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What if the secret to entrepreneurial success isn't what you do but who you know? In this episode, Marlon Sanders, a trailblazer in internet marketing with a wealth of insights on the impact of relationships in business, explores how strategic connections, forged over decades, can open doors to unexpected opportunities and lead to lifelong friendships. Marlon shares the foundational principles behind his network-building approach, detailing his journey through internet marketing, mentorship, and the transformative power of connecting with the right people. The conversation dives deep into the art of cultivating meaningful relationships, the role of reciprocity in building trust, and the untold stories of impactful relationships that shaped both of their lives. [00:01 - 08:16] The Power of Relationships in Business Marlon reflects on why Kevin chose relationships as the podcast's focus How relationships became the foundation of Kevin's business philosophy Marlon's perspective on strategic partnerships and lasting connections [08:17 - 16:46] The Influence of Mentorship and Storytelling Kevin recounts a transformative moment at a Matt Fury seminar Marlon discusses the storytelling skills he learned from industry legends Mentorship's role in shaping both of their careers [16:47 - 25:04] Methods of Networking with the Affluent Marlon shares networking techniques from Thomas Stanley's book Recognition as a tool to build trust with high-achievers Giving value before asking for favors [25:05 - 33:29] Acts of Appreciation that Open Doors Marlon emphasizes the importance of showing genuine appreciation Kevin reflects on a client's feedback about wanting more support The role of personal growth in strengthening connections [34:41 - 43:28] Intentional Action and Connection Marlon discusses Joe Vitale's principle of never showing up empty-handed Kevin and Marlon reflect on the importance of taking intentional action Embracing action as a tool to manifest ideas and build momentum Key Quotes: “Recognition can open doors that no other strategy can.” - Marlon Sanders “If you want to open doors, start by helping others—give first.” - Marlon Sanders Connect with Marlon: Website: https://www.resellertoolkit.com/70k LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlonsanders Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marlon.sanders YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/marlonsanders Thanks for tuning in! If you liked my show, please LEAVE A 5-STAR REVIEW, like, and subscribe! Find me on the following streaming platforms: Apple Spotify Google Podcasts IHeart Radio Stitcher
Evergreen List Building Secrets - https://www.marketingsharks.com/evergreen-list-building-secrets-from-david-perdew-and-marlon-sanders/THE SINGLE LIST BUILDING METHOD THAT TURNED DAVID PERDEW FROM A WANNABE WITH HARDLY ANY LIST TO A “POWER PLAYER” ONLY 12 MONTHS LATERTo start with, David had a list of less than 1,000. No one knew him. Things looked bleak.One list building secret changed David's life to this very day and minute. Just doing this one thing, a year later he was a Power Player with a cash cow list paying him money every day. Not to mention the admiration and respect of others.Every week and every year since then, David has used this amazing list building method to enjoy his life.By the 20th time Marlon used this method, he had a list of 20,000! That's an addition of 1,000 emails to his list every time he used it!Marlon Sanders interviewed David on a training where he shared his secret method IN DETAIL and explained:How it works?Why it works?How to do it?Evergreen List Building Secrets - https://www.marketingsharks.com/evergreen-list-building-secrets-from-david-perdew-and-marlon-sanders/
In this episode, Russell and Alison answer the question "How long do you stick with a product that's not working?". Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com Magnetic Marketing ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: Hey, good morning. Welcome back, everybody. We've got some more Q and A's from the e-com versus experts Smackdown today for the marketing speakers podcast. And today's question is one; I think a lot of you guys are probably wondering. My guess is if you created a product and you're trying to sell it, and no one's buying, when do you quit? We're always talking about don't be a quitter, but is there a time to quit? Is there a time to keep going? How does it work? The question is, how long do you stick with a product that's not working before you pivot and try something different? This is a great question from the Smackdown. I think you guys will enjoy the answer, and hopefully, you'll learn a ton from both Allison and I. So with that said, I'm queuing up the theme song, and then we come back. You're going to find out how long do you actually stick with a product that's not working? And if it's not working, do you just give up? Or if there're other things you can do, like maybe I'm close, maybe like an inch away from success. So that's what this episode and this question is all about. I hope you enjoy it and I will see you guys soon. Brent Coppieters: All right. The next question is from Denise Smith; she says, how long should I stick with a product or strategy that is not working before I should pivot to a different product? What are some things you do when a product isn't working for you before you move on? Russell: Ooh, that's a really good question. Alison Prince: So good. Russell: That's a good one. I'll give some of my thoughts, and then I'm going to open until I find out more of what your product is, but there's two sides of this. I've seen people who have a product they wanted to create. They were passionate about it, they were obsessed with it, and then they created it, and it wasn't what the market wanted. And they kept trying and trying and trying to the point where they ended up losing everything. I literally had a friend when I first got started, he'd written this ebook, and it wasn't a very good ebook, and the topic wasn't good. He spent two years trying to sell it, and I asked him, why don't you just try to try something else? And he's like, I invested so much time and energy into this, I can't try anything else. And he never made success, and I haven't seen him now in a decade and a half. But there's the other side too, where ClickFunnels like we built ClickFunnels. We launched it, and it was like crickets. Then I did it again and again, I spent… three or four, the sixth time is when it caught and started taking off. So there's kind of like that fine line of is this thing a dud? Marlon Sanders, if you guys know Marlin, he's one of the original OG's; he had a whole presentation. He did one time about dead ducks don't quack. He's like if you have a dead duck, it doesn't quack. You need to let it go. But you have to find out, is it a dead duck? Or is it just a duck that hasn't learned how to quack yet? So that's the question; I'd be curious to know, I don't know if you want to add anything to it, but I'm curious to know what the product is and where you are on the timeline because that might help us to give you very specific big feedback as opposed to. Denise Smith: I switched products, and I'm a big geek here. I switched products because I spent a year and a half doing exactly what your friend did. I put something out in the market I thought young people would need. It was, are you ready to be an entrepreneur? Millennials don't want us to tell them how to get organized. I kept saying they need it, and my husband kept saying, but they don't want help, but they need it. I spent so much time, and that was my problem is I spent a lot of time and energy there and a lot of money. I have now pivoted; I've started actually completely. I've gone into the health system like Tracy did this morning. I'm going in, and I'm now teaching because my real passion is teaching women my age, post-menopausal women, how to lose weight, the healthy way without all the crazy diets, and everything else. That's where my passion is. My question is, I have that, and I will continuously show up on that because I'm crazy. But as I have products how long would I... And I'm just building it; I just started this week. If I put a cookbook out there, how long do I try to keep selling the cookbook before I just say, wow, no one wants this. And obviously, this time, I'm going to use the ask method. I'm asking before I just do. But, so that's my thing is how long do you keep not necessarily the overall program, but products within the program if they don't work? And by the way, my husband, I'm just going to be a geek here. I was trying to figure it out. My husband's like, you always say do what Russell says, so ask Russell. He don't mind, ask him. Alison: And here you go. Russell: I love it. One thing to think about, too, is you said the product didn't work, but the interesting thing is the product actually is fine. It's the positioning of the product. If you were to go back to that first business, my guess is you were trying to sell them what they needed but not what they wanted. I was the same thing with ClickFunnels. I was trying to sell initially, like what they need, like you guys need this, but that wasn't the messaging they wanted. I had to position it differently for them to be like, oh, I want that. But it wasn't me changing the entire product; it was changing the positioning. I've had multiple products where I've launched, and it bombed. In fact, David Fry is a close friend of mine. He had a very interesting one. He had; it was actually a similar market he was trying to teach students how to get good grades, like getting into good colleges. He tried targeting students forever and messaging them towards students. And for years tried and finally just about to give up on it, and then he realized he's like the kids aren't the ones who care about getting good grades and going to college; it's the parents. So he took the same product; he didn't change the product at all; he just changed the sales letter, the messaging from, Hey, as a kid, you can get good grades to Hey, how would you like your kid to get better grades? How would you like your kid, and he started speaking the whole copy spoke to the parents and how this thing was going to help. He shifted that, shifted the ad, shifted the targeting, and boom, the whole thing blew up. A lot of times, the product doesn't have to restart; it's just the positioning. How do we position this? If you think about this the way even this program, there's things people want, but there's also things you need. And so it's we talk about the things that you guys want, but then we're fulfilling also. We give you the stuff you want, but we're also giving you stuff that you need. It's like your parents used to give you ice cream if you eat your vegetables, or whatever. And so marketing is all about that. We want to deliver exactly what people need because we're educators; we're trainers like we love that. But what do they want? We got to sugar coat it and position it in a way it shows off with the parts that they want. Then we can give them what they want, but then really serve with what they actually need. It's fascinating, does this program 2CCX alone? It's yes, everyone wants the funnel that's going to hit in the market but what most people actually need is the mindset stuff. So we're giving what you guys want. You're going to come in, you're going to learn funnels, and we're going to do challenge funnels, econ funnels. But man, we have momentum coaches because what you actually need is this. That's what people actually are keeping away. So we're sugar coating, and we're positioning in a way that we can get people in. That'd be my take on the old business. If that one's done, I'm fine with that you moving on to this other one, but just the same thing's going to be true with this one is understanding that Hey, because you're going to be passionate about this. This is all the stuff you need, like, you need to go on a diet, and no one wants to go on a diet. You got to eat healthily, and no one wants to eat healthily. So it's like, Hey, how do we position this in a way that's exciting? Like this is what they actually are wanting. And then we can still give them everything they need, but we're positioning in a way that gets them excited to want to go and buy. Otherwise, they're not going to buy them. Alison: Did you guys just see what happened there? I was looking on the outsider. You have this amazing product. We saw it, we see it. And you're like, I'm just ready to trash it, and Russell's like, no, just tweak it a little bit. Instead of selling to the millennials or the kids or whatever, just sell to the parents. Just a little tweak, all this hard work that you've done, all the money that you've spent. That's awesome. You just switch it just a little bit. Denise: I'll do that. Alison: That's what happens in these hot seats in the 2CCX program. And some people are just like, ah, I spent all of this money, I can't do this anymore, and they want to ditch it. And I'm like no, that's still really good. You just have to change the positioning of who you're selling it to. Russell: Yeah. Alison: That was fun. Denise: I'm going to do both. Russell: Awesome. Alison: Thank you and tell your husband, hi. Denise: I will. Brent: Very cool. Oh, so good. Awesome. Russell: These are fun. Alison: I know, right. Russell: From now on, we're doing hot seats every day for the rest of our lives; this is way better than anything else; it was awesome.
Here comes another episode from Dr. Joe Vitale, on his hit new vodcast: Zero Limits Living! Do not miss out as he interviews his friend, and successful businessman Marlon Sanders. This episode is sure to give you the inspiration you need to find your superpower!Be sure to Like and Subscribe for more Luxe Content!Download the LuxeTV app to watch anytime, anywhere!
In This Episode: [2:45] How Marlon played a key role in lobbying for affiliates during CAN-SPAM legislation. [04:48] Politicians are not business people and that's not a good thing. [07:25] Too often we over react and toss the baby out with the bathwater. [09:41] Marketers always need to be ready to adapt. [10:54] You can just type the freaking thing up and mail it. [11:18] Shared IP servers are not one of Marlon's favorite things. [12:58] The stress of email marketing. [17:45] Open up every channel for interaction. [19:46] Why do we have such complex automation when nobody uses it? [26:12] Why no one is listening to us right now Jim! [28:03] Nobody cares. [28:38] People just want an easy part time income with no big effort. [31:29] Business opportunity seekers are not business people, they are hobbyists. [33:29] People want a money button they can just push. [40:35] Why Marlon won't be writing a book. [41:15] Software sells because all you gotta do is push a button. [42:16] No matter what you sell, make it a toaster. [46:15] Marlon's latest project.
Today we have Jim Edwards who is a top direct response marketer and entrepreneur. Jim started back in 1997 writing ebooks and today has a very popular software product that helps shortcut the process of writing copy for ecommerce, webinars, and much more. Jim helps people discover how to turn ideas into income with books, ebooks, video, sales copy, and blogging. Jim's successes are compelling because he went through a lot of challenges. After having success in real estate and mortgage banking, Jim left the industry to launch his own business. In just a few short years, he lost all he acquired, and he struggled. Jim developed a heart condition and landed in the hospital staring death in the face. Thereafter, he declared bankruptcy. After 2-3 years he made it all back and kept going. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [1:20] Jeremy introduces his guest, Jim Edwards. [3:00] Jim talks about his early career and experiencing low points. [9:00] How did Marlon Sanders influence Jim? [13:00] Finding an audience that is desperate for your help. [14:30] Jim talks about some early sales copy software he’s developed. [17:30] What are people using Funnel Scripts for? What’s the most popular? [22:00] Using Funnel Scripts for ecommerce businesses. [26:30] Why does Jim use the webinar method to promote Funnel Scripts. [33:30] Trends in sales copy. [39:00] Jim talks about creating a script for case studies. [41:00] Jim opens up about a health scare. [46:00] Using resources to help others. In this episode… How can lessons learned from a career of writing effective sales copy teach you and your organization how to take your business to the next level? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from business leader and sales copy expert Jim Edwards. Jim opens up about his career, how he helps businesses connect with their audience, why it’s vital to solve real and pressing issues that customers face, trends he sees in sales copy, and so much more! Don’t miss this opportunity to learn some valuable insights and lessons from Jim on this informative episode! Have you ever thought about how your life experiences have shaped and molded your journey to cause you to end up right where you were meant to be? What episodes from early on in your life prepared you for where you are today? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from entrepreneur and business leader Jim Edwards. Jim is kind enough to share some of the early difficulties, failures, and successes that set him on his path to working as a top direct response marketer and sales copy expert. You can tell that Jim has learned a lot on his journey and he’s eager to help leaders like you gather as many insights and lessons from his story so you can have similar success without the bumps along the way. Learn more about Jim’s story on this episode! If you want to grow your business and really connect with your customer base, you’ve got to identify an issue or problem that they are desperate to solve. What steps has your business taken to address this important factor? On this episode of Inspired Insider, Jim Edwards explains why it’s vital for businesses to tap into the critical needs, not just the inconveniences of their target audience. Jim says that if organizations can embrace this approach, they will see their business grow exponentially. Discover what additional insights and lessons you can learn from Jim’s unique perspective on this engaging episode! Imagine what it would look like if you could take an aspect of your industry and automate it in a way that makes you money and leaves your customers highly satisfied. What level of impact would that type of innovation have on your organization? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from business leader and innovator Jim Edwards. In his conversation with Jeremy, Jim shares how he came up with the idea to automate and build a software that helps business leaders like you create an effective sales copy. Whether you are interested in an efficient sales copy service or if you want to learn from Jim’s experience of embracing automation, you’ve got to check out this fascinating episode! How can your organization stand out in your industry? What will it take for your message to succeed and help you stay ahead of the competition? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from sales copy expert and business leader Jim Edwards. Jim is here to help leaders like you hone your message and communicate effectively to your audience. One way to stay ahead of the competition is to make sure your message is relevant and crafted for today’s social media audience. The days of long-form sales copy and messaging are gone! You and your organization need to learn how to send out tweets and other messages that are clear and concise. Hear more from Jim about communicating in the age of social media and more on this episode! Resources Mentioned on this episode www.thejimedwardsmethod.com http://funnelscripts.com/ Gary Halbert Marlon Sanders Russell Brunson Breakthrough Advertising Ben Cummings Sponsor for this episode Rise25 is where entrepreneurs of 6,7, and 8 figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges through this high-level Mastermind group. Each member leaves each week with lifelong friendships and actionable steps to take their business to the next level. Check out Rise25.com - a group run by myself and cofounder John Corcoran. Rise 25 is application only.
