, those are the fun things. We spent probably more time, 3 or 4 times more on the b-roll than we do on the video or the initial thing we’re shooting, you know what I mean. So think about that. So that’s all I got.
I know this was kind of a random episode. We talked about Flip Hacking Live, Justin and Tara’s event, the difference between being a specialist and a generalist, and if you are a generalist and you’re speaking to a market, to flip into specialist mode and change your message because you’ll sell more and you’ll serve more, and if you’re choosing between a generalist and a specialist, become a specialist. Don’t become the next Russell Brunson, Funnel Builder. The next Dan Kennedy, marketing guy. Become the funnel builder for whatever market, you know what I mean? Become a specialist.
Then we shifted over into the Dry Bar Comedy Club, JP Sears, Andrew Warner and then all the stuff we did tonight. And the emphasis on capturing the b-roll, capturing the story. We talked about documenting the journey and you’re doing that through podcasts and things like that, but man if you can get your camera out and film different pieces, even just getting your phone out and filming you doing different pieces, that stuff will be valuable someday. I promise you that.
I look back now that my kids are, my twins are turning 13 years old now. We didn’t film, we didn’t capture much stuff of them because we didn’t have cameras back then and it wasn’t as easy. And I look now and I have tons of footage of Norah and Aiden and stuff, but the earlier kids we have hardly any footage, and ugh, sick to my stomach. I’m so grateful now that we’re capturing all this b-roll of everything we’re doing because we can go back into the archives and in 8 months from now when the book launches, and be like, “Here’s all the footage of when Russell was actually writing the book.”
How cool is it to have all that? And how many ways can we use that in the promotional videos and ads and other things, you know. If you’re launching your funnel and the last phase is you creating your sales video and you’re like, “What should we do for ads? Let’s think about an ad.” Then you’re missing the point. You’re missing the magic.
The magic is while you’re creating this thing, you should be documenting every single piece of that, because that becomes your ad, that becomes the b-roll for the sales video, that becomes the storyline for all the things you’re doing.
So I hope that helps. I’m going to go get some sleep because I have not slept enough, which you can probably tell. Some days my podcast is probably all over the place, on the days I haven’t slept, which sounds like it might be today. So I apologize for that. Hopefully you got some value from this, appreciate you guys, thanks for listening. If you did get value, please take a snap shot on your phone right now, go over to Facebook or Instagram, tag me so I can see it and also hashtag Marketing Secrets, which would be really cool. I appreciate that. And with that said, thanks so much and I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow.
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Somedays it makes you question why you’re still staying up late at night and waking up early to serve the audience that you love.
On today’s episode Russell talks about the mystery of why he continues to work so hard, even though the company would continue to thrive if he didn’t. Here are some of the amazing things he goes over on this episode:
What Russell thinks the answer is to a question his wife asked about why he continues to get stressed out and work extra hard, despite the company continuing to be successful. Why Russell hates significance, but still needs it. And what are the two things that Russell sees as his legacy.So listen here to find out why Russell continues to work hard and go the extra mile for a company that would continue to grow and be successful even if he stopped working so hard.
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The secret trick I use to help my kids handle an entire day at school.
On today’s episode Russell talks about listening to music on the way to school to get his kids excited about the day. Here are some of the amazing things in this episode:
Find out why listening to music on the way to school helps get Russell’s kids excited about school, so they won’t be miserable like he was when he was a kid. And why listening to a specific kind of music is the best and fastest way to get into the state you need to be in.So listen here to find out what music Russell listens to with his kids to get their energy levels high enough to make it through an entire school day.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Right now I’m driving in the car with….
Norah: Me.
Russell: What’s your name?
Norah: Norah.
Russell: And we’re going to tell you guys something really, really cool.
Alright, so me and Norah just took the kids to school and dropped them off and it’s really fun. So Norah drives with us most mornings and we take the kids to the junior high. And I don’t know about you but school wasn’t my favorite thing. It was really hard and I didn’t enjoy it very much.
So I’ve got this really special 5 minute drive everyday to take my kids to school, and during the 5 minute drive, I realize they are about to enter to probably the most miserable, depressing place on earth. I shouldn’t say that out loud, but come on now, those of you guys who have been through school (which is all of us) it’s not like Disneyland, it’s not like a Funnel Hacking Live event. It’s not like something exciting where you’re motivated and inspired and ready to change the world.
You go and you’re like waiting for the bell to ring so you can see your friends for two minutes before you go back into class again. So I figure I’ve got to give my kids the best chance to enter into school every single day in the most peak state possible.