If you’re not as successful yet as you’d like to be… I know why. This episode I went off on a 96 minute rant that’ll get you back on track. On today’s special road trip edition of the podcast Russell talks about some exciting events coming up, some personal development rules he follows, and why it’s okay for people to outgrow Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to look forward to in this episode: The viral video by the Harmon Brothers and the kind of party that is planned for it. Why Russell thinks studying, learning and geeking out on the marketing of your product is the key to success. Why it’s okay to be greedy in the initial stages of your business. How building and growing a business is similar to making, being pregnant with, and birthing a baby. What the 3 steps toward personal development that Russell follows are. Why you need to be willing to take risks. What some Clickfunnels clients are doing that they shouldn’t and why Russell is a little pissed off about it. And much, much more. So listen here to hear this extra long, extra informative and extra exciting episode of Marketing Secrets. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a special edition, a road trip version, edition, whatever you want to call it of Marketing Secrets podcast. I feel like we’re going old school, for our long time friends and followers, this is like a Marketing In Your Car. But I’ve got a long drive ahead and I want to welcome you guys to the podcast. Alright, alright everybody. I just started a super long road trip heading to Burley, Idaho. It is my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday. So we’re heading down to the big birthday party. Isn’t that crazy, 100 years old! It’s really, really fun. My wife and kids actually left a day and a half ago. I had to get some stuff done, so now I’m heading down for the big party. So basically I have a two hour road trip and was heading out the door, super excited and I’m totally unprepared. I forgot my camera to record podcasts, I forgot my little ear buds, I forgot my sunglasses. Oh well, what can you do? I forgot my battery charger for my phone, oh well I’m still excited. So I’m heading down and I’ve got some time to talk to you guys. So I wanted to share some cool things. First off, one thing we’re working on is, as you’ve probably heard, we’re about to launch our viral video with the Harmon Brothers. They’re the guys that did Squatty Potty and Poopourri and all the other awesome things. What’s funny, everyone asks me, “Oh I want to hire them too, their stuff is awesome. How much does it cost?” and I think people think the quote is going to be like 10 or 15 grand or something, but it’s actually half a million dollars to hire them to do a 3 minute video for you. It’s not cheap. So we paid a lot of money to get this video created and then I was like man, most people do a video and then they launch it and it kind of just, you hope it goes well and sometimes it does, but I’m like, if we’re going to launch it, I want as much oompf behind it as humanly possible. So I was like, we need to do a launch party. So that was kind of the first thought, but how do we do a launch party? I’ve never done one before but it’s gotta be just kind of like a regular party. Well maybe we should get some cool speakers, some cool influencers and affiliates out here, so who would be cool to have? Oh Gary Vaynerchuk would be cool. He’s not speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, but he’d be a really cool fit for this event. So we called him up, he said yes. We had to pay him about 100 grand to get him to come to Boise to speak. But we’re like where in Boise is actually cool enough to host an event like this? There’s not a lot of cool hotels. So the Boise State football stadium, the big Skybox there, is kind of cool and hold 3 or 400 people. So we’re like, cool we’ll do this. We rent the Skybox, but who are we going to invite. We need to make this really, really cool. I think it was Alex Charfen told me this, it might not have been him, but I think it was. Basically said that entrepreneurs like to create events out of everything to make it memorable for them and for everybody else. So I was like, we need to make a big event. So anyway, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can invite our affiliates, that’ll be kind of fun, we’ll invite a bunch of them. But who else can we invite that can share this video? We can invite people that aren’t necessarily our affiliates, just other influencers that if they share the video it would dramatically boost it. So okay, let’s do that. So we set up this event, I was going to speak, Harmon Brothers were going to speak, Gary was going to speak, then we start reaching out to influencers and they’re like, “We don’t really care about people speaking. We want a party.” And we’re like, it’s going to be kind of a fun party. We’re all fun people. They’re like, “No we need a real party.” So we’re like, how do we throw a real party? So we started just kind of brainstorming and what came out of the brainstorm was what if we rented out the actual football stadium and tried to play bubble soccer, that’d be kind of fun. What if instead of playing bubble soccer, what if we tried to play the biggest game of bubble soccer ever? What if we had the Guinness Book of World Records come and…. Anyway, that was kind of the initial crazy thought and then Dave was like, “I’m going to figure out how to make this work.” So Dave spent the next two weeks on the phone getting the Guinness Book of World Records, and then getting Boise State to let us come, and all the licensing fees and it’s been this insane project. So we got all that done. We don’t have any influencers who have kind of, we’re in this thing with a lot of money. We have no influencers actually coming. So then I was like, okay, I have to go old school. Practice what I preach. So the last two days I’ve sat in this car and recorded almost 200 videos, personalized videos for all these influencers, which was a lot of work. We made a page, 200 pages for 200 different influencers and now Monday, we’re in the process of contacting all of them and inviting them to this huge party. Anyway, it’s been crazy and none of them may come, but hopefully they will. But regardless it’ll be a fun party. We’re going to set a world record, we’re going to launch a viral video and that’s one of the many things we’re doing. We also have 12 events in the next 43 days happening in Boise. One of them just got done so it’s actually down to 11. Monday we have a design-a-thon where we’ve got 30 designers coming out and we’re busting out a whole bunch of new templates for the Marketplace that’s launching during the new onboarding, everything’s going live in Clickfunnels when the viral videos hits and about a billion other things. It’s crazy. The next 45 days will probably be the most stressful, crazy days of my life. But if we can pull it off, it’s going to be nuts. I keep saying that, I did the same thing with the book launch. I think there’s something about me, I think something’s wrong, the wiring in my head where I always think that after this life will get normal again. But then I just keep stacking things on. I think part of it is just momentum, it’s hard to get momentum for a lot of people. But when you have momentum you don’t want to slow down, you want to keep riding the wave. So I feel like I’m 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame and I’m enjoying the ride and I don’t want to slow down, so I’m like, we just keep rolling stuff out. We’re launching a new book, the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, this month. It’s crazy. If you guys could see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, I don’t think you’d actually believe it. Funnel Hacker TV, we started filming that because we wanted to show people, but that’s still just a glimpse, it doesn’t come close to everything that’s actually happening. It’s nuts. Alright, so for you guys I wanted to share, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this last night as I was working super late. I was like, why am I here? It’s been two nights that I’ve been here until like 2:30 in the morning and I’m loving it. Outside of hanging out with my kids, there’s nothing else I would rather do than that. And I’m like, how do I get people to where they’re this passionate about what they do and their business and what they’re selling? I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the number one trait I found between entrepreneurs who are successful and those who aren’t and the biggest trait is that the ones who are super successful, they’re the ones who are extremely passionate, not just about their product but about the marketing of their product. They start geeking out on the marketing. That’s the key. Those who obsess with the marketing are the ones who have the most success, which is why for me it’s been a big deal, that’s why I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book and the Expert Secrets book, and why I do the events. All the stuff I do is because my goal is to get you guys, I want to make marketing and sales fun. If this is something that you guys, if I could make this the entertainment. To study and learn and geek out on the marketing, then that’s been my mission on this earth. Because when I was learning this stuff, it was exciting for me but honestly it was kind of boring. The people teaching and talking about marketing, yawn, they were boring and I had to wade through a lot of boring crap and now I’m trying to make it exciting. I’m trying to bring my raw passion to you guys and I hope I’m doing my job. I’m doing my best. Because if you get pumped up and fired up about the marketing of your thing, then that’s how you get the ability to make money, free yourself, and give you the ability to not just make the money but impact more people and serve more people and that’s the goal. So I’m thinking, outside of me just everyday trying to get you guys pumped and excited and fired up about how much fun the marketing of your thing can be, I was thinking about this last night, how do I just take that part of my brain out and shove it into your brain so you’re fired up. I started thinking about it and I think the key for someone to be truly passionate about the marketing and the selling of their thing, they first have to be truly passionate about their thing. Because you think about that, I talked a little bit about this in the Expert Secrets book, initially you don’t wake up, well I did, but I think most people don’t, maybe that was my gift of whatever. But most people don’t wake up excited, “I’m going to learn how to do marketing!” It’s not the thing that pumps people up. But there’s something else that happens, there’s something that you got excited about in your life. It could a book you read, it could be audio, could be video, could be just a weird thing, I don’t know. Whatever it is that your thing is. Everyone has their thing, your thing is something. So your thing that got you pumped up, whatever that was, I want you to think about that because that’s the key that unlocks everything. First you get excited about that thing because it’s exciting to you. You go through this time of growth. You start studying it and you learn and geek out and start growing and growing and growing and growing and at first it’s honestly kind of a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s the dude from Wallstreet say? Greed is good. Initially it is, I think. Not long term, but short term greed is good. Greed is what gets you to unbalance your life in a way initially, not long term but initially. Initially you have unbalance your life to focus on a thing to have greatness come. When I met my beautiful wife and I wanted to fall in love with her, for me to be successful in that I had to be greedy. I had to shift all my time and all the other stuff I was doing and other people and other things. I had to unbalance my life to focus everything on that relationship so that we could fall in love and get married. The same thing happened with business. The same thing happened with wrestling. When I started wrestling, I had to be greedy about that thing. I had to get so unbalanced in every other thing in my life and just focus on that thing, because that’s what it takes to be great at anything, right. That raw passion. So first, the greed of that thing, of you desiring that thing is what initially starts. Some of you guys it was weight loss, some of you guys it was Biohacking, some of you guys it was finance, some of you guys it was history. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you geek out about. So the greed of the excitement that you feel initially for that thing is what makes it so you can completely unbalance your life and absorb and go into that thing. That’s the first key because to be an expert, to be able to share your message, all those things we talk about and to actually care about the marketing about your thing, you’ve got to be ridiculously passionate about the thing first. Otherwise you’re not going to wade into this territory, you’re going to go through all the pain of being an entrepreneur and getting that thing out into the world. Because I know a lot of us paint this beautiful picture of entrepreneurship and it is eventually, but initially it’s not. Initially it sucks. Initially you have to go through so much. It’s like giving birth. My wife has given birth to 5 kids, 4 times, one time was twins. Giving birth is not pleasurable. The initial thought of it, that creates the baby. That’s pleasurable just like your business, the thought of it is exciting. You’re romantic about the thing you’re going to create. Sorry, my jeep is super loud when I go into overdrive. Anyway, that’s pleasurable, we all enjoy that. I enjoyed what it took to get my wife pregnant, that’s awesome I enjoyed what it took to create the seed of Clickfunnels and the business, right. That part’s fun, and then after the romantic side happens, for pregnancy there’s nine months of pain for the woman. My wife, I watched her go through this 4 times. She gained weight, she felt horrible, she felt sick, she was throwing up. Business is the same way, after you go through the romantic part, now it’s painful. You have to work hard and you can’t sleep and you have to deprive yourself of friends and family and life and all the pleasures in life to birth this thing that you have. And most people give up during the birthing process, because it sucks. With a baby you got no option, the baby’s coming whether you want it to or not, but the birthing of a business and to be an entrepreneur, it’s so painful most people don’t make it through it. They always say that 1 out of 100 businesses succeed, but the reality, 1 out of a million businesses never even get to fruition because the idea is planted, but the birthing of the thing never happens because it’s so painful. So if you’re not obsessively, insanely passionate about your thing, I’ve got to break it to you, it’s going to be hard to birth it. Those hard times come and it sucks. So I think that not only do you have to become passionate about the market, because I’m trying to make that part fun, so the birthing process is actually fun. Maybe I’m the equivalent of the hypno-birthing class. My wife and I did hypno-birthing for the last kid, which was actually really cool. We did classes and they tried to make it really, really fun. So maybe I’m the hypno-birthing coach. Trying to make the process of birth fun for you even though you know it’s still going to suck. But maybe you can have a good time along the way, you should, it is really fun. But I was like, if you’re going to go through that birth process, you have to be so excited about the baby, that’s the key. My wife and I were so excited about the twins, we were so excited for the other kids and that’s why she was willing to endure that pain because we were so passionate and excited about the kids. So for you, it starts with before you can be an entrepreneur, before you can birth this thing, you have to be insanely passionate about your thing. And there are people who will tell you otherwise. “No, it’s math…blah blah.” I don’t know, I think you can make money without passion, but you can’t leave a legacy, you can’t do what’s really important without it. So my next phase of this, we got a long road trip, you guys. I hope you don’t mind. But the next phase of this is how you become passionate about this thing? You’re like, Russell I see you. You’re jumping around, excited, screaming every single day, but I wake up in the morning and I’m tired. I wake up in the morning and I don’t always feel that passion. And I get that. I want to share some stuff, this is maybe personal development, according to Russell. I don’t teach personal development, I probably never will, but I have my thoughts on it, I have my feelings. So I do a lot of it myself. So I’m going to give you, during our road trip together, some of my thoughts and the personal development stuff that I had to go through and we have to go through and hopefully some of these things will help. So number one, the first thing is all of you guys, you’ve got to quit being so bleh. That’s the official term for it, bleh. My daughter, she puts on this little monster mask, it’s so cute and then she’ll go “bleh.” That’s what most of you guys are doing. If I ask you what you’re working on, you’re like, “Bleh.” You’ve got to be excited, if you’ve listened to the podcast, probably three hundred episodes ago I did one talking about being awesome. People always ask you, “How are you doing?” and everyone goes, “I’m alright. I’m doing okay.” First off, if you’re doing okay, it means your life sucks. You need to stop it. “I’m doing okay.” My kids, I told them, when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you never say I’m doing okay. I’m doing good. Good is the enemy to great. If you’re doing good, that’s not a good thing. If you’re going to change the world you can’t be like, “I’m doing good. It’s alright.” Notice this, everyone will ask how you’re doing and you’ll always say doing good. First thing to change, you are no longer doing good. You are doing awesome, all the time. My kids, if you ask them, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” If you ask me, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” You need to reprogram your brain from “I’m doing alright.” To being awesome. When people ask you that from now on, this is rule number one, you have to say you’re doing awesome. It may seem like a dumb thing, but you will see how it changes people around you. “How you doing?” “I’m doing awesome.” They’re like, “Really. Huh, nobody ever says that.” If you say you’re doing good, bleh. You just did that, bleh. You pulled an Ellie, a monster Ellie. Ellie’s my daughter that does that, bleh. So no more bleh’s. You’re doing awesome. And if you don’t feel awesome, guess what the first step to feeling awesome is? Saying that you’re feeling awesome. Okay, that’s number one. Number two, stay in control. If you ever go to a Tony Robbins event, which you should, if you don’t you’re insane. I’m not allowed to say yet, but he may be hanging out with us at our next Funnel Hacking Live event. But regardless, you should go to at least UPW. You get to walk on fire and hopefully have a chance to go to Date with Destiny as well. If you really want to have a shift in your life, Tony is the person that will take you and shift you. That’s why I don’t teach personal development because Tony is the best in the world and I couldn’t do better, even remotely close, so I’m not even going to try. If I felt like I could I probably would go and try to serve that market, but Tony’s the best, so I’m not going to. So I leave it to Tony and also Brendon Burchard, Brendon’s the man. Tony and Brendon, those dudes will shift yourself, personal development wise, so go and study them. Tony especially, because walking on fire is insanely cool. But one of the main things you learn in Date with Destiny is a thing called state control. So state is the thing that you are in as you are doing something. Sometimes you’re in a happy state, and a bleh state. Most of us we live our lives in a bleh state. You have to learn how to change your state like this. The coolest thing I learned from Tony is that I actually control the state I’m in. I don’t think most people understand that. You control the state you’re in. You can change it, you can be depressed or be happy, you can change it that fast. When I learned that and became aware of it, it was insanely cool. I would have a long horrible day at the office. I’d be beat up and tired, worn out, come home and as most people do, I could walk through the door and be like, bleh. Be a bleh dad. But I was like, no. I don’t want to be a bleh dad. So I walk in tired, beat up, angry sometimes, frustrated, all the crap you go through sometimes during the day, I get to the door and I say, I could either walk in and be a bleh dad, or I can change my state. What am I going to do? I’m going to freaking change my state. So I do what Tony Robbins talks about, there’s three things he calls the triad. I make these three shifts in my life, my physiology, my focus, my meaning, I shift those things and boom, that fast I walk in and guess what? I’m not a bleh dad, I’m a freaking awesome dad. I have fun with my kids, I play with my kids, and they’re going to remember that. When I walk in the office, some days I haven’t slept for more than an hour. I walk into the office and guess what I feel like? I feel like I want to die sometimes, I’m so tired. I walk in and could be like, bleh. But guess what happens if I walk in at state, guess what happens to all the people around me? They will match my state, because I’m the leader. If I walk in like bleh, they will all become bleh. This is the official term by the way, it’s bleh. So if I walk in bleh, they’re all going to be bleh. If I walk in at a freaking ten, they are all going to rise to my level, to my state. State control is huge. You can control your own state, but the other cool thing is that you can control the state of the people that are around you. People always come to our office and they’re like, “Is it always like this?” the answer is yes. Why is it like this? It’s because I’m freaking setting the pace when I walk in during the day. I walk in knowing that the pace that I set, everyone’s going to match me at that pace. If I come in bleh, they’re going to be bleh. I work with other companies, and partners and friends and people and what’s interesting, we will work with employees of a business owner and whatever the state of the business owner is, and you know that by seeing their videos and all their stuff, the entire company matches that state. It’s insane. So if I want to dominate the world, I gotta learn to change my state. So understanding state control is huge and so much more simple than you think. Tony Robbins talked about, go to UPW. There’s three things, he calls it a triad, there’s three things that are involved in state control. I’ll kind of go through these, I’ll probably just slaughter them, so go study Tony. Worst case, go to YouTube and type in “Tony Robbins State Control” or something, I’m sure you can get some videos of him teaching it as well. But the triad, there’s three things you gotta change. The first thing is your physiology. You’re body, this amazing gift that God has given us functions and drives everything. Have you ever notice that depressed people look depressed? Bleh. Sad people what do they do? They look sad. They’re body matches and mirrors how they feel. So a lot of times you think, “I’m sad, that’s why my body’s like this. My shoulders are drooping because I’m bleh.” Sometimes, because your body’s drooping, that’s why you’re sad. Just changing your physiology, changing your state, how you hold your body, will actually change how you feel. It’s insane. He talked about a group of people who were clinically depressed, not just I’m depressed, I’m sad, clinically depressed. They were in a clinic, they were in rehab because they had such bad depression. They took this group of like 50 clinically depressed people and took them off all their depression medication, which all medication really does is change your state. Changes our physiology, honestly we’ll talk about that in a minute, but it takes them off all their meds and makes them stand in front of a mirror for thirty minutes a day, with their shoulders back, smiling. Even if it’s a fake smile, or angry, makes them smile for thirty minutes. Guess what happened? Just by changing their physiology and forcing themselves to smile for 30 days, every one of the people who had clinical depression were healed. They were miraculously saved from their depression. Now there are times when, I have friends and family members that deal with depression, so I’m not short changing that, but I promise you that by shifting your physiology you can shift everything. It’s huge. I’ve seen people who are depressed shift their state, shift their body and they get un-depressed. It’s crazy. So if I want to be in a happy mood, if I want to be in a good state for my kids, my wife, my whatever. If I’m going to a meeting or whatever, the state, how I hold my body has a ton to do, 50% of how I enter a room has to do with the outcome of what’s going to happen. That’s not scientifically proven, that’s just what I’m guestimating based on what happens. That’s a big thing. So figure that out. How do you control your body? Look at what depressed people look like and if you hold your body in a way that depressed people hold their body, you’re going to be depressed. If you hold your body the way sad people hold it, you’re going to be sad. If you hold it in a way of the happy people, you’re going to be happy. Look right here right now, do I look happy? The reason why I’m doing this, if you watch Funnel Hacker TV, “Why is Russell so excited?” Because when I’m in an excited mood, I feel better, I get more done. I get people around me to raise to my level of vibration and they get excited as well. There’s this weird thing, and this is scriptural, for those that are the church going folk, and those who aren’t it doesn’t even matter. Light cleaveth to light and dark cleaveth to darkness. One of my coaches, Tara Williams talks about this all the time, vibes, vibrations. People like, “He’s got a good vibe, she’s got a good vibe.” Sense the vibration. And if you think of this like tuning forks. Let’s say you have a tuning fork here and you want to, if you hit two tuning forks next to each other, they will eventually match their vibrations. There’s a high pitched one, a low pitched one, they will meet in the middle because vibrations match. Light cleaveth to light, dark to dark. The same thing happens with you. If you come in and you’re a tuning fork and your vibration’s high, people are going to suck you down to their level and you’ll be depressed. Or you’re going to come in and freaking just blow your mind with the level of energy and vibration and everybody will rise to you. You have to understand that. They’re either going to suck you down, or you’re going to rise up. That’s one part of state control, is understanding that your body has so much to do with it. Now that you understand that, how else can you control your body? This is why us nerdy, entrepreneur, biohacking people talk about the importance of our body. Alex Charfen at the Pirates Cove mastermind said that “for any of you entrepreneurs that aren’t treating your body like a professional athlete, you’re insane. You’re doing things that professional athletes aren’t. You’re trying to accomplish things that they can’t even fathom. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’re insane.” It’s true, what you put into your body effects your physiology. When I eat crap, guess how I feel? Crap. People always ask me why I take so many supplements. Because different supplements I take effect my physiology. I have rules with my supplements. Most of you all know, I’m a Mormon, therefore I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t do alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, any other crazy stuff, I don’t do a lot of these, but there’s some supplements that I do take because they affect my physiology. I do take some caffeine, because caffeine affects you physiology. You take it, it increases your energy. Your physiology changes, it helps me get into state faster. There’s other supplements I take, I could go days on supplements, but there’s things I take because they affect my physiology. There’s things I don’t eat because they affect my physiology. If you look at how I eat, I usually don’t eat breakfast. The reason why is breakfast typically makes me feel sluggish and tired, my physiology goes down. I usually eat one huge meal a day. When I’m at the office Melanie makes me this huge salad, it’s got high fats, tons of vegetables, I eat it and there’s almost no carbs outside of the carbs inside of vegetables because carbs make me feel sluggish and tired. I don’t want to feel tired. So I just eat the vegetables meats and fats because that keeps my energy, my physiology good. When I’m at home, if I’m going to eat junk, typically I eat it at the end of the night, when I’m about to go to bed, because at that point I don’t care about my physiology, I’m going to fall asleep. But I don’t eat at dinner, I usually won’t eat all the other nice stuff. I’ll go and pick the veggies, the meat off, whatever my wife makes and I’ll eat that because I know that if I eat the rice and the carbs, stuff like that, guess what happens? My physiology drains and I’m going to be a worse dad for my kids. I know how it works. So if I want to stay in peak state for my kids, I have to stay in, I gotta keep my physiology going, so I’m very careful of what I eat. Sometimes, I’m not as good as a lot of my biohacking buddies, sometimes I just screw up, and if my physiology…this is probably the bad thing. This is the negative of personal development. But if I eat something and feel like crap, I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap. I’m going to feel like crap no matter what, I might as well make my taste buds feel good.” So then I go all out and if I have a bad day, I have a really bad day. Because I’m physiologically jacked anyway, let’s have some fun. Anyway, there you go. Alright, that’s number one. Number two side of the pillar of Tony’s triad is shifting what you focus on. Have you noticed that depressed people focus on depressing things? Have you noticed that happy people focus on happy things? But Russell, there’s so much sad things happening in the world. I know there is, but guess what I don’t focus on? The sad things that are happening in the world. Guess what I don’t watch? The freaking news. Want to know why? Because the news focuses on depressing things. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t listen to depressing things. I try to focus on people and things that get me pumped up. I listen to podcasts of people that inspire me, that get me excited. I read things that get me excited. I focus on stuff that gets me excited. In business, crappy stuff happens every single day and I tell you what, when you go from a million dollar company to a 10 to 100, the level of crappy crap that comes up everyday exponentially increases. They say, someone told me the other day that every three months an entrepreneur’s focus with decisions could either make or break them. That’s true when you’re running a million dollar business. When you’re running a hundred million dollar a year business that happens a lot more often. I would say probably every three hours. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of crap that hits me in the face every single day and if I focus on the negative, I would be in a state of depression right now. I have to look at it and I’m like, “Oh, that sucks. Alright, this is the answer.” And I turn my back and run from it. I do not focus on it for more than 5 seconds, otherwise I will lose my state. What are you focusing on? A lot of you guys get overwhelmed and get stressed. Do you not think I get overwhelmed? I have 12 events happening in the next 47 days. We’re doing the biggest launch in the history of the freaking internet. We’re re-doing the complete onboarding process, I just wrote a new book in the last 30 days. It’s not a tiny book, it’s a freaking cookbook, it’s a 500 page cookbook. We’re doing a design-a-thon in two days. If you knew how much stress I have on my plate. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure most people would crack under the pressure. I’m shocked that I haven’t yet, but the reason why is because I keep moving on. Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in the history of wrestling. Well maybe not the greatest anymore, but he is the legend. He is the Michael Jordan of wrestling. So Dan Gable, someone asked him one time, because he went through all of college never losing a match. His very last match he lost, he got so pissed off that he went and started training for the Olympics and he actually became an Olympic champion and not a single person scored on him. And what’s crazy is while he was training for the Olympics, it’s so crazy. The Russians actually said, they came out publically and said, “We are going to train an athlete with the only goal to beat Dan Gable from the Americans.” And Dan Gable was like, “No, I’m the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived, no one’s going to beat me.” So what did Dan do? He would work 7 hours a day, working out 7 hours a day preparing for the Olympics, then he’d go to bed at night. Then as he’d go to bed at night, he laid there in bed saying, “The dude in Russia who is trying to beat me is awake and training right now. And that pisses me off and freaks me out.” So what did Dan Gable do? He woke up at midnight and he’d go running. Because he knew that his opponent was competing, was training and it stressed him out knowing that his opponent was awake while he was sleeping. He did not like that so he got up and kept working out. Is that obsessive? Heck yes. Did he crack under pressure? No, he went to the Olympics and won. Not a single person scored a point on him. That’s Dan Gable. Now someone asked Dan Gable, I heard this in an interview one time, they said, “Dan don’t…” and afterwards Dan went on to become the head wrestling coach of Iowa Hawkeyes and won more NCAA championships in a row than anyone in any sport, I believe. Anyway, insane. And someone asked Dan Gable, “Don’t you believe in pressure?” and Dan’s like, “Yeah, I believe in pressure, it’s everywhere. The difference is that most people sit underneath the pressure and they sit on it. I believe in it, I just don’t put myself underneath it. I step aside and I focus on what I need to get done.” And most of us, it’s that same way. I don’t know about you guys, sometimes I have so much stress and so much pressure, I’m about to crack. Then half of that is just in our heads. So I’ll sit down with a pad of paper, especially at night when I can’t sleep, I sit with a pad of paper and write down what I’m stressing on. I write all those things down, when you write it down it’s like, oh that’s actually not as bad as I thought. And then you can fall asleep, get yourself out of the pressure. Sometimes we’re focusing on all pressure and stress and all this stuff and that’s why we don’t succeed. Don’t do that. Write it all down, prioritize it and be like I can’t control what I can’t control. I’m going to move forward out of the pressure. Go. And sometimes I don’t get crap done. I’m sure that all the stuff I have to get done between now and our viral video launch, most of it is not going to get done. A lot of it will, most of it will. But sometimes you can’t affect it, so you do whatever you can and as you get closer and closer to deadlines all of the non essentials fall away and then you get the essentials and that’s how the game’s played. Alright, this is fun, we’ve been going 32 minutes you guys. I hope you’ve been having fun. I don’t know where I left off. Physiology, shift your physiology. Number two, what you’re focusing on and then number three, what’s the meaning. I think number three is meaning. If not I’ve been teaching this wrong, or thinking about it wrong. Number three is the meaning we’re attaching to things. A lot of times something bad happens to us and we attach these weird meanings to it. And we, it’s really cool, we have this unique ability as humans to attach meanings to things, right. And usually what happens is subconscious; we don’t know that we’re doing something right. If someone punches you in the face, subconsciously our body attaches a meaning to that. So this person is mad at me, we attach the meaning, I need to fight….sorry, let me step back. Someone punches us, right. Our meaning maker attaches this meaning to the thing. That person is mad at us, we must fight them back. So I go and try to fight someone. Or someone punches us and maybe the meaning is this person is going to kill me, that’s the meaning we attach so then we run away. There’s all sorts of things. Every single day, something is happening and we’re attaching these meanings to it and these meanings direct where we’re going with our thoughts and actions and everything else. But as soon as you’re aware of this, you can actually change the meanings that are coming to you. I actually don’t know if this is part of the triad, it may not be. I can’t remember now. Go YouTube Tony Robbins. Regardless, I want to talk about meaning, because meaning is a big thing. When you’re aware of this it’s kind of cool because now it gives you the ability to kind of shift meanings. So when somebody, we’ve had some morons, and they are morons, this week that have been attacking Clickfunnels and at first I got so mad I want to kill them and fly to their house and beat them, because that’s the wrestler in me. My body attaches a meaning to what they’re doing. But then what’s cool is Tony taught me this technique where you stop and say, okay, what if that’s not the meaning they’re attaching, what if it’s actually this meaning? You shift the meaning that maybe they’re attaching and if you shift the meaning associated with an experience, it’ll change your perspective, which changes everything. So we gotta become good at consciously picking the meaning we’re attaching to things. If someone screws us over we can attach a meaning saying “That person is a horrible person trying to screw me over.” But if you attach that meaning, be careful. Because as soon as you attach that meaning to something, guess what happens? Now the situation you enter, the state you enter is going to be based on that meaning and it can get really bloody and get really bad and things can turn really bad, which is going to increase all these other pressure, noise and other bad stuff. But if you come in and say, “Look, that person is a total douche bag,” I don’t know if I can say that on TV. I apologize if I can’t. Anyway, that person is a horrible person, but maybe their having a bad day today. Maybe they’re struggling, maybe financially, whatever. You attach a different meaning to the situation, then you come and you’re like, man that person screwed me over, but this is probably why he did it. Or why she did. If you attach that meaning it gives you a different set of tools to deal with the situation. So what happens now in my life, if something happens and instantly a meaning is attached by my brain and what I’ve found is that most of the times that the instant meaning that’s attached, is going to leave me in a really negative path. It’s weird how it works. So too often I run down that negative meaning and bad things happen. So I try to consciously stop and try to take the exact opposite. I remember Tony at Date with Destiny he does this thing, he says, “Find an experience in your life that pissed you off.” For me it was something with my wife, and my wife was at the event then, sitting separate, so she was sitting four rows ahead of me and there was an experience and they said to write down the experience, so I wrote it down. They said, “Write down all the meanings you attached to that experience.” I was like, “My wife is mad at me, she doesn’t love me.” I wrote down all these different meanings that I had attached to that situation. And then Tony said, “Write a big line down the side of the paper and next to each of the meanings you attached to that situation, I want you to write the exact opposite of that thing.” So I was like, “My wife is mean to me, but on the other side, she actually loves me. My wife is super selfish, no she is actually so giving that she struggles.” So I wrote the exact opposite of each of the meanings that I had attached to the situation. But what’s crazy is after handwriting out probably three or four of the things, I started crying. I started crying because I realized, I love my wife and I know her, and I realized the true meaning of what happened in that situation, was actually the exact opposite of the meaning I had attached to it. I instantly realized that I was in the wrong and she wasn’t. I broke down crying because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Where else in my life is this happening? Where I’m attaching these meanings subconsciously to a thing and I’m actually wrong?” I realized that day that I have to take control of my meaning maker, the meaning I’m attaching to every single situation. So something happens now and instantly I get the negative meaning, it just happens that’s in our brains wiring for some stupid reason. I stop and I’m like, what’s the opposite of that, what’s something that if I could attach a different meaning would make me look at this person through a different angle, a different lens, a different light? I shift the meaning and it shifts everything. It shifts how I feel about the person. It shifts how I approach them, it shifts the response. It changes everything. I wish I could say I am perfect with this, I am not. If you’ve ever been on the back end of a backlash from me for stuff, I apologize. Because I’m, I can be a prick sometimes. I didn’t realize this until the other day. We have a contractor, he was killing himself for us, and I imagine it’s got to be a pain in the butt working with me sometimes. Because I’m vocal, I’m on TV, I’m on Instagram, I’m ranty and ravy and talking about everything. And without thinking I kind of shared publicly my thoughts and part of it’s because I’m a media personality. If I came out like bleh all the time nobody would listen. So I’m usually on the extremes, I’m extremely happy or extremely upset because that’s what’s interesting. So I feel bad because I published stuff that was negative towards that person. And the other day it was kind of brought to my attention, “Wow, Russell this person is really working his butt off for you and you’re saying these things.” And I had this moment again where I kind of broke down and I was like I’m a bad person sometimes. And the meaning I was attaching to all these situations was like, they’re lazy, they don’t care, they’re not working hard enough, or whatever. I’m attaching all these meanings and I had this fun little moment where I had this exercise where I was like, okay, if I switch the meaning, what’s actually happening? And I was like, oh man, I’m a jerk. I realized it again, so I reached out personally and apologized and I don’t know if it’ll make it better or not, but I was wrong. I’ve had other situations this week where again there’s this person who’s honestly, it’s always the people you help the most. It’s someone I helped a lot, to have a lot of success, I bent over backwards for them and now they’re publically attacking me and us. It’s just….it’s funny, the meaning, even now, the meaning I want to attach to it wants to come in there. I’m like, no stop. Get out of my brain. Because I know, I know the reason why this person is being a douche bag. I’m going to use that word, I apologize. I know the true meaning. It’s not the one that makes me feel better about myself, which sucks because that one makes me feel so much better about myself. But it’s the truth. So I’ve tried to attach that meaning to it, even though every time I think about the situation, my blood’s boiling just thinking about it again. But I gotta go back to the meaning that I attached on purpose. So the more you guys are aware of this the more you can affect. That’s a big part. There’s number two in personal development. So where have we gone this far? So far we’ve talked about not being bleh. We talked about shifting your state in the circumstance. We talked about shifting the meaning you’re attaching to things. Alright so here’s a couple of things. Yes, we’ve been going for 40 minutes, but I still got another hour and a half drive, so we’re going to keep on talking. It’s like on Wedding Singer, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, do you remember when he’s all depressed after his girlfriend gets married on him and he’s hosting the wedding party and he’s telling all these jokes? And the one guy’s like, “Hey wedding singer, you’re the worst wedding singer I’ve ever heard.” And he looks at him and he’s like, “Well I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.” One of my favorite lines ever. That’s how I feel right now. I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say. I guess you can turn me off, hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you can hear me. This is car is so loud when we’re driving. I hope this is coming through because I think there’s some good stuff in here for people. Alright, next thing. We talked about being not bleh, we talked about getting in state, we talked about meaning, these are pieces to help you function better as a human being. I always tell people how much of an impact Tony Robbins had on me. It’s because he made me aware of these things and there’s so many more. I wish we could go to UPW. Go walk on fire. I think you can get a ticket for $500 to a thousand bucks. If you are broke and don’t have the money, go get a credit card and finance it. If you’re broke, you’re going to become more broke. Who freaking cares? At this point, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re going to go bankrupt? Dude, you’re broke, it doesn’t matter. It always blows my mind when people are like, “I don’t have any money, I can’t invest.” Then you have nothing to lose. Go take out a loan. Go take out five loans, who cares? Worst case scenario is you lose it all. If you have nothing, then you have nothing. I taught the cub scouts, the 12 year olds, I did an entrepreneurship merit badge and one of the guys asked, “how old do you think these kids should start?” I was like, “They should start now. I got a dozen friends who are teenagers who are making insane amounts of money.” The guy who asked said, “Just so all you kids know, you have nothing. If you lose it all you didn’t lose anything, so who cares?” Anyway, it always makes me laugh because people are like, “you can risk a lot because you have money to risk.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s way easier to risk when you’re broke.” Worst case scenario you lose everything, but everything is like rent on an apartment, but that’s not that big of a deal, you guys. When you’ve got 150 employees whose lives depend on you, I promise you it is a lot scarier to risk at that point. Nevertheless, I digress. Where was I going? I don’t even remember. Hopefully there was something in there of value. Okay, what I want to talk about here is you gotta risk. You’re creating this thing, you’re giving birth, you’re going into this thing…..Oh I remember what I was talking about. I was talking about investing in UPW and talking about being broke. Yeah, go to UPW, go to Date with Destiny. Invest in these events because it’ll transform you, it’ll help you to become super aware of yourself and other people. That’s what Tony gave me that was so important to me. Most of us live life on autopilot and we’re just going through the day bumping into things and things are happening and you’re just not aware of how we work. When you’re aware of how you work, it’s like now you can affect things, change things, tweak things. I can change my approach, I can change other people’s approach. For me it’s been huge to understand me and people better. So yeah, go to those things it’s worth it. There you go. I have a friend down in Australia, his name’s Mal Every, I don’t know why this just popped in my head but he says, “I don’t have a problem with you if you’re broke, but I do have a problem if you stay broke. There’s too many opportunities in this world. If you stay broke, it’s because you’re not trying.” You’re literally not trying. Anyway, I don’t know why I said that, but it popped in my head therefore it must have been important. Alright, the next thing I want to talk about. If you want to be successful in life the next piece outside of not being bleh, and figuring out state control and attaching meaning to the right things, the next thing is you have to stop dabbling. Stop freaking dabbling. School has screwed up all of us. School has taught us how to dabble. You sign up for college, you take 20 credits, 20 cool things that you want to learn about. What they do is they spoon feed you and force you to dabble over a semester. So they give you a little bit of information in math, you spend 50 minutes. Then you go to the next class, here’s a little bit of science, a little bit of history. So you dabble in a whole bunch of little crap and you try to remain and retain all this stuff and then you go back the next day and you dabble a whole bunch and you dabble and you dabble and you dabble for like 15 years of our life. Let there be no mistake. You will never be hyper successful if you are dabbling. Dabbling is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to be successful. If you want to be successful in something, you have to go deep, you have to immerse, you have to be obsessed with that thing. I guarantee you the people I’m competing against right now in our business, the reason why we are kicking the crap out of all of them is because they are dabblers. I promise you, there’s not one of my competitors that spent as much time in the last 48 hours, in the last week, in the last 5 weeks studying marketing and business and growth and personal development as much as I have. And for most of them, we’re already way past them, so why in the world, why are they not…..? I don’t know. But they’re dabbling and that’s why I’m able to pass them. When you start immersing and you go deep, a couple of really cool things happen. First off, you will start seeing connections that you cannot see when you dabble. I sucked in school because I could never see the connections. I spent an hour in history, an hour in math, then an hour in debate, then an hour in logic, I’m trying to figure out how to make the connections. Unless you go deep in something, you can’t do it. The reason why I’ve written two books is not, yes I like writing books, yes I like sharing it. When I write a book, I have to go in such deep immersion that I start