So what we do, in case anyone who drives down this road with me is wondering, in fact I had a friend the other day, she said, “Sometimes I pass you guys when you’re driving to school and it looks like you guys are having a disco party.” Which makes me want to get a disco ball in the Jeep. But basically we crank up the music, so today we’re listening to Bohemian Rhapsody and we start head banging, huh Norah.
And Norah is the cutest little head banger. When it gets to the awesome part, she starts head banging and kicking her feet and we’re all going crazy and we’re laughing and we’re singing, and we’re trying to….my goal is to get them in the best state possible so when they step out of the jeep and go into the school they are starting at the peak excitement for the day. And hopefully that will last all the way to wrestling practice at 3:30.
Anyway, the reason I wanted to share that with you guys is because music is powerful. I’m not a big fan of listening to music all the time, I think a lot of people waste their lives just listening to music, when they could be listening to podcasts and learning, and all sorts of stuff. In fact, I read somewhere, I’m going to misquote the facts, but it was like, “the average person who listens to music all day make $50,000, and the average person who listens to podcasts all day is like $150,000 a year.” So you’ll 3x your income just by listening to podcasts as opposed to music.
But there is a time and a place for music, and I think that the best time and place for music, and I feel bad I shouldn’t say that because I do love music and I listen to it a lot, but the time it’s most efficient is before you are about to do something. Music has this magical, powerful effect to change your state. If you listen to a sad song, you can be sad instantly. You listen to a happy song, you can be happy instantly. A pump up song, whatever it is, music has the ability to change your state and shift your state faster than I think, anything else out there. Outside of maybe hardcore drugs, I don’t know. I’ve never done that, so I’m not sure but other than that music is like number two for dramatically shifting your state.
Norah: Daddy?
Russell: Yeah Norah?
Norah: Why did they turn off the waterfall?
Russell: I don’t know. Norah’s wonder why they turned off, there’s a waterfall when you go into our neighborhood and it’s turned off. It’s because it’s too cold now Norah.
Anyway, so with my kids when I’m trying to get them to peak state of excitement and energy and everything before they step through the doors of school, we use music and we use fun, exciting, high energy music. So we find our favorite thing, in fact, whoever is driving in the jeep and they sit in the front seat, gets to be the dj for the day, and they each get to pick the song they want.
And typically, it’s usually like a Greatest Showman’s song, the Other Side is one of their favorites, or it’s Bohemian Rhapsody, or it’s Black Eyed Peas, something that gets them into high state, high excitement, high energy. And then we head bang and we sing, and we have so much fun, so the second they get out their energy level is super high.
Norah: Daddy….
Russell: Say hi guys. Want to say hi to everybody?
Norah: I like puppet shows.
Russell: Norah likes watching puppet shows. Her favorite thing to do is to go to YouTube and watch puppet shows, huh?
Anyway, I use it at the same time, when I’m driving to the office.
Norah: and I sleep in mommy’s bed.
Russell: and she sleeps in mommy’s bed. You should sleep in Norah’s bed. No?
Anyway, I use music also when I know I’m tired or like worn out. I don’t want to do this thing, like lifting weights this morning. I didn’t want to do it, so I come in and turn on the right music to get you in the right state to be able to handle it.
Days I’m going to the office and I’m like, “I don’t want to be here, I’m tired.” I use music to shift my state. Days when I know I need an extra boost of energy or excitement or motivation or whatever, I use music to shift my state and get me into that thing, so I can get out of myself what I need.
So that’s how you use music strategically. So for you guys, I just want you thinking about that, when you’re about to enter something……oh can you hear Norah singing?
Norah: (singing in background)
Russell: Oh, that makes me happy. You think about it in church, a lot of times too. The same thing, you use music to shift you into state, to be able to feel the spirit. You shift music to be able to dominate the day.
Anyway, so my message for you guys today is make different music tracks. I use Spotify, because it’s the easiest. I make Spotify tracks and they get me into the different states I need. If I want to be in a romantic state, I’ve got a Spotify track. If I want to be in a high energy state, I’ve got a track. If I want to be in a thoughtful state, a motivation, a meditative state, we use music to get ourselves in state quickly. So use music to shift your state to be able to accomplish what you guys need to do. So there you go.
That’s it, I’m almost home. Norah’s singing, I’m going to go sing the rest of the song with her. I appreciate you guys and we’ll talk to you all soon.
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