seeing these connections that you don’t, you can’t see when you dabble. When I started writing the Expert Secrets book, I was doing a whole bunch of things. Some things consciously, some things subconsciously and as I started focusing on this book and trying to make a really, really good book, it forced me to read and study and geek out and immerse myself in a whole bunch of different things and through that process, I was not dabbling, I was immersing. I don’t know if it’s God, if it’s your brain, but when you immerse yourself, I feel like the reward for that, all these connections that you don’t normally see, all the sudden start being open to you. Howard Berg told me, he’s the world’s fastest reader. He said when he goes to do a topic, most people read a book and they form their opinion based one book they read. He’ll read 30-40 books to get a really clear view of the reality of the situation. This is what 30 authors have said and you get a very clear view of it. And that’s how I feel about immersion. When you immerse yourself and you go and listen, study, read, you really geek out and become obsessed in your thing. I don’t know if it’s your brain, God or the universe, whatever you want to attribute it to, I know who I want to attribute it to. But he opens up pathways, he opens up connections for you and lets you see a whole picture and that’s your reward for immersion. So that’s the next step in this you guys, you have to stop dabbling. So first off, the first phase in this comes back to you being greedy. The first phase is figure out this thing you want to be obsessed with. Maybe it’s not the marketing yet, and that’s okay. Because phase one is about being greedy and mastering it for yourself and becoming who you need to be to serve the world that you’re trying to serve. So go and now is the time to become unbalanced. In the bible, well if you listen to this song, I think it was…who was it? A time for every season, there’s a time under heaven for everything. A time and a season for everything, right. This is your season to immerse in your craft and become the best in the freaking world in your craft. Again, there’s a time and a season, this is the time and season right now for you to do that, for you to immerse yourself. So that’s phase number one and that’s going to give you the ability to become who you need to be. And you’re going to become completely unbalanced. Your work life, your social life, your family life is going to become unbalanced during that period of time, but you’re going to be able to immerse yourself, you’re not going to dabble. You’re going to unbalance and become awesome at your thing. And then there will be a transition phase where you’re going through and becoming so passionate about it, where there will be this weird time where all the sudden, I don’t know what it is, you can’t get filled up anymore. For me, I was doing all this marketing for all of our businesses and companies. We were doing the Neuropathy product, the weight loss, the dating, all these different businesses and we’re doing it and there came a point where I stopped getting fulfilled by just doing the business and I didn’t know what it was. I started going through this slump. I didn’t feel the momentum, didn’t feel the progress. I was like, ugh. I didn’t feel it and that transition is because eventually you can’t keep growing in that immersion. Because eventually you’ll see the connections, you’ll see everything, you’ll be going through this immersion and then you will…. I don’t know how to say it, not that you’ll become perfect ever, but you’ll become more perfected in that thing. Where it’s hard to squeeze a lot more oranges to get any juice out of it, to really fill you up. And that’s what I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, that’s where you transition from this growth, to the only way you can keep growing is transition into contribution. And this is where entrepreneurship is born. This is where you realize the only way for me to actually keep sharing this and to keep having that juice is to start contributing and giving back and sharing with other people. And what you find is insane. As soon as you take this path and this gift, this thing you’ve been geeking out on and immersing yourself on and become obsessed with, you start sharing it, that juice starts flowing again. It’s like the next wave and it’s so fulfilling. That’s why I’m doing an hour long podcast instead of focusing on the road and listening. That’s why for me right now, I started listening to, when I start doing personal development and growth and start learning and studying, as I do that I start shaking because this is good. I’m getting juice, but if I could share this with other people I’d be getting ten times what I’m getting now. That’s why I publish so much, that’s why I share so much. It’s because that contribution will fill you up more than the growth will eventually. But first you gotta fill up. Again, you gotta become unbalanced so you can become who you need to be. But after you’ve hit that point, and you’ll know it because you can’t get the same thing out of it, until you start contributing. And that’s logically where you start shifting to contribution. That’s when you start becoming obsessed with the marketing. That’s when you start geeking out there. That’s the key you guys, that’s what it’s like. At that point, you don’t care about the money. This is what I talked about a few podcasts ago. The people who struggle are the people trying to make money. When you’ve been geeking out on a thing and have filled yourself up and now you’re shifting to contribution, you do not care about money. I could not care less about money at this point in my life. It’s fun, it keeps track, it’s how we know that we’re doing well. It’s such not a driving force, you can ask…..I do not have logins to my bank accounts. I have no idea what’s in there. My accountant, I’m always like “Hey can I buy this?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. I have no idea.” My wife, I don’t have access to my bank accounts, personal, business, anything. I do not know what’s in there. I don’t want to know. It means zero to me at this point in my life. The only thing that means anything to me now is contribution. That’s what fires me up. That’s the state you gotta enter business and entrepreneurship in. Those are the people who are successful. The come in like, “This thing that I have, this gift, this thing. I’m so passionate about it, I have to figure out how to share it with other people.” Then guess what’s going to happen? Then it’s going to be easy to become obsessed with the marketing because the marketing is the means for you to get your message out, for you to get your product and your service out. All the sudden it becomes exciting. I think that’s why I struggled in school so much. I would learn and read a book and it didn’t matter to me. If you’re going into marketing and you’re struggling, this marketing, I’m learning this stuff. I learned about squeeze pages, traffic and conversion but you don’t care. It’s because it’s like school. I study a thing and I write a paper but I don’t care about this paper, there’s no point to it. If you’re struggling studying the marketing it’s because there’s no point to it. But as soon as you find your thing and you obsess with it and you’ve grown and filled yourself up and shift to contribution, now when you start studying it, the marketing becomes alive. It lights up and becomes alive again. I remember, I always thought I was dumb. I hated reading, I hated studying, I hated school, I hated all those things and honestly, I thought I was a dumb kid. I started my business and started selling these little things, it was crazy because I was selling some stuff and I was not doing that well. I remember it was pre-podcasts, but everyone used to do tele-seminars back when I got started. I would download all these tele-seminars and I would listen to them. Guys like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian, those are the guys I listened to. Marlon Sanders, these are the guys I listened to initially. And I would listen to them on my headphones. I would burn these tele-seminars onto cd’s and put the cd’s in and listen to them while I was on my wrestling trips and I would learn stuff. They would say stuff and I’m like, “That’s so cool. I’m going to go try that.” And I’d try it and the craziest thing would happen, I would try something. I was making a little bit of money and then I’d try something and make more money. I was like, are you kidding me, that freaking worked. I gotta try something else. I listened to another tele-seminar and I would try it and are you kidding me, that freaking worked! And then another one and I was like, that guy wrote a book. I’d read his book and I’m like, I’m going to try it. And then guess what happened? I’d make more money. My thing would go out to more people and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And all the sudden reading became alive for me, studying became alive for me, marketing became alive for me. I remember copywriting I was like, one of my first websites I set up and I didn’t have a sales letter and someone’s telling me about this copywriting thing and I was like, are you kidding me? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not going to write words, I don’t want to learn that. I remember just being angry because I didn’t want to learn copy. It sounded so boring and stupid. Anyway, I tried to hire a copywriter, and the copywriter, it was actually Michael Thornton was the first copywriter I tried to hire and his quote for me at the time was 8 or 10 grand or something and I was like, “Whoa! I haven’t made that much money in my entire life combined at this point.” So then I tried to read a book on copy and again, it was horrible. I read it and I was like this sucks. I had to write my very first little sales letter. So I wrote it and then it was crazy because it made money. So then I started listening to some copywriters and the guys like, I remember it was Michael Thornton actually, I was listening to this presentation he gave at this big seminar and he was like, “We tested this thing and it turns out that a red headline out converted a blue one.” So I changed my headline to red and sure enough it out converted. I was like, what the crap? Okay, what else does this guy got? I remember he tested a brown background, it did better in this thing. So I’m going to do a brown background. So I did a brown background and sure enough it out converted. I’m like are you kidding me? Then he said to try a new headline, his headline swipe file had all his headlines. So I tried four or five headlines and one of them dramatically beat the other one. I was like, what? I changed the headline and I doubled my income. Normal humans, if they want to double their income, guess what they gotta do? A doctor would have to go back to like 16 more years in medical school to specialize and double their income, work another 15 years and then maybe they would. I changed 13 words on a headline and all the sudden guess what? Copywriting became alive for me. It got exciting and all the sudden I want to read every freaking copywriting book I can find, because I’d read through and most of it was garbage or rehashing stuff but I’d read one sentence that was like, “Oh, you should end each line with a dot, dot, dot. Because it keeps the readers mind open and doesn’t close out the thought and they’re more likely to keep reading.” I was like, what? So now to every single email and every single thing I’ve ever written, I add a dot, dot, dot, you’ve probably noticed that before. Guess what happened? Everything increased. And I started going to marketing seminars. I’d go to a five day seminar and listen for five days and every single speaker who is talking, I knew everything. I’ve done that, knew that, heard that, rehash, rehash and then one speaker on day 6 would say one thing where he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one time I added an exit pop where I gave a discount and 20% of the people took the exit pop.” I was like, wait, what? So I go back to my thing and add an exit pop and my income would increase by like $100,000 a month. From that one little thing. I remember I was like, I sat through 5 days of crap and got that one thing and it was so huge for me that it made the whole thing worth while. Or I would be at an event, got nothing and I’d go out to eat with everybody and I’m the Mormon dude, everyone goes to the bar and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the bar, I don’t want people to think I’m drinking. So I’d go to the bar, and I’m not joking, I’d order milk because I didn’t want people to think…..if I ordered a sprite people might think I’m drinking and I
If you’re not as successful yet as you’d like to be… I know why. This episode I went off on a 96 minute rant that’ll get you back on track. On today’s special road trip edition of the podcast Russell talks about some exciting events coming up, some personal development rules he follows, and why it’s okay for people to outgrow Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to look forward to in this episode: The viral video by the Harmon Brothers and the kind of party that is planned for it. Why Russell thinks studying, learning and geeking out on the marketing of your product is the key to success. Why it’s okay to be greedy in the initial stages of your business. How building and growing a business is similar to making, being pregnant with, and birthing a baby. What the 3 steps toward personal development that Russell follows are. Why you need to be willing to take risks. What some Clickfunnels clients are doing that they shouldn’t and why Russell is a little pissed off about it. And much, much more. So listen here to hear this extra long, extra informative and extra exciting episode of Marketing Secrets. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a special edition, a road trip version, edition, whatever you want to call it of Marketing Secrets podcast. I feel like we’re going old school, for our long time friends and followers, this is like a Marketing In Your Car. But I’ve got a long drive ahead and I want to welcome you guys to the podcast. Alright, alright everybody. I just started a super long road trip heading to Burley, Idaho. It is my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday. So we’re heading down to the big birthday party. Isn’t that crazy, 100 years old! It’s really, really fun. My wife and kids actually left a day and a half ago. I had to get some stuff done, so now I’m heading down for the big party. So basically I have a two hour road trip and was heading out the door, super excited and I’m totally unprepared. I forgot my camera to record podcasts, I forgot my little ear buds, I forgot my sunglasses. Oh well, what can you do? I forgot my battery charger for my phone, oh well I’m still excited. So I’m heading down and I’ve got some time to talk to you guys. So I wanted to share some cool things. First off, one thing we’re working on is, as you’ve probably heard, we’re about to launch our viral video with the Harmon Brothers. They’re the guys that did Squatty Potty and Poopourri and all the other awesome things. What’s funny, everyone asks me, “Oh I want to hire them too, their stuff is awesome. How much does it cost?” and I think people think the quote is going to be like 10 or 15 grand or something, but it’s actually half a million dollars to hire them to do a 3 minute video for you. It’s not cheap. So we paid a lot of money to get this video created and then I was like man, most people do a video and then they launch it and it kind of just, you hope it goes well and sometimes it does, but I’m like, if we’re going to launch it, I want as much oompf behind it as humanly possible. So I was like, we need to do a launch party. So that was kind of the first thought, but how do we do a launch party? I’ve never done one before but it’s gotta be just kind of like a regular party. Well maybe we should get some cool speakers, some cool influencers and affiliates out here, so who would be cool to have? Oh Gary Vaynerchuk would be cool. He’s not speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, but he’d be a really cool fit for this event. So we called him up, he said yes. We had to pay him about 100 grand to get him to come to Boise to speak. But we’re like where in Boise is actually cool enough to host an event like this? There’s not a lot of cool hotels. So the Boise State football stadium, the big Skybox there, is kind of cool and hold 3 or 400 people. So we’re like, cool we’ll do this. We rent the Skybox, but who are we going to invite. We need to make this really, really cool. I think it was Alex Charfen told me this, it might not have been him, but I think it was. Basically said that entrepreneurs like to create events out of everything to make it memorable for them and for everybody else. So I was like, we need to make a big event. So anyway, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can invite our affiliates, that’ll be kind of fun, we’ll invite a bunch of them. But who else can we invite that can share this video? We can invite people that aren’t necessarily our affiliates, just other influencers that if they share the video it would dramatically boost it. So okay, let’s do that. So we set up this event, I was going to speak, Harmon Brothers were going to speak, Gary was going to speak, then we start reaching out to influencers and they’re like, “We don’t really care about people speaking. We want a party.” And we’re like, it’s going to be kind of a fun party. We’re all fun people. They’re like, “No we need a real party.” So we’re like, how do we throw a real party? So we started just kind of brainstorming and what came out of the brainstorm was what if we rented out the actual football stadium and tried to play bubble soccer, that’d be kind of fun. What if instead of playing bubble soccer, what if we tried to play the biggest game of bubble soccer ever? What if we had the Guinness Book of World Records come and…. Anyway, that was kind of the initial crazy thought and then Dave was like, “I’m going to figure out how to make this work.” So Dave spent the next two weeks on the phone getting the Guinness Book of World Records, and then getting Boise State to let us come, and all the licensing fees and it’s been this insane project. So we got all that done. We don’t have any influencers who have kind of, we’re in this thing with a lot of money. We have no influencers actually coming. So then I was like, okay, I have to go old school. Practice what I preach. So the last two days I’ve sat in this car and recorded almost 200 videos, personalized videos for all these influencers, which was a lot of work. We made a page, 200 pages for 200 different influencers and now Monday, we’re in the process of contacting all of them and inviting them to this huge party. Anyway, it’s been crazy and none of them may come, but hopefully they will. But regardless it’ll be a fun party. We’re going to set a world record, we’re going to launch a viral video and that’s one of the many things we’re doing. We also have 12 events in the next 43 days happening in Boise. One of them just got done so it’s actually down to 11. Monday we have a design-a-thon where we’ve got 30 designers coming out and we’re busting out a whole bunch of new templates for the Marketplace that’s launching during the new onboarding, everything’s going live in Clickfunnels when the viral videos hits and about a billion other things. It’s crazy. The next 45 days will probably be the most stressful, crazy days of my life. But if we can pull it off, it’s going to be nuts. I keep saying that, I did the same thing with the book launch. I think there’s something about me, I think something’s wrong, the wiring in my head where I always think that after this life will get normal again. But then I just keep stacking things on. I think part of it is just momentum, it’s hard to get momentum for a lot of people. But when you have momentum you don’t want to slow down, you want to keep riding the wave. So I feel like I’m 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame and I’m enjoying the ride and I don’t want to slow down, so I’m like, we just keep rolling stuff out. We’re launching a new book, the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, this month. It’s crazy. If you guys could see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, I don’t think you’d actually believe it. Funnel Hacker TV, we started filming that because we wanted to show people, but that’s still just a glimpse, it doesn’t come close to everything that’s actually happening. It’s nuts. Alright, so for you guys I wanted to share, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this last night as I was working super late. I was like, why am I here? It’s been two nights that I’ve been here until like 2:30 in the morning and I’m loving it. Outside of hanging out with my kids, there’s nothing else I would rather do than that. And I’m like, how do I get people to where they’re this passionate about what they do and their business and what they’re selling? I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the number one trait I found between entrepreneurs who are successful and those who aren’t and the biggest trait is that the ones who are super successful, they’re the ones who are extremely passionate, not just about their product but about the marketing of their product. They start geeking out on the marketing. That’s the key. Those who obsess with the marketing are the ones who have the most success, which is why for me it’s been a big deal, that’s why I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book and the Expert Secrets book, and why I do the events. All the stuff I do is because my goal is to get you guys, I want to make marketing and sales fun. If this is something that you guys, if I could make this the entertainment. To study and learn and geek out on the marketing, then that’s been my mission on this earth. Because when I was learning this stuff, it was exciting for me but honestly it was kind of boring. The people teaching and talking about marketing, yawn, they were boring and I had to wade through a lot of boring crap and now I’m trying to make it exciting. I’m trying to bring my raw passion to you guys and I hope I’m doing my job. I’m doing my best. Because if you get pumped up and fired up about the marketing of your thing, then that’s how you get the ability to make money, free yourself, and give you the ability to not just make the money but impact more people and serve more people and that’s the goal. So I’m thinking, outside of me just everyday trying to get you guys pumped and excited and fired up about how much fun the marketing of your thing can be, I was thinking about this last night, how do I just take that part of my brain out and shove it into your brain so you’re fired up. I started thinking about it and I think the key for someone to be truly passionate about the marketing and the selling of their thing, they first have to be truly passionate about their thing. Because you think about that, I talked a little bit about this in the Expert Secrets book, initially you don’t wake up, well I did, but I think most people don’t, maybe that was my gift of whatever. But most people don’t wake up excited, “I’m going to learn how to do marketing!” It’s not the thing that pumps people up. But there’s something else that happens, there’s something that you got excited about in your life. It could a book you read, it could be audio, could be video, could be just a weird thing, I don’t know. Whatever it is that your thing is. Everyone has their thing, your thing is something. So your thing that got you pumped up, whatever that was, I want you to think about that because that’s the key that unlocks everything. First you get excited about that thing because it’s exciting to you. You go through this time of growth. You start studying it and you learn and geek out and start growing and growing and growing and growing and at first it’s honestly kind of a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s the dude from Wallstreet say? Greed is good. Initially it is, I think. Not long term, but short term greed is good. Greed is what gets you to unbalance your life in a way initially, not long term but initially. Initially you have unbalance your life to focus on a thing to have greatness come. When I met my beautiful wife and I wanted to fall in love with her, for me to be successful in that I had to be greedy. I had to shift all my time and all the other stuff I was doing and other people and other things. I had to unbalance my life to focus everything on that relationship so that we could fall in love and get married. The same thing happened with business. The same thing happened with wrestling. When I started wrestling, I had to be greedy about that thing. I had to get so unbalanced in every other thing in my life and just focus on that thing, because that’s what it takes to be great at anything, right. That raw passion. So first, the greed of that thing, of you desiring that thing is what initially starts. Some of you guys it was weight loss, some of you guys it was Biohacking, some of you guys it was finance, some of you guys it was history. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you geek out about. So the greed of the excitement that you feel initially for that thing is what makes it so you can completely unbalance your life and absorb and go into that thing. That’s the first key because to be an expert, to be able to share your message, all those things we talk about and to actually care about the marketing about your thing, you’ve got to be ridiculously passionate about the thing first. Otherwise you’re not going to wade into this territory, you’re going to go through all the pain of being an entrepreneur and getting that thing out into the world. Because I know a lot of us paint this beautiful picture of entrepreneurship and it is eventually, but initially it’s not. Initially it sucks. Initially you have to go through so much. It’s like giving birth. My wife has given birth to 5 kids, 4 times, one time was twins. Giving birth is not pleasurable. The initial thought of it, that creates the baby. That’s pleasurable just like your business, the thought of it is exciting. You’re romantic about the thing you’re going to create. Sorry, my jeep is super loud when I go into overdrive. Anyway, that’s pleasurable, we all enjoy that. I enjoyed what it took to get my wife pregnant, that’s awesome I enjoyed what it took to create the seed of Clickfunnels and the business, right. That part’s fun, and then after the romantic side happens, for pregnancy there’s nine months of pain for the woman. My wife, I watched her go through this 4 times. She gained weight, she felt horrible, she felt sick, she was throwing up. Business is the same way, after you go through the romantic part, now it’s painful. You have to work hard and you can’t sleep and you have to deprive yourself of friends and family and life and all the pleasures in life to birth this thing that you have. And most people give up during the birthing process, because it sucks. With a baby you got no option, the baby’s coming whether you want it to or not, but the birthing of a business and to be an entrepreneur, it’s so painful most people don’t make it through it. They always say that 1 out of 100 businesses succeed, but the reality, 1 out of a million businesses never even get to fruition because the idea is planted, but the birthing of the thing never happens because it’s so painful. So if you’re not obsessively, insanely passionate about your thing, I’ve got to break it to you, it’s going to be hard to birth it. Those hard times come and it sucks. So I think that not only do you have to become passionate about the market, because I’m trying to make that part fun, so the birthing process is actually fun. Maybe I’m the equivalent of the hypno-birthing class. My wife and I did hypno-birthing for the last kid, which was actually really cool. We did classes and they tried to make it really, really fun. So maybe I’m the hypno-birthing coach. Trying to make the process of birth fun for you even though you know it’s still going to suck. But maybe you can have a good time along the way, you should, it is really fun. But I was like, if you’re going to go through that birth process, you have to be so excited about the baby, that’s the key. My wife and I were so excited about the twins, we were so excited for the other kids and that’s why she was willing to endure that pain because we were so passionate and excited about the kids. So for you, it starts with before you can be an entrepreneur, before you can birth this thing, you have to be insanely passionate about your thing. And there are people who will tell you otherwise. “No, it’s math…blah blah.” I don’t know, I think you can make money without passion, but you can’t leave a legacy, you can’t do what’s really important without it. So my next phase of this, we got a long road trip, you guys. I hope you don’t mind. But the next phase of this is how you become passionate about this thing? You’re like, Russell I see you. You’re jumping around, excited, screaming every single day, but I wake up in the morning and I’m tired. I wake up in the morning and I don’t always feel that passion. And I get that. I want to share some stuff, this is maybe personal development, according to Russell. I don’t teach personal development, I probably never will, but I have my thoughts on it, I have my feelings. So I do a lot of it myself. So I’m going to give you, during our road trip together, some of my thoughts and the personal development stuff that I had to go through and we have to go through and hopefully some of these things will help. So number one, the first thing is all of you guys, you’ve got to quit being so bleh. That’s the official term for it, bleh. My daughter, she puts on this little monster mask, it’s so cute and then she’ll go “bleh.” That’s what most of you guys are doing. If I ask you what you’re working on, you’re like, “Bleh.” You’ve got to be excited, if you’ve listened to the podcast, probably three hundred episodes ago I did one talking about being awesome. People always ask you, “How are you doing?” and everyone goes, “I’m alright. I’m doing okay.” First off, if you’re doing okay, it means your life sucks. You need to stop it. “I’m doing okay.” My kids, I told them, when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you never say I’m doing okay. I’m doing good. Good is the enemy to great. If you’re doing good, that’s not a good thing. If you’re going to change the world you can’t be like, “I’m doing good. It’s alright.” Notice this, everyone will ask how you’re doing and you’ll always say doing good. First thing to change, you are no longer doing good. You are doing awesome, all the time. My kids, if you ask them, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” If you ask me, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” You need to reprogram your brain from “I’m doing alright.” To being awesome. When people ask you that from now on, this is rule number one, you have to say you’re doing awesome. It may seem like a dumb thing, but you will see how it changes people around you. “How you doing?” “I’m doing awesome.” They’re like, “Really. Huh, nobody ever says that.” If you say you’re doing good, bleh. You just did that, bleh. You pulled an Ellie, a monster Ellie. Ellie’s my daughter that does that, bleh. So no more bleh’s. You’re doing awesome. And if you don’t feel awesome, guess what the first step to feeling awesome is? Saying that you’re feeling awesome. Okay, that’s number one. Number two, stay in control. If you ever go to a Tony Robbins event, which you should, if you don’t you’re insane. I’m not allowed to say yet, but he may be hanging out with us at our next Funnel Hacking Live event. But regardless, you should go to at least UPW. You get to walk on fire and hopefully have a chance to go to Date with Destiny as well. If you really want to have a shift in your life, Tony is the person that will take you and shift you. That’s why I don’t teach personal development because Tony is the best in the world and I couldn’t do better, even remotely close, so I’m not even going to try. If I felt like I could I probably would go and try to serve that market, but Tony’s the best, so I’m not going to. So I leave it to Tony and also Brendon Burchard, Brendon’s the man. Tony and Brendon, those dudes will shift yourself, personal development wise, so go and study them. Tony especially, because walking on fire is insanely cool. But one of the main things you learn in Date with Destiny is a thing called state control. So state is the thing that you are in as you are doing something. Sometimes you’re in a happy state, and a bleh state. Most of us we live our lives in a bleh state. You have to learn how to change your state like this. The coolest thing I learned from Tony is that I actually control the state I’m in. I don’t think most people understand that. You control the state you’re in. You can change it, you can be depressed or be happy, you can change it that fast. When I learned that and became aware of it, it was insanely cool. I would have a long horrible day at the office. I’d be beat up and tired, worn out, come home and as most people do, I could walk through the door and be like, bleh. Be a bleh dad. But I was like, no. I don’t want to be a bleh dad. So I walk in tired, beat up, angry sometimes, frustrated, all the crap you go through sometimes during the day, I get to the door and I say, I could either walk in and be a bleh dad, or I can change my state. What am I going to do? I’m going to freaking change my state. So I do what Tony Robbins talks about, there’s three things he calls the triad. I make these three shifts in my life, my physiology, my focus, my meaning, I shift those things and boom, that fast I walk in and guess what? I’m not a bleh dad, I’m a freaking awesome dad. I have fun with my kids, I play with my kids, and they’re going to remember that. When I walk in the office, some days I haven’t slept for more than an hour. I walk into the office and guess what I feel like? I feel like I want to die sometimes, I’m so tired. I walk in and could be like, bleh. But guess what happens if I walk in at state, guess what happens to all the people around me? They will match my state, because I’m the leader. If I walk in like bleh, they will all become bleh. This is the official term by the way, it’s bleh. So if I walk in bleh, they’re all going to be bleh. If I walk in at a freaking ten, they are all going to rise to my level, to my state. State control is huge. You can control your own state, but the other cool thing is that you can control the state of the people that are around you. People always come to our office and they’re like, “Is it always like this?” the answer is yes. Why is it like this? It’s because I’m freaking setting the pace when I walk in during the day. I walk in knowing that the pace that I set, everyone’s going to match me at that pace. If I come in bleh, they’re going to be bleh. I work with other companies, and partners and friends and people and what’s interesting, we will work with employees of a business owner and whatever the state of the business owner is, and you know that by seeing their videos and all their stuff, the entire company matches that state. It’s insane. So if I want to dominate the world, I gotta learn to change my state. So understanding state control is huge and so much more simple than you think. Tony Robbins talked about, go to UPW. There’s three things, he calls it a triad, there’s three things that are involved in state control. I’ll kind of go through these, I’ll probably just slaughter them, so go study Tony. Worst case, go to YouTube and type in “Tony Robbins State Control” or something, I’m sure you can get some videos of him teaching it as well. But the triad, there’s three things you gotta change. The first thing is your physiology. You’re body, this amazing gift that God has given us functions and drives everything. Have you ever notice that depressed people look depressed? Bleh. Sad people what do they do? They look sad. They’re body matches and mirrors how they feel. So a lot of times you think, “I’m sad, that’s why my body’s like this. My shoulders are drooping because I’m bleh.” Sometimes, because your body’s drooping, that’s why you’re sad. Just changing your physiology, changing your state, how you hold your body, will actually change how you feel. It’s insane. He talked about a group of people who were clinically depressed, not just I’m depressed, I’m sad, clinically depressed. They were in a clinic, they were in rehab because they had such bad depression. They took this group of like 50 clinically depressed people and took them off all their depression medication, which all medication really does is change your state. Changes our physiology, honestly we’ll talk about that in a minute, but it takes them off all their meds and makes them stand in front of a mirror for thirty minutes a day, with their shoulders back, smiling. Even if it’s a fake smile, or angry, makes them smile for thirty minutes. Guess what happened? Just by changing their physiology and forcing themselves to smile for 30 days, every one of the people who had clinical depression were healed. They were miraculously saved from their depression. Now there are times when, I have friends and family members that deal with depression, so I’m not short changing that, but I promise you that by shifting your physiology you can shift everything. It’s huge. I’ve seen people who are depressed shift their state, shift their body and they get un-depressed. It’s crazy. So if I want to be in a happy mood, if I want to be in a good state for my kids, my wife, my whatever. If I’m going to a meeting or whatever, the state, how I hold my body has a ton to do, 50% of how I enter a room has to do with the outcome of what’s going to happen. That’s not scientifically proven, that’s just what I’m guestimating based on what happens. That’s a big thing. So figure that out. How do you control your body? Look at what depressed people look like and if you hold your body in a way that depressed people hold their body, you’re going to be depressed. If you hold your body the way sad people hold it, you’re going to be sad. If you hold it in a way of the happy people, you’re going to be happy. Look right here right now, do I look happy? The reason why I’m doing this, if you watch Funnel Hacker TV, “Why is Russell so excited?” Because when I’m in an excited mood, I feel better, I get more done. I get people around me to raise to my level of vibration and they get excited as well. There’s this weird thing, and this is scriptural, for those that are the church going folk, and those who aren’t it doesn’t even matter. Light cleaveth to light and dark cleaveth to darkness. One of my coaches, Tara Williams talks about this all the time, vibes, vibrations. People like, “He’s got a good vibe, she’s got a good vibe.” Sense the vibration. And if you think of this like tuning forks. Let’s say you have a tuning fork here and you want to, if you hit two tuning forks next to each other, they will eventually match their vibrations. There’s a high pitched one, a low pitched one, they will meet in the middle because vibrations match. Light cleaveth to light, dark to dark. The same thing happens with you. If you come in and you’re a tuning fork and your vibration’s high, people are going to suck you down to their level and you’ll be depressed. Or you’re going to come in and freaking just blow your mind with the level of energy and vibration and everybody will rise to you. You have to understand that. They’re either going to suck you down, or you’re going to rise up. That’s one part of state control, is understanding that your body has so much to do with it. Now that you understand that, how else can you control your body? This is why us nerdy, entrepreneur, biohacking people talk about the importance of our body. Alex Charfen at the Pirates Cove mastermind said that “for any of you entrepreneurs that aren’t treating your body like a professional athlete, you’re insane. You’re doing things that professional athletes aren’t. You’re trying to accomplish things that they can’t even fathom. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’re insane.” It’s true, what you put into your body effects your physiology. When I eat crap, guess how I feel? Crap. People always ask me why I take so many supplements. Because different supplements I take effect my physiology. I have rules with my supplements. Most of you all know, I’m a Mormon, therefore I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t do alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, any other crazy stuff, I don’t do a lot of these, but there’s some supplements that I do take because they affect my physiology. I do take some caffeine, because caffeine affects you physiology. You take it, it increases your energy. Your physiology changes, it helps me get into state faster. There’s other supplements I take, I could go days on supplements, but there’s things I take because they affect my physiology. There’s things I don’t eat because they affect my physiology. If you look at how I eat, I usually don’t eat breakfast. The reason why is breakfast typically makes me feel sluggish and tired, my physiology goes down. I usually eat one huge meal a day. When I’m at the office Melanie makes me this huge salad, it’s got high fats, tons of vegetables, I eat it and there’s almost no carbs outside of the carbs inside of vegetables because carbs make me feel sluggish and tired. I don’t want to feel tired. So I just eat the vegetables meats and fats because that keeps my energy, my physiology good. When I’m at home, if I’m going to eat junk, typically I eat it at the end of the night, when I’m about to go to bed, because at that point I don’t care about my physiology, I’m going to fall asleep. But I don’t eat at dinner, I usually won’t eat all the other nice stuff. I’ll go and pick the veggies, the meat off, whatever my wife makes and I’ll eat that because I know that if I eat the rice and the carbs, stuff like that, guess what happens? My physiology drains and I’m going to be a worse dad for my kids. I know how it works. So if I want to stay in peak state for my kids, I have to stay in, I gotta keep my physiology going, so I’m very careful of what I eat. Sometimes, I’m not as good as a lot of my biohacking buddies, sometimes I just screw up, and if my physiology…this is probably the bad thing. This is the negative of personal development. But if I eat something and feel like crap, I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap. I’m going to feel like crap no matter what, I might as well make my taste buds feel good.” So then I go all out and if I have a bad day, I have a really bad day. Because I’m physiologically jacked anyway, let’s have some fun. Anyway, there you go. Alright, that’s number one. Number two side of the pillar of Tony’s triad is shifting what you focus on. Have you noticed that depressed people focus on depressing things? Have you noticed that happy people focus on happy things? But Russell, there’s so much sad things happening in the world. I know there is, but guess what I don’t focus on? The sad things that are happening in the world. Guess what I don’t watch? The freaking news. Want to know why? Because the news focuses on depressing things. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t listen to depressing things. I try to focus on people and things that get me pumped up. I listen to podcasts of people that inspire me, that get me excited. I read things that get me excited. I focus on stuff that gets me excited. In business, crappy stuff happens every single day and I tell you what, when you go from a million dollar company to a 10 to 100, the level of crappy crap that comes up everyday exponentially increases. They say, someone told me the other day that every three months an entrepreneur’s focus with decisions could either make or break them. That’s true when you’re running a million dollar business. When you’re running a hundred million dollar a year business that happens a lot more often. I would say probably every three hours. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of crap that hits me in the face every single day and if I focus on the negative, I would be in a state of depression right now. I have to look at it and I’m like, “Oh, that sucks. Alright, this is the answer.” And I turn my back and run from it. I do not focus on it for more than 5 seconds, otherwise I will lose my state. What are you focusing on? A lot of you guys get overwhelmed and get stressed. Do you not think I get overwhelmed? I have 12 events happening in the next 47 days. We’re doing the biggest launch in the history of the freaking internet. We’re re-doing the complete onboarding process, I just wrote a new book in the last 30 days. It’s not a tiny book, it’s a freaking cookbook, it’s a 500 page cookbook. We’re doing a design-a-thon in two days. If you knew how much stress I have on my plate. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure most people would crack under the pressure. I’m shocked that I haven’t yet, but the reason why is because I keep moving on. Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in the history of wrestling. Well maybe not the greatest anymore, but he is the legend. He is the Michael Jordan of wrestling. So Dan Gable, someone asked him one time, because he went through all of college never losing a match. His very last match he lost, he got so pissed off that he went and started training for the Olympics and he actually became an Olympic champion and not a single person scored on him. And what’s crazy is while he was training for the Olympics, it’s so crazy. The Russians actually said, they came out publically and said, “We are going to train an athlete with the only goal to beat Dan Gable from the Americans.” And Dan Gable was like, “No, I’m the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived, no one’s going to beat me.” So what did Dan do? He would work 7 hours a day, working out 7 hours a day preparing for the Olympics, then he’d go to bed at night. Then as he’d go to bed at night, he laid there in bed saying, “The dude in Russia who is trying to beat me is awake and training right now. And that pisses me off and freaks me out.” So what did Dan Gable do? He woke up at midnight and he’d go running. Because he knew that his opponent was competing, was training and it stressed him out knowing that his opponent was awake while he was sleeping. He did not like that so he got up and kept working out. Is that obsessive? Heck yes. Did he crack under pressure? No, he went to the Olympics and won. Not a single person scored a point on him. That’s Dan Gable. Now someone asked Dan Gable, I heard this in an interview one time, they said, “Dan don’t…” and afterwards Dan went on to become the head wrestling coach of Iowa Hawkeyes and won more NCAA championships in a row than anyone in any sport, I believe. Anyway, insane. And someone asked Dan Gable, “Don’t you believe in pressure?” and Dan’s like, “Yeah, I believe in pressure, it’s everywhere. The difference is that most people sit underneath the pressure and they sit on it. I believe in it, I just don’t put myself underneath it. I step aside and I focus on what I need to get done.” And most of us, it’s that same way. I don’t know about you guys, sometimes I have so much stress and so much pressure, I’m about to crack. Then half of that is just in our heads. So I’ll sit down with a pad of paper, especially at night when I can’t sleep, I sit with a pad of paper and write down what I’m stressing on. I write all those things down, when you write it down it’s like, oh that’s actually not as bad as I thought. And then you can fall asleep, get yourself out of the pressure. Sometimes we’re focusing on all pressure and stress and all this stuff and that’s why we don’t succeed. Don’t do that. Write it all down, prioritize it and be like I can’t control what I can’t control. I’m going to move forward out of the pressure. Go. And sometimes I don’t get crap done. I’m sure that all the stuff I have to get done between now and our viral video launch, most of it is not going to get done. A lot of it will, most of it will. But sometimes you can’t affect it, so you do whatever you can and as you get closer and closer to deadlines all of the non essentials fall away and then you get the essentials and that’s how the game’s played. Alright, this is fun, we’ve been going 32 minutes you guys. I hope you’ve been having fun. I don’t know where I left off. Physiology, shift your physiology. Number two, what you’re focusing on and then number three, what’s the meaning. I think number three is meaning. If not I’ve been teaching this wrong, or thinking about it wrong. Number three is the meaning we’re attaching to things. A lot of times something bad happens to us and we attach these weird meanings to it. And we, it’s really cool, we have this unique ability as humans to attach meanings to things, right. And usually what happens is subconscious; we don’t know that we’re doing something right. If someone punches you in the face, subconsciously our body attaches a meaning to that. So this person is mad at me, we attach the meaning, I need to fight….sorry, let me step back. Someone punches us, right. Our meaning maker attaches this meaning to the thing. That person is mad at us, we must fight them back. So I go and try to fight someone. Or someone punches us and maybe the meaning is this person is going to kill me, that’s the meaning we attach so then we run away. There’s all sorts of things. Every single day, something is happening and we’re attaching these meanings to it and these meanings direct where we’re going with our thoughts and actions and everything else. But as soon as you’re aware of this, you can actually change the meanings that are coming to you. I actually don’t know if this is part of the triad, it may not be. I can’t remember now. Go YouTube Tony Robbins. Regardless, I want to talk about meaning, because meaning is a big thing. When you’re aware of this it’s kind of cool because now it gives you the ability to kind of shift meanings. So when somebody, we’ve had some morons, and they are morons, this week that have been attacking Clickfunnels and at first I got so mad I want to kill them and fly to their house and beat them, because that’s the wrestler in me. My body attaches a meaning to what they’re doing. But then what’s cool is Tony taught me this technique where you stop and say, okay, what if that’s not the meaning they’re attaching, what if it’s actually this meaning? You shift the meaning that maybe they’re attaching and if you shift the meaning associated with an experience, it’ll change your perspective, which changes everything. So we gotta become good at consciously picking the meaning we’re attaching to things. If someone screws us over we can attach a meaning saying “That person is a horrible person trying to screw me over.” But if you attach that meaning, be careful. Because as soon as you attach that meaning to something, guess what happens? Now the situation you enter, the state you enter is going to be based on that meaning and it can get really bloody and get really bad and things can turn really bad, which is going to increase all these other pressure, noise and other bad stuff. But if you come in and say, “Look, that person is a total douche bag,” I don’t know if I can say that on TV. I apologize if I can’t. Anyway, that person is a horrible person, but maybe their having a bad day today. Maybe they’re struggling, maybe financially, whatever. You attach a different meaning to the situation, then you come and you’re like, man that person screwed me over, but this is probably why he did it. Or why she did. If you attach that meaning it gives you a different set of tools to deal with the situation. So what happens now in my life, if something happens and instantly a meaning is attached by my brain and what I’ve found is that most of the times that the instant meaning that’s attached, is going to leave me in a really negative path. It’s weird how it works. So too often I run down that negative meaning and bad things happen. So I try to consciously stop and try to take the exact opposite. I remember Tony at Date with Destiny he does this thing, he says, “Find an experience in your life that pissed you off.” For me it was something with my wife, and my wife was at the event then, sitting separate, so she was sitting four rows ahead of me and there was an experience and they said to write down the experience, so I wrote it down. They said, “Write down all the meanings you attached to that experience.” I was like, “My wife is mad at me, she doesn’t love me.” I wrote down all these different meanings that I had attached to that situation. And then Tony said, “Write a big line down the side of the paper and next to each of the meanings you attached to that situation, I want you to write the exact opposite of that thing.” So I was like, “My wife is mean to me, but on the other side, she actually loves me. My wife is super selfish, no she is actually so giving that she struggles.” So I wrote the exact opposite of each of the meanings that I had attached to the situation. But what’s crazy is after handwriting out probably three or four of the things, I started crying. I started crying because I realized, I love my wife and I know her, and I realized the true meaning of what happened in that situation, was actually the exact opposite of the meaning I had attached to it. I instantly realized that I was in the wrong and she wasn’t. I broke down crying because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Where else in my life is this happening? Where I’m attaching these meanings subconsciously to a thing and I’m actually wrong?” I realized that day that I have to take control of my meaning maker, the meaning I’m attaching to every single situation. So something happens now and instantly I get the negative meaning, it just happens that’s in our brains wiring for some stupid reason. I stop and I’m like, what’s the opposite of that, what’s something that if I could attach a different meaning would make me look at this person through a different angle, a different lens, a different light? I shift the meaning and it shifts everything. It shifts how I feel about the person. It shifts how I approach them, it shifts the response. It changes everything. I wish I could say I am perfect with this, I am not. If you’ve ever been on the back end of a backlash from me for stuff, I apologize. Because I’m, I can be a prick sometimes. I didn’t realize this until the other day. We have a contractor, he was killing himself for us, and I imagine it’s got to be a pain in the butt working with me sometimes. Because I’m vocal, I’m on TV, I’m on Instagram, I’m ranty and ravy and talking about everything. And without thinking I kind of shared publicly my thoughts and part of it’s because I’m a media personality. If I came out like bleh all the time nobody would listen. So I’m usually on the extremes, I’m extremely happy or extremely upset because that’s what’s interesting. So I feel bad because I published stuff that was negative towards that person. And the other day it was kind of brought to my attention, “Wow, Russell this person is really working his butt off for you and you’re saying these things.” And I had this moment again where I kind of broke down and I was like I’m a bad person sometimes. And the meaning I was attaching to all these situations was like, they’re lazy, they don’t care, they’re not working hard enough, or whatever. I’m attaching all these meanings and I had this fun little moment where I had this exercise where I was like, okay, if I switch the meaning, what’s actually happening? And I was like, oh man, I’m a jerk. I realized it again, so I reached out personally and apologized and I don’t know if it’ll make it better or not, but I was wrong. I’ve had other situations this week where again there’s this person who’s honestly, it’s always the people you help the most. It’s someone I helped a lot, to have a lot of success, I bent over backwards for them and now they’re publically attacking me and us. It’s just….it’s funny, the meaning, even now, the meaning I want to attach to it wants to come in there. I’m like, no stop. Get out of my brain. Because I know, I know the reason why this person is being a douche bag. I’m going to use that word, I apologize. I know the true meaning. It’s not the one that makes me feel better about myself, which sucks because that one makes me feel so much better about myself. But it’s the truth. So I’ve tried to attach that meaning to it, even though every time I think about the situation, my blood’s boiling just thinking about it again. But I gotta go back to the meaning that I attached on purpose. So the more you guys are aware of this the more you can affect. That’s a big part. There’s number two in personal development. So where have we gone this far? So far we’ve talked about not being bleh. We talked about shifting your state in the circumstance. We talked about shifting the meaning you’re attaching to things. Alright so here’s a couple of things. Yes, we’ve been going for 40 minutes, but I still got another hour and a half drive, so we’re going to keep on talking. It’s like on Wedding Singer, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, do you remember when he’s all depressed after his girlfriend gets married on him and he’s hosting the wedding party and he’s telling all these jokes? And the one guy’s like, “Hey wedding singer, you’re the worst wedding singer I’ve ever heard.” And he looks at him and he’s like, “Well I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.” One of my favorite lines ever. That’s how I feel right now. I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say. I guess you can turn me off, hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you can hear me. This is car is so loud when we’re driving. I hope this is coming through because I think there’s some good stuff in here for people. Alright, next thing. We talked about being not bleh, we talked about getting in state, we talked about meaning, these are pieces to help you function better as a human being. I always tell people how much of an impact Tony Robbins had on me. It’s because he made me aware of these things and there’s so many more. I wish we could go to UPW. Go walk on fire. I think you can get a ticket for $500 to a thousand bucks. If you are broke and don’t have the money, go get a credit card and finance it. If you’re broke, you’re going to become more broke. Who freaking cares? At this point, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re going to go bankrupt? Dude, you’re broke, it doesn’t matter. It always blows my mind when people are like, “I don’t have any money, I can’t invest.” Then you have nothing to lose. Go take out a loan. Go take out five loans, who cares? Worst case scenario is you lose it all. If you have nothing, then you have nothing. I taught the cub scouts, the 12 year olds, I did an entrepreneurship merit badge and one of the guys asked, “how old do you think these kids should start?” I was like, “They should start now. I got a dozen friends who are teenagers who are making insane amounts of money.” The guy who asked said, “Just so all you kids know, you have nothing. If you lose it all you didn’t lose anything, so who cares?” Anyway, it always makes me laugh because people are like, “you can risk a lot because you have money to risk.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s way easier to risk when you’re broke.” Worst case scenario you lose everything, but everything is like rent on an apartment, but that’s not that big of a deal, you guys. When you’ve got 150 employees whose lives depend on you, I promise you it is a lot scarier to risk at that point. Nevertheless, I digress. Where was I going? I don’t even remember. Hopefully there was something in there of value. Okay, what I want to talk about here is you gotta risk. You’re creating this thing, you’re giving birth, you’re going into this thing…..Oh I remember what I was talking about. I was talking about investing in UPW and talking about being broke. Yeah, go to UPW, go to Date with Destiny. Invest in these events because it’ll transform you, it’ll help you to become super aware of yourself and other people. That’s what Tony gave me that was so important to me. Most of us live life on autopilot and we’re just going through the day bumping into things and things are happening and you’re just not aware of how we work. When you’re aware of how you work, it’s like now you can affect things, change things, tweak things. I can change my approach, I can change other people’s approach. For me it’s been huge to understand me and people better. So yeah, go to those things it’s worth it. There you go. I have a friend down in Australia, his name’s Mal Every, I don’t know why this just popped in my head but he says, “I don’t have a problem with you if you’re broke, but I do have a problem if you stay broke. There’s too many opportunities in this world. If you stay broke, it’s because you’re not trying.” You’re literally not trying. Anyway, I don’t know why I said that, but it popped in my head therefore it must have been important. Alright, the next thing I want to talk about. If you want to be successful in life the next piece outside of not being bleh, and figuring out state control and attaching meaning to the right things, the next thing is you have to stop dabbling. Stop freaking dabbling. School has screwed up all of us. School has taught us how to dabble. You sign up for college, you take 20 credits, 20 cool things that you want to learn about. What they do is they spoon feed you and force you to dabble over a semester. So they give you a little bit of information in math, you spend 50 minutes. Then you go to the next class, here’s a little bit of science, a little bit of history. So you dabble in a whole bunch of little crap and you try to remain and retain all this stuff and then you go back the next day and you dabble a whole bunch and you dabble and you dabble and you dabble for like 15 years of our life. Let there be no mistake. You will never be hyper successful if you are dabbling. Dabbling is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to be successful. If you want to be successful in something, you have to go deep, you have to immerse, you have to be obsessed with that thing. I guarantee you the people I’m competing against right now in our business, the reason why we are kicking the crap out of all of them is because they are dabblers. I promise you, there’s not one of my competitors that spent as much time in the last 48 hours, in the last week, in the last 5 weeks studying marketing and business and growth and personal development as much as I have. And for most of them, we’re already way past them, so why in the world, why are they not…..? I don’t know. But they’re dabbling and that’s why I’m able to pass them. When you start immersing and you go deep, a couple of really cool things happen. First off, you will start seeing connections that you cannot see when you dabble. I sucked in school because I could never see the connections. I spent an hour in history, an hour in math, then an hour in debate, then an hour in logic, I’m trying to figure out how to make the connections. Unless you go deep in something, you can’t do it. The reason why I’ve written two books is not, yes I like writing books, yes I like sharing it. When I write a book, I have to go in such deep immersion that I start seeing these connections that you don’t, you can’t see when you dabble. When I started writing the Expert Secrets book, I was doing a whole bunch of things. Some things consciously, some things subconsciously and as I started focusing on this book and trying to make a really, really good book, it forced me to read and study and geek out and immerse myself in a whole bunch of different things and through that process, I was not dabbling, I was immersing. I don’t know if it’s God, if it’s your brain, but when you immerse yourself, I feel like the reward for that, all these connections that you don’t normally see, all the sudden start being open to you. Howard Berg told me, he’s the world’s fastest reader. He said when he goes to do a topic, most people read a book and they form their opinion based one book they read. He’ll read 30-40 books to get a really clear view of the reality of the situation. This is what 30 authors have said and you get a very clear view of it. And that’s how I feel about immersion. When you immerse yourself and you go and listen, study, read, you really geek out and become obsessed in your thing. I don’t know if it’s your brain, God or the universe, whatever you want to attribute it to, I know who I want to attribute it to. But he opens up pathways, he opens up connections for you and lets you see a whole picture and that’s your reward for immersion. So that’s the next step in this you guys, you have to stop dabbling. So first off, the first phase in this comes back to you being greedy. The first phase is figure out this thing you want to be obsessed with. Maybe it’s not the marketing yet, and that’s okay. Because phase one is about being greedy and mastering it for yourself and becoming who you need to be to serve the world that you’re trying to serve. So go and now is the time to become unbalanced. In the bible, well if you listen to this song, I think it was…who was it? A time for every season, there’s a time under heaven for everything. A time and a season for everything, right. This is your season to immerse in your craft and become the best in the freaking world in your craft. Again, there’s a time and a season, this is the time and season right now for you to do that, for you to immerse yourself. So that’s phase number one and that’s going to give you the ability to become who you need to be. And you’re going to become completely unbalanced. Your work life, your social life, your family life is going to become unbalanced during that period of time, but you’re going to be able to immerse yourself, you’re not going to dabble. You’re going to unbalance and become awesome at your thing. And then there will be a transition phase where you’re going through and becoming so passionate about it, where there will be this weird time where all the sudden, I don’t know what it is, you can’t get filled up anymore. For me, I was doing all this marketing for all of our businesses and companies. We were doing the Neuropathy product, the weight loss, the dating, all these different businesses and we’re doing it and there came a point where I stopped getting fulfilled by just doing the business and I didn’t know what it was. I started going through this slump. I didn’t feel the momentum, didn’t feel the progress. I was like, ugh. I didn’t feel it and that transition is because eventually you can’t keep growing in that immersion. Because eventually you’ll see the connections, you’ll see everything, you’ll be going through this immersion and then you will…. I don’t know how to say it, not that you’ll become perfect ever, but you’ll become more perfected in that thing. Where it’s hard to squeeze a lot more oranges to get any juice out of it, to really fill you up. And that’s what I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, that’s where you transition from this growth, to the only way you can keep growing is transition into contribution. And this is where entrepreneurship is born. This is where you realize the only way for me to actually keep sharing this and to keep having that juice is to start contributing and giving back and sharing with other people. And what you find is insane. As soon as you take this path and this gift, this thing you’ve been geeking out on and immersing yourself on and become obsessed with, you start sharing it, that juice starts flowing again. It’s like the next wave and it’s so fulfilling. That’s why I’m doing an hour long podcast instead of focusing on the road and listening. That’s why for me right now, I started listening to, when I start doing personal development and growth and start learning and studying, as I do that I start shaking because this is good. I’m getting juice, but if I could share this with other people I’d be getting ten times what I’m getting now. That’s why I publish so much, that’s why I share so much. It’s because that contribution will fill you up more than the growth will eventually. But first you gotta fill up. Again, you gotta become unbalanced so you can become who you need to be. But after you’ve hit that point, and you’ll know it because you can’t get the same thing out of it, until you start contributing. And that’s logically where you start shifting to contribution. That’s when you start becoming obsessed with the marketing. That’s when you start geeking out there. That’s the key you guys, that’s what it’s like. At that point, you don’t care about the money. This is what I talked about a few podcasts ago. The people who struggle are the people trying to make money. When you’ve been geeking out on a thing and have filled yourself up and now you’re shifting to contribution, you do not care about money. I could not care less about money at this point in my life. It’s fun, it keeps track, it’s how we know that we’re doing well. It’s such not a driving force, you can ask…..I do not have logins to my bank accounts. I have no idea what’s in there. My accountant, I’m always like “Hey can I buy this?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. I have no idea.” My wife, I don’t have access to my bank accounts, personal, business, anything. I do not know what’s in there. I don’t want to know. It means zero to me at this point in my life. The only thing that means anything to me now is contribution. That’s what fires me up. That’s the state you gotta enter business and entrepreneurship in. Those are the people who are successful. The come in like, “This thing that I have, this gift, this thing. I’m so passionate about it, I have to figure out how to share it with other people.” Then guess what’s going to happen? Then it’s going to be easy to become obsessed with the marketing because the marketing is the means for you to get your message out, for you to get your product and your service out. All the sudden it becomes exciting. I think that’s why I struggled in school so much. I would learn and read a book and it didn’t matter to me. If you’re going into marketing and you’re struggling, this marketing, I’m learning this stuff. I learned about squeeze pages, traffic and conversion but you don’t care. It’s because it’s like school. I study a thing and I write a paper but I don’t care about this paper, there’s no point to it. If you’re struggling studying the marketing it’s because there’s no point to it. But as soon as you find your thing and you obsess with it and you’ve grown and filled yourself up and shift to contribution, now when you start studying it, the marketing becomes alive. It lights up and becomes alive again. I remember, I always thought I was dumb. I hated reading, I hated studying, I hated school, I hated all those things and honestly, I thought I was a dumb kid. I started my business and started selling these little things, it was crazy because I was selling some stuff and I was not doing that well. I remember it was pre-podcasts, but everyone used to do tele-seminars back when I got started. I would download all these tele-seminars and I would listen to them. Guys like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian, those are the guys I listened to. Marlon Sanders, these are the guys I listened to initially. And I would listen to them on my headphones. I would burn these tele-seminars onto cd’s and put the cd’s in and listen to them while I was on my wrestling trips and I would learn stuff. They would say stuff and I’m like, “That’s so cool. I’m going to go try that.” And I’d try it and the craziest thing would happen, I would try something. I was making a little bit of money and then I’d try something and make more money. I was like, are you kidding me, that freaking worked. I gotta try something else. I listened to another tele-seminar and I would try it and are you kidding me, that freaking worked! And then another one and I was like, that guy wrote a book. I’d read his book and I’m like, I’m going to try it. And then guess what happened? I’d make more money. My thing would go out to more people and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And all the sudden reading became alive for me, studying became alive for me, marketing became alive for me. I remember copywriting I was like, one of my first websites I set up and I didn’t have a sales letter and someone’s telling me about this copywriting thing and I was like, are you kidding me? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not going to write words, I don’t want to learn that. I remember just being angry because I didn’t want to learn copy. It sounded so boring and stupid. Anyway, I tried to hire a copywriter, and the copywriter, it was actually Michael Thornton was the first copywriter I tried to hire and his quote for me at the time was 8 or 10 grand or something and I was like, “Whoa! I haven’t made that much money in my entire life combined at this point.” So then I tried to read a book on copy and again, it was horrible. I read it and I was like this sucks. I had to write my very first little sales letter. So I wrote it and then it was crazy because it made money. So then I started listening to some copywriters and the guys like, I remember it was Michael Thornton actually, I was listening to this presentation he gave at this big seminar and he was like, “We tested this thing and it turns out that a red headline out converted a blue one.” So I changed my headline to red and sure enough it out converted. I was like, what the crap? Okay, what else does this guy got? I remember he tested a brown background, it did better in this thing. So I’m going to do a brown background. So I did a brown background and sure enough it out converted. I’m like are you kidding me? Then he said to try a new headline, his headline swipe file had all his headlines. So I tried four or five headlines and one of them dramatically beat the other one. I was like, what? I changed the headline and I doubled my income. Normal humans, if they want to double their income, guess what they gotta do? A doctor would have to go back to like 16 more years in medical school to specialize and double their income, work another 15 years and then maybe they would. I changed 13 words on a headline and all the sudden guess what? Copywriting became alive for me. It got exciting and all the sudden I want to read every freaking copywriting book I can find, because I’d read through and most of it was garbage or rehashing stuff but I’d read one sentence that was like, “Oh, you should end each line with a dot, dot, dot. Because it keeps the readers mind open and doesn’t close out the thought and they’re more likely to keep reading.” I was like, what? So now to every single email and every single thing I’ve ever written, I add a dot, dot, dot, you’ve probably noticed that before. Guess what happened? Everything increased. And I started going to marketing seminars. I’d go to a five day seminar and listen for five days and every single speaker who is talking, I knew everything. I’ve done that, knew that, heard that, rehash, rehash and then one speaker on day 6 would say one thing where he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one time I added an exit pop where I gave a discount and 20% of the people took the exit pop.” I was like, wait, what? So I go back to my thing and add an exit pop and my income would increase by like $100,000 a month. From that one little thing. I remember I was like, I sat through 5 days of crap and got that one thing and it was so huge for me that it made the whole thing worth while. Or I would be at an event, got nothing and I’d go out to eat with everybody and I’m the Mormon dude, everyone goes to the bar and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the bar, I don’t want people to think I’m drinking. So I’d go to the bar, and I’m not joking, I’d order milk because I didn’t want people to think…..if I ordered a sprite people might think I’m drinking and I
My cliffnotes from Earl Nightengale's speech, The Strangest Secret. On this episode Russell talks about the book, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale. He goes into detail what the book is about and what it means to him. Here are some of the strange things you will hear in this episode: Why the opposite of courage isn't cowardice, it's conformity. Why conformity has caused the majority of the population to not be financially independent. And how we become what we think about. So listen below to find out what the Strangest Secret is and why. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Behind Your Desk. My commute from my house to my office is like 10 seconds now so I don't know how to keep Marketing In Your Car, we may have to change the title or something. But I'm here and I've got something cool for you guys. So when we moved from the office, we moved our books all onto one really cool bookshelf. As I was putting up all the books I was like, “I want to read this book and this book.” So as I've been coming in I've been grabbing different books. So today I grabbed, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale. And I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this book but it's the beginning, the foundation of the personal development industry. I'm pretty sure he wrote this book, I think it was a record back in the day, and then that's what sprouted out all personal development. So it's kind of like the beginning. I just heard a beep in the office, do you think it's the fire alarm. Oh crap, good thing Steven is packing heat, my body guards here packing heat. He's literally on his elbows crawling out to go kill somebody and protect us from imminent danger and doom. Anyway, while he's trying to kill these people I'm going to give you guys a message about the Strangest Secret. First off, if you haven't read this, the book is like 15 pages, so you can read it in a very short period of time or you can try to find the record. I wonder if I can find the record on Ebay, that'd be cool. Anyway, in this book he's talking about the fact that….well he's talking about, and this is written way back in the day, this is a long time ago. But he's talking about how if you look at people that are over 65 that at the time, there were 14 million people. Of that 14 million, 13 million were broke and relying on other people. He said it's amazing that by the time that you're seven you learn how to read, you can make a living by the time you're 25, but the majority of people by the age of 65 had not learned to be financially independent. That's crazy, how is that not happening? And then he talked about what's the definition of success? And he said the definition of success is not that you achieve something, but the definition is the pursuit of that. So the pursuit of something is success. So it says the only man who succeeds is the man who is progressing, realizing a worthy ideal. So if you're pursuing something, that's the definition of success. It's not so much that you have it, it's that you're going forward. I should almost just read you guys the whole book, it'd only take 15 minutes. Probably less than that actually. But I don't want to spoil the surprise. I want you guys to go and find it on Ebay or Amazon or whatever and get it. It'll be worth it. Anyway, he's talking about, the next chapter is all about goals. He says, the key here is goals, setting goals and moving towards those goals. He talked about how if you take a boat with the crew and captain and they say, this is where we're going, 99.99% of the time, they get there. If you took a boat, took the crew off and the captain and just set it on the harbor and pushed it out, 0% of the time, would it ever get there. Yet, that's how most people function their life. They wake up and they're walking and stumbling and things like that. One thing, I don't know if I can find it real quick in here. He said, it was super cool….This is what he said, that society was not set up to keep people from winning. Society was set up to keep people from losing. It's like, if you look at the American society it doesn't really care if people are winning or whatever, it's trying to set it up so people don't lose. So it becomes super simple. It's easy to get a job. It's easy to make enough money to survive. And he says why do people not succeed? The reason why people don't succeed is because they conform. The conforming is the opposite of success, which is so interesting. So it's not, I wonder if I can find the quote right here where he said it? “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, a lot of people think that the opposite of being encouraging and going forward is being a coward. No, it's not. The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, its conformity.” So it's conforming to the world around us. Conforming to that and then, he said, the government, the world way it's structured is to protect people from failing, that's why everything is so easy. Because of that we have to conform to do that. So then 99% of the population conforms. People get jobs so they cannot fail, so they can get a steady paycheck or whatever that means. It's not just for money, but for anything in life. I think about wrestling, let's say you're doing sports. It's way easier to kind of go through the motions than it is to try and win. So there's conforming and doing the normal whatever anyone is doing is the lowest thing. Anyway, it's hard to tell a book that you just barely read. Anyway, it kind of goes on from there. Success and goals and he said this is the key to success. The key to success, we become what we think about. Let me say that again, we become what we think about. And then he goes through and starts talking about all these different quotes from different people. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” William James “A great discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their life by altering the attitudes of their mind.” He's got quote after quote after quote all these people. Shakespeare, “Our doubts are traitors that make us lose the good we oft win by fearing to attempt.” On and on. All these things come down to, we are what we think about all day long. And that is the Strangest Secret. That's kind of the key. So at the very end it says, “We become what we think about. That is the strangest secret in the world. Now why do I say it's strange and why do I say it's a secret? Actually it isn't a secret at all, it the first..” there's a big word that not in our vocabulary now a days, “ the first ‘something' by some of the earliest wise men and it appears again and again throughout the bible, but every few people who have learned it, understand it and that's why it's a secret and for some equally strange reason, it virtually remains a secret.” So kind of the message of this book and hopefully this podcast for today, is a couple of things. First off, it's what are you thinking about? What's the goal? What's the thing you're driving towards every single day? And if you don't have that you're just like the boat that's wandering and going to crash. And the second part of this is understanding that just conforming to the standard is the reason why the majority of the population by the time they're 65 have not learned financial independence. 65 years is not how long, it shouldn't take that long to learn and master financial independence. You should learn that earlier in life, but because it's easier just to conform and just to slip back to doing the status quo. And just doing what it takes to not lose, which is what our whole society is built upon. Most people go that way. So for you guys here listening to this podcast, I know that's not what any of you guys want. So it comes back down to setting a goal. What do you want? Where are you going? Having a very clear path and thinking about it, visualizing and figuring out how to get there. If you, man, low and behold you get there. Like I said, it's weird that 99.99% of the boats that set a destination get there, same with airplanes. There's a tiny fraction that crash and burn, but mostly if they've got a direction and a destination they're going, they get there. And I think it's the same thing for you guys, if you've got that. What's your destination? Where are you going? If you've got that and you're thinking about it and it becomes the thing you're looking for, you'll get there. And it's not that hard, you just gotta think about it and then work to make that thing become a reality. So that's what I got for today you guys. The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale, I think they said that this where the secret, the movie The Secret, came from. Which, that movie is a little cheesy, not going to lie. Conceptually it's pretty cool. But then it's like, I just remember the one scene when the guys like, “Yeah, I thought about, I wanted a coffee and someone brought me some coffee.” That's not what this is talking about, that's stupid. This is talking about what do I want in my life? And I want to be able to see it visually and then I go and chase it. For me, I remember when I got started in this business, 13, 14 years ago now, I saw people ahead of me. For me, my first mentors were like, Armand Morin and John Reese, Marlon Sanders, Jonathon Mizel. These are the guys that I saw initially and I saw what they were doing and I was like, that's what I want. I need that. I gotta figure that out. And it wasn't easy. Conformity is easy. And it's not what they say. I mean it's not easy, but it's worth it. That's definitely the thing. Same thing, that was my goal. So I started looking what Armand was doing. I was modeling him. If you look at my first 3 or 4 sites, they were identical to Armand's. I funnel hacked him as close as humanly possible. My sites, Armand always had a picture of his head on the header, so I always had a picture of my head on the header. I just modeled him identical because it was Armand. That's who I wanted to be like. I had a vision and that's where I was going. And then at my very first big seminar, that's the first time I saw people speak and sell from stage and I was like, “holy crap.” I remember seeing this dude get on stage and he does his pitch and people run to the back of the room and I was doing the math, he made 50 thousand dollars in 90 minutes. I saw the next guy and the next guy. They did 130 thousand dollars in sales. Thing after thing after thing. I was like, “I don't know how to speak. I'm scared to death of people and getting on stage. But that thing, that skill, I gotta learn that.” So that became the destination. For the next three years of my life I learned how to speak and sell from stage. It was hard. It was not easy. It was embarrassing. The first ten or fifteen times I got on stage I did my pitch and nobody would move. That's humiliating. It sucked, it was so embarrassing. But I knew where I was going, so I'm like, “I gotta get there because that skill, if I can get that skill, holy crap that'd be cool.” So I stood up in front of 100 people, 500 people, 600 people and I did the thing. And then I crashed and burned. I was so embarrassed. I remember, I think I told you this before. The first time I was so embarrassed because usually when you speak all the other speakers that are selling from the stage will be like, “Hey, how did you do? What were your numbers? How many did you close?” So I did my pitch and nobody bought. It was like the walk of shame to the back of the room. Everyone was waiting, just not running to the back and buying. I was so embarrassed and I didn't want to talk to the other speakers, the promoter, the other attendees, I was humiliated. So I went to my room and I still remember, I had never before rented a movie on TV in a hotel room before, so I went to the movie section and I started movies. And I watched movies for 3 days. Every movie that was there that I felt comfortable watching, I watched. I remember ordering coconut shrimp and Haagan Dazs ice cream every hour on the hour. I was like, “I'm not going anywhere. I'm not leaving this place. I want to eat.” Because it was so humiliating. But I knew where I wanted to go. I knew the destiny. I gotta figure this thing out because people are doing it and they can't be that much smarter than me. I'm sure they're more talented than me, but they can't be that much smarter than me. I just gotta figure it out. So I kept doing it and doing it and eventually I got to that destination. So for you guys, find the destination, set the goals, think about it all the time, go read the Strangest Secret. It's literally a 5 minute read. It'll take you less time to read than it was to listen to this podcast. That's all I got you guys. With that said, I appreciate you all, have a great day and we'll talk soon.
My cliffnotes from Earl Nightengale’s speech, The Strangest Secret. On this episode Russell talks about the book, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale. He goes into detail what the book is about and what it means to him. Here are some of the strange things you will hear in this episode: Why the opposite of courage isn’t cowardice, it’s conformity. Why conformity has caused the majority of the population to not be financially independent. And how we become what we think about. So listen below to find out what the Strangest Secret is and why. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Behind Your Desk. My commute from my house to my office is like 10 seconds now so I don’t know how to keep Marketing In Your Car, we may have to change the title or something. But I’m here and I’ve got something cool for you guys. So when we moved from the office, we moved our books all onto one really cool bookshelf. As I was putting up all the books I was like, “I want to read this book and this book.” So as I’ve been coming in I’ve been grabbing different books. So today I grabbed, The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale. And I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of this book but it’s the beginning, the foundation of the personal development industry. I’m pretty sure he wrote this book, I think it was a record back in the day, and then that’s what sprouted out all personal development. So it’s kind of like the beginning. I just heard a beep in the office, do you think it’s the fire alarm. Oh crap, good thing Steven is packing heat, my body guards here packing heat. He’s literally on his elbows crawling out to go kill somebody and protect us from imminent danger and doom. Anyway, while he’s trying to kill these people I’m going to give you guys a message about the Strangest Secret. First off, if you haven’t read this, the book is like 15 pages, so you can read it in a very short period of time or you can try to find the record. I wonder if I can find the record on Ebay, that’d be cool. Anyway, in this book he’s talking about the fact that….well he’s talking about, and this is written way back in the day, this is a long time ago. But he’s talking about how if you look at people that are over 65 that at the time, there were 14 million people. Of that 14 million, 13 million were broke and relying on other people. He said it’s amazing that by the time that you’re seven you learn how to read, you can make a living by the time you’re 25, but the majority of people by the age of 65 had not learned to be financially independent. That’s crazy, how is that not happening? And then he talked about what’s the definition of success? And he said the definition of success is not that you achieve something, but the definition is the pursuit of that. So the pursuit of something is success. So it says the only man who succeeds is the man who is progressing, realizing a worthy ideal. So if you’re pursuing something, that’s the definition of success. It’s not so much that you have it, it’s that you’re going forward. I should almost just read you guys the whole book, it’d only take 15 minutes. Probably less than that actually. But I don’t want to spoil the surprise. I want you guys to go and find it on Ebay or Amazon or whatever and get it. It’ll be worth it. Anyway, he’s talking about, the next chapter is all about goals. He says, the key here is goals, setting goals and moving towards those goals. He talked about how if you take a boat with the crew and captain and they say, this is where we’re going, 99.99% of the time, they get there. If you took a boat, took the crew off and the captain and just set it on the harbor and pushed it out, 0% of the time, would it ever get there. Yet, that’s how most people function their life. They wake up and they’re walking and stumbling and things like that. One thing, I don’t know if I can find it real quick in here. He said, it was super cool….This is what he said, that society was not set up to keep people from winning. Society was set up to keep people from losing. It’s like, if you look at the American society it doesn’t really care if people are winning or whatever, it’s trying to set it up so people don’t lose. So it becomes super simple. It’s easy to get a job. It’s easy to make enough money to survive. And he says why do people not succeed? The reason why people don’t succeed is because they conform. The conforming is the opposite of success, which is so interesting. So it’s not, I wonder if I can find the quote right here where he said it? “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, a lot of people think that the opposite of being encouraging and going forward is being a coward. No, it’s not. The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, its conformity.” So it’s conforming to the world around us. Conforming to that and then, he said, the government, the world way it’s structured is to protect people from failing, that’s why everything is so easy. Because of that we have to conform to do that. So then 99% of the population conforms. People get jobs so they cannot fail, so they can get a steady paycheck or whatever that means. It’s not just for money, but for anything in life. I think about wrestling, let’s say you’re doing sports. It’s way easier to kind of go through the motions than it is to try and win. So there’s conforming and doing the normal whatever anyone is doing is the lowest thing. Anyway, it’s hard to tell a book that you just barely read. Anyway, it kind of goes on from there. Success and goals and he said this is the key to success. The key to success, we become what we think about. Let me say that again, we become what we think about. And then he goes through and starts talking about all these different quotes from different people. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” William James “A great discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their life by altering the attitudes of their mind.” He’s got quote after quote after quote all these people. Shakespeare, “Our doubts are traitors that make us lose the good we oft win by fearing to attempt.” On and on. All these things come down to, we are what we think about all day long. And that is the Strangest Secret. That’s kind of the key. So at the very end it says, “We become what we think about. That is the strangest secret in the world. Now why do I say it’s strange and why do I say it’s a secret? Actually it isn’t a secret at all, it the first..” there’s a big word that not in our vocabulary now a days, “ the first ‘something’ by some of the earliest wise men and it appears again and again throughout the bible, but every few people who have learned it, understand it and that’s why it’s a secret and for some equally strange reason, it virtually remains a secret.” So kind of the message of this book and hopefully this podcast for today, is a couple of things. First off, it’s what are you thinking about? What’s the goal? What’s the thing you’re driving towards every single day? And if you don’t have that you’re just like the boat that’s wandering and going to crash. And the second part of this is understanding that just conforming to the standard is the reason why the majority of the population by the time they’re 65 have not learned financial independence. 65 years is not how long, it shouldn’t take that long to learn and master financial independence. You should learn that earlier in life, but because it’s easier just to conform and just to slip back to doing the status quo. And just doing what it takes to not lose, which is what our whole society is built upon. Most people go that way. So for you guys here listening to this podcast, I know that’s not what any of you guys want. So it comes back down to setting a goal. What do you want? Where are you going? Having a very clear path and thinking about it, visualizing and figuring out how to get there. If you, man, low and behold you get there. Like I said, it’s weird that 99.99% of the boats that set a destination get there, same with airplanes. There’s a tiny fraction that crash and burn, but mostly if they’ve got a direction and a destination they’re going, they get there. And I think it’s the same thing for you guys, if you’ve got that. What’s your destination? Where are you going? If you’ve got that and you’re thinking about it and it becomes the thing you’re looking for, you’ll get there. And it’s not that hard, you just gotta think about it and then work to make that thing become a reality. So that’s what I got for today you guys. The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale, I think they said that this where the secret, the movie The Secret, came from. Which, that movie is a little cheesy, not going to lie. Conceptually it’s pretty cool. But then it’s like, I just remember the one scene when the guys like, “Yeah, I thought about, I wanted a coffee and someone brought me some coffee.” That’s not what this is talking about, that’s stupid. This is talking about what do I want in my life? And I want to be able to see it visually and then I go and chase it. For me, I remember when I got started in this business, 13, 14 years ago now, I saw people ahead of me. For me, my first mentors were like, Armand Morin and John Reese, Marlon Sanders, Jonathon Mizel. These are the guys that I saw initially and I saw what they were doing and I was like, that’s what I want. I need that. I gotta figure that out. And it wasn’t easy. Conformity is easy. And it’s not what they say. I mean it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. That’s definitely the thing. Same thing, that was my goal. So I started looking what Armand was doing. I was modeling him. If you look at my first 3 or 4 sites, they were identical to Armand’s. I funnel hacked him as close as humanly possible. My sites, Armand always had a picture of his head on the header, so I always had a picture of my head on the header. I just modeled him identical because it was Armand. That’s who I wanted to be like. I had a vision and that’s where I was going. And then at my very first big seminar, that’s the first time I saw people speak and sell from stage and I was like, “holy crap.” I remember seeing this dude get on stage and he does his pitch and people run to the back of the room and I was doing the math, he made 50 thousand dollars in 90 minutes. I saw the next guy and the next guy. They did 130 thousand dollars in sales. Thing after thing after thing. I was like, “I don’t know how to speak. I’m scared to death of people and getting on stage. But that thing, that skill, I gotta learn that.” So that became the destination. For the next three years of my life I learned how to speak and sell from stage. It was hard. It was not easy. It was embarrassing. The first ten or fifteen times I got on stage I did my pitch and nobody would move. That’s humiliating. It sucked, it was so embarrassing. But I knew where I was going, so I’m like, “I gotta get there because that skill, if I can get that skill, holy crap that’d be cool.” So I stood up in front of 100 people, 500 people, 600 people and I did the thing. And then I crashed and burned. I was so embarrassed. I remember, I think I told you this before. The first time I was so embarrassed because usually when you speak all the other speakers that are selling from the stage will be like, “Hey, how did you do? What were your numbers? How many did you close?” So I did my pitch and nobody bought. It was like the walk of shame to the back of the room. Everyone was waiting, just not running to the back and buying. I was so embarrassed and I didn’t want to talk to the other speakers, the promoter, the other attendees, I was humiliated. So I went to my room and I still remember, I had never before rented a movie on TV in a hotel room before, so I went to the movie section and I started movies. And I watched movies for 3 days. Every movie that was there that I felt comfortable watching, I watched. I remember ordering coconut shrimp and Haagan Dazs ice cream every hour on the hour. I was like, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving this place. I want to eat.” Because it was so humiliating. But I knew where I wanted to go. I knew the destiny. I gotta figure this thing out because people are doing it and they can’t be that much smarter than me. I’m sure they’re more talented than me, but they can’t be that much smarter than me. I just gotta figure it out. So I kept doing it and doing it and eventually I got to that destination. So for you guys, find the destination, set the goals, think about it all the time, go read the Strangest Secret. It’s literally a 5 minute read. It’ll take you less time to read than it was to listen to this podcast. That’s all I got you guys. With that said, I appreciate you all, have a great day and we’ll talk soon.
Are you guilty of this team creation shortcoming?
Welcome to another episode of the Real Fast Results Podcast. I'm so pleased you are here! I have a very special treat for you. I have a good friend and a mentor of mine, Mr. Marlon Sanders, on the line. We are going to talk about something that's really important for the longevity of your business--that is creating evergreen products. In other words, information products that sold five years ago, ten years ago, and they'll sell fifteen years into the future. They are evergreen. These are great types of products to focus on within your business. Not only will your product be evergreen, but the potential to sell that product and profit from that product long-term also exist. I'm all about leveraging your time and your efforts to get the most bang out of the least amount of effort. Focusing on evergreen types of products, are a really great way to do that. And a master of this is Marlon Sanders. Why Evergreen Products? Here's the thing that people need to know: We all got into this business because we would rather trade our products for money than we would our own personal time. However, if you have to keep creating new products in order to do that, you're kind of in a rat race. It's like being on a treadmill because you created the product, you launched it, two weeks later the sales are dead and now you're having to create another product. I'm not criticizing that, but imagine this. This is a future state. Imagine that you have a product that you created ten years ago and you're still getting paid for it. You have a product you created five years ago and you're still getting paid for that. You have a product you created six years ago, you're still getting paid for it. That's the beauty of evergreen products. Because now: you can relaunch them if you set them up right, these products can sell literally for years Product creation itself has changed because the market has morphed and changed. Trying to combine launches today and having a successful launch today with an evergreen product, that's a little bit of a trick. Those are the topics that we want to discuss today. I want t break it down as much as I can. Step By Step Overview On How To Create Evergreen Products We'll review the steps in brief and then detail each one. Step number one is to find timeless topics. If you're doing a topic that is going to be dramatically different six months from now, then it's going to be really hard to have that as an evergreen product. Nonetheless, there are certain topics that are incredibly timeless. Step number two is nailing the product format. What format do you deliver on, that allows it to sell long-term? This is something that's really huge and it's something most people don't know and don't do. Step number three is what's selling today? How do you combine this with what you can launch today and what's selling today? Those are the three basic steps that we'll break down into more detail. Step 1 - Timeless Topics Technology Topic Concerns One of the things that sort of comes to mind for some people is, "Well, what if I'm in a tech industry or what if I'm in some industry that doesn't necessarily lend itself well to an evergreen topic?" I believe that in just about every industry you're going to find topics that are more evergreen than others. It's all relative, and we'll compare it to a chess game. Static Advantage In chess, when you study the theory of chess, there are advantages during a game that are called static. Meaning they'll last the whole chess game. It's a static advantage, right? You're up a rook. It's a static advantage. They're not getting a rook back. You're up a rook the whole rest of the game. That's a static advantage. It stays the same. Not forever in chess, but for that game that you're playing. Dynamic Advantage Then you have dynamic advantages. A dynamic advantage in chess is when you have it right now on the board. Their pawn is backwards. There's an open file that you can seize. There's a combination you can take advantage of. That is a changeable dynamic, very short-term advantage. The thing is that the game that you play with tech topics, is more like chess. The nature of that game is shorter than the game. Maybe it's in internet marketing, but you still have static plays within whatever the parameters of that game are. That's how I would look at that, and I would try to identify the things within the tech field that are more static than they are dynamic. Another idea to mention to people who have the "tech topic" as a concern is, "What is the variable in this puzzle that doesn't change?" Generally that's a human being. If there's some aspect of your product that deals with human psychology, human behavior, human looks, anything like that, those tend to be more evergreen topics. As a machine, humans don't change from generation to generation like computers do. Finding Timeless Topics It's amazing how much things change and how much they don't change. If you study books and magazines from the very early 1900's, there are ads and products you could take from then, that would still sell today. It's amazing how much things don't change. For example, back in the early 1900's a popular product was about memory. You would think that today with iPhones and iPads that people wouldn't still buy memory courses, memory training and memory books, but guess what? They do. You go down to Barnes and Noble. You go to the self-help section, and what are you going to find books on? How to improve your stupid memory. They were selling that in the 1800's. You pick up that book on how to improve your memory, and the methods in it were invented around the 1700's. It's the same method. You go back and you study. You think, "This is the same stuff." They probably taught it better in the 1700's. It's amazing how much things change and how much they're the same. Character analysis back then was a big thing. Analyzing people, analyzing people using many of the same exact methods, very similar to the way they are taught today. There are so many more. The subject of motivation. Hypnosis. Great in the 1800's and 1900's about hypnosis. My friend still sells the hypnosis stuff today. Joe Vitale and Steven Jones sell more hypnosis audios than you can fathom. There isn't anything new about it. They've been doing hypnosis since the 1900's and before. Another piece to look at is what are things that have sold long-term? How about analysis? Selling analysis. People have been buying personality analysis, business analysis, literally since the early 1900's. What's an analysis? What's the value of an analysis? An analysis is going to be evergreen. People perceive value in an analysis. There are all of these timeless topics, and yet within them obviously things are updated and changed, so you're living in both worlds. You have a foot in the past and a step in the present and kind of a third foot going into the future. Or, eyes going into the future. In step one we're hitting on the evergreen topics. Yet, you're also trying to get in touch with what aspects of those topics people are wanting to buy now. If they don't want to buy it right now, then it's not going to sell. Therefore, it's updated with current angles and so forth. It's still something that's going to sell over time. There's a bit of a balance there and a bit of an art. On a side note, if you're looking for evergreen topics and evergreen content within your niche, make sure to download show number two: Publishing And Profiting From Public Domain Content With Tony Laidig. I think we all understand step one, Marlon. Let's jump into step number two. Step 2 - Product Format The format is important when selling evergreen products! In general, PDFs are a tough format to sell long-term. I don't have a lot of PDFs that I wrote ten years ago that sell well today. It's a very controversial topic and people have an awful lot of opinions about them. Some people say, "Oh, don't worry about them." All I know is PDF products struggle to sell long-term and I don't know why. Dan Kennedy said one of the most brilliant things I've ever heard, and here's what he said, "Don't produce your info product in a format people can compare." Now, I'm talking about the item you're selling for money. Obviously, a Kindle book is a Kindle book and you're using it to generate new customers, probably not as much for profit. I'm talking about your moneymaker. Don't make your moneymaker something that people can easily compare it to. In other words, if you know anything about Dan Kennedy and buy something, he might include some books, checklists, some templates, some conference calls, or even just his old simple products. Dan Kennedy wouldn't just sell you a book. It would be a manual with this ugly thing stuck in it with cassette tapes popped into there. Then some other sheets and items stuffed in a big nine by twelve envelope. How do you compare the value of this with someone else's info product? Another format is example is, Dan Sullivan. Dan teaches people in all kinds of industries to create and sell processes instead of products. It's one of the most profound things I've heard. He'll take somebody in a really difficult commodity type industry. Let's take a financial planner. If you ask, "Well, what's the difference between Johnny and Jimmy financial planner?" Most people would just scratch their heads and say, "I don't know. They both, what? Give you a plan?" Dan Sullivan teaches how to create this process with these steps. They have these fancy graphics created for it and give it this name, like, "The Parents' Easy Transition Process," to easily transition your finances when your parents are elderly. It would teach them to create a process, create illustrations and diagrams and put a name on it. Now how does someone compare the value of that to the value of a Kindle book, a course or a PDF they'd buy on the internet? I have a treasure box that's actually a card file, like a Rolodex. I write my ideas in there because I'm scared if I stick them on my iPad or iPhone it'll crash and I'll just lose them all. I still trust index cards. The point of this is let's say you bought a product and I shipped you this little thing of index cards with notes on them. What's the value of that? That's the reason I do dashboards. I created the dashboard format. A few people have done dashboards, but there's not very many. What's the value of a dashboard? The value of a dashboard is what I tell you it is and what you feel it's worth. Product Platform - Planners Evergreen products, here's a great idea. Planners. I don't care what niche you are in, people love planners. It's the weirdest thing. They just sell. People love buying planners. It's great. It's a repeat business because they use them (take a look at show 4: Profiting From Low and No-Content Books With Kristen Joy). Grant Cardone sells so many of his 10X Planners that it's insane. He's got a place where you write your appointments for the day and then a place where you brainstorm your goals. Evergreen products contain information that you can't easily compare. Information that has perceived value over time. I did a planner just because I knew that every year when people get on the planner thing, they're going to be buying a planner. What I learned about planners is the simpler the better. And don't forget, people love workbooks as well. Product Platform - Dashboards I want to just spend a moment here, Marlon, because you're known far and wide for your dashboard type of products. I love your dashboard products. I first knew of you by buying your dashboard products. And really, when I was a pup in this industry, it was you, Marlon, that really helped me along. Not you, directly, but your products. I'm eternally grateful to you because they were so doggone easy to use and attractive. I knew what I needed. I needed to follow along the top row, then go to the next row and follow along that, and it was just all right there and very easy to use. I'm going to recommend to you, if you haven't yet bought one of Marlon's dashboard products, I like the marketing one. Well, I like them all. I own practically every one of them. Thanks, Daniel! We have Traffic Dashboard. People are always going to need traffic. We have Info Product Dashboard. That helps you create Info Products, and as long as people are buying information that's going to be the product that sells. We have one called the Marketing Dashboard because, hey, people are always going to be wanting to market. Big Ticket Dashboard is the most recent one. Daniel, is probably most important for you community because I see some of your people sell consultations on the back-end of their products. Evergreen Point There's an evergreen point here, which is that people love information broken down step by step. Systematic, step by step. Here's something you don't know. You know, the magazine, Newsweek, wasn't always called Newsweek. In the early 1900's, the magazine sold more advertising than any other magazine in America. It literally had a hundred pages of advertising. The magazine was about three hundred pages long every month. It was called "The System." It documented the systems used by the largest businesses in America in the day. It's the most phenomenal magazine ever published in the history of the United States and probably the history of the world. It was an amazing magazine by A.W. Shaw who was a brilliant guy. Around 1923 (give or take a few years) Newsweek bought it because they were the ones selling all the advertising and Newsweek wanted to be a part of that. So, Newsweek bought and assimilated the magazine. The point is, you want to build step by step systems into your products. People eat it up. They can't get enough of it, and they love it. Dashboards are just a way to create a product that people can't easily compare the price and value, and it breaks it down step by step. Step 3 - What's Selling Today What's selling today? That's really the third part of evergreen products. Not every evergreen product is going to be a good launch product or sell today. Launches have changed. When I launched Big Ticket Dashboard I added a small piece of software as a bonus and found out that people eat up software like it's Oreo cookies or something. People just cannot get enough software right now. If you can add, even as a bonus, some kind of software element today, especially if you're launching, affiliates love it. Like JVZoo. They love promoting as the "product of the day" items that has a software element to it. You've got to look at what's evergreen, but it has to be combined with what's selling now/today. It's a bit of a balance. Nobody said being an entrepreneur was always easy. To get both of those things happening can take talent and brains and it's why we get paid instead of a computer. Otherwise, a computer would just assemble stuff, assemble a sales letter and launch it. Having Software Created Here's a great question: "What if you don't know how to create software or don't even feel comfortable talking to a programmer?" Talking to programmers can be challenging because they have a language of their own. Here's what you do.When I did Push Button Letters, which is a software program that's been selling since 2001. It cost me about $350 in 2001 to have it created. I don't know how much of it I've sold, but it's been a lot. It's great software. My point is, I wrote out everything in enormous detail. Now, your more sophisticated people, especially stuff that has a GUI, a graphical user interface, they go into Photoshop, usually. However, some of them use Balsamiq or other programs, and they map out their user interface, They basically use a specs doc. For every little button on the GUI, that matches up to a document that explains the functionality of that button for the programmer. You spec it out in extreme detail. The people I know that are successful getting programming done, that's what they do. They leave as little to imagination as they can. They do the GUI interface and they spec out every single function: what it is, what it does, purpose of it, etc. Now, in my case the software I included with Big Ticket Dashboard, it was a bonus. It was really simple and it probably stretched the imagination some to call it software, but I am a copywriter. I didn't have anybody complaining. The software today is one of those elements, and it's hard for software to be evergreen, it's probably not. This is part of an evergreen product and it's funny. It goes back to a Gary Halbert expression. I miss Gary because he was so colorful. Some of the people listening may or may not know him. He was a very famous marketer. Gary said, "Man, I love marketing and sales. I love sending out thousands or mailing pieces of direct mail and just seeing those checks come in, but I'll tell you what. Fulfillment is a bitch." In his case he went to jail because he said he didn't actually fulfill. So for him it was literally a pitch. I don't know what the reality of that situation was, but what I do know is someone has to maintain the products. Even though it's evergreen, there's still got to be maintenance. Somebody's got to do it. Either you have to assign staff or you've got to buckle down and do it yourself. Now there is a solution to this, which is called relaunching. This is something I'm personally going to do because some of my products now need updated. After you update your products, you relaunch them. If somebody has been patient and managed to listen to me this long, here's the payoff. This guy named Alex Jeffreys was number one, two, three, four top JVZoo vendor. I think maybe last year or the year before he was number one. He literally relaunched products every four to six weeks. He would add a bonus or two and call it version three or call it version four. He put up fresh, new ten thousand dollar prizes for affiliates, and he would launch the product and get another three thousand sales just like he had six weeks before. He averaged like two to three thousand units of sales and he would throw in a bonus or two and not even rewrite the sales letter or anything. When it comes to marketing and marketing your digital products, think of your target audience as parade goers. It's not like you get everyone that's ever going to buy your product into a room and you get to sell them all at one time. That's not how it works. That's one of the reasons why this sort of relaunching periodically does work because there are buyers that come into the marketplace and there are buyers that leave the marketplace. It's like a parade. That's one of the things you need to focus in on with regard to this whole idea of relaunching. Before we move on from the software, I just want to point out that you can, in fact, find public or PLR software. PLR software that's almost all the way built and you just have a programmer add an element or two. There is a site called Dynamic Drive where you can get software applications that you can use for free. If you're brand new and you haven't added software, don't start off with huge software. Keep it in the back of your mind or go look for something that's already been created. Something that you could buy either PLR or get for free. I've actually given away free software and shareware before in packages, and I really say, "Hey, yeah, this is a freeware." You don't have to create it, is my point. You can go out and find it elsewhere. It's simple. It's probably two or three hundred dollars to get it programmed if you have something real simple. Examples of Evergreen Products I'm going to turn the tables here a second, Daniel, because we haven't put you on the hot seat yet. What is the one product you have that is the most evergreen and why? For me it's very easy. It's the "Speakers Cruise Free" book. It's very sexy to be able to trade your talents for free on luxury cruises. There's a big industry around it, but it's really a niche within the speaking niche. I keep buyers coming because I still have affiliate relationships from ten years ago that still send me traffic and it still sells. It's a beautiful thing. Not only that, for me, because mine was so niched down, I'm about the only person that still survived in this niche. If you want anything to do with cruise ship speaking, you go buy my book, which, by the way, is available on Amazon.com. You should buy it if that's one of the things that you're interested in. The second big evergreen product for me actually happens to be my Real Fast Book program. Eighty percent of the United States, I've heard that statistic anyway, wants to write a book in some way, shape, manner or form. They want to write the great American novel or to get a memoir out. For me, I put together a very step by step program on how to do that using CreateSpace and Kindle. By the way, if you go to Realfastbook.com, you can get a seven part free course that steps you through exactly how to go about putting together a print-on-demand book completely for free. Yes, there's going to be an offer at the , very end, but you're still going to get exceptionally good value in the seven video lessons that I put together. That'd be my second one. Daniel, back in early 1900's books were new then and that kind of topic was still selling back then. How to publish a book. They were doing it way back then, believe it or not. It's endlessly fascinating how some of these topics just keep enduring. Some of these topics just keep enduring. Recap Number one is you've got to find your evergreen topic. Daniel just gave, what I think are, two marvelous examples. Number two is format. My preference is a format that's harder to compare the value on. We talked about adding a software element, if possible. The third step is merging it with what's selling right now today. Which is where software comes in. Or other current angles that are selling right now today that you could throw in as a bonus with it. Just because the product itself is evergreen doesn't mean you can't make it extremely timely by throwing in that hot sexy new topic as a bonus with it or as bonuses with it. There's a company that does about five or six hundred million dollars a year just using that marketing method. Agora publishes financial newsletters, like two or three hundred of them and options, stocks. Investing can be kind of dry and boring, but they make it incredibly interesting by adding in these bonuses on the hottest thing going. That's the bonus when you subscribe to the newsletter. They sell this stuff like there's no tomorrow by tapping into what is hot today. Whatever the hot topic is right now today, they're creating a bonus on it, packaging it in when you buy their newsletter. Marketing Evergreen Products I had a product, and evergreen product called "Book of Secrets." My best marketing secrets I learned in a lifetime. Well, I had typos in the sales letter and typos in the book. I personally don't care about typos. Other people care. I just don't care. I care about information. I don't care about typos. Anyway, Frank Kern comes along and says, "It's one of the greatest sales letters I've read in a long, long time," and people just go off on his Facebook because it has typos in it. I mean, they just go off. The sales are like pouring in from Frank's post. More and more people are seeing this. About a hundred people have commented. Sales are pouring in, pouring in, pouring in. Finally, I fixed the typos and all of the controversy died down and the sales stopped pouring in. I should've just left them in there. The headline had a typo in it. It was really bad. I should've just left them there because people are like, "Oh my God. I can't believe this," and just more sales keep pouring in for it. If it's not broke, don't fix it. Contacting Marlon I have a Facebook group. On Facebook search, Marlon Sanders, you'll find my Facebook group. If you go to Marlonsanders.com I have a link over to my blog. Marlonsanders.com is an easy way to find me. If you want the modern version of "Creating The Products Quick," that's at the quickiestart.com. Daniel's Real Fast Results Tips: Evergreen products It's OK to use more than one format. One evergreen product may be a book, the other may be a dashboard. It all boils down to the topic you pick. Make sure your topic is timeless. Relaunching old products with new bonuses is an excellent way to go. Resources Dashboards by Marlon Sanders: Traffic Dashboard Info Product Dashboard Big Ticket Dashboard Marketing Dashboard Previous Podcasts That Help With Evergreen Products: Profiting From Low and No-Content Books With Kristen Joy Publishing And Profiting From Public Domain Content With Tony Laidig Open Source Software You Can Use As Bonuses - Dynamic Drive Daniel's Best Selling Evergreen Products Realfastbook.com Speakers Cruise Free
Project Ignite Podcast with Derek Gehl: Online Business | Internet Marketing | Make Money Online
In this episode I talk with Marlon Sanders about the importance of knowing how to sell. In this day and age, shiny and slick graphics can take over the priority list, but you won’t be successful if you don’t understand how to sell. We talk about the future of mobile business (goodbye desktops!) and how to push traffic from one platform to the next.
Are you frustrated because nobody is buying your product? This episode will show you the secret to guaranteeing a success! On today's episode Russell talks about what to do if your funnel flops. He talks about how the average millionaire fails 11 times before they have success. Here are some cool things to listen for on this episode: Why you should keep trying even if your funnel fails the first, second or even third time. How many times Clickfunnels failed before it actually became a successful business. And what a successful business has in common with Michael Jordan. So listen below to find out what to do if the funnel you have built flops. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell. I want to welcome you to Marketing in Your Car. All right everyone, today, the message for you guys today is all about publishing, about putting stuff out into the world. It's been interesting as I've seen those in our high end coaching program who are successful versus those who aren't. It's almost one very common theme that happens over and over again. Those who are having success are publishing a lot of things. They're writing emails, sending out blog posts, making funnels, making videos. They're doing stuff. They're moving forward. The ones who aren't making money, they're focusing on one perfect funnel and not doing anything else except for making this thing just the most perfect thing in the world. They're spending months and months trying to do it. The nice thing about Click Funnel is it's about the process we teach at Funnel Hacking. You should be able to build a funnel in a day, maybe two days if you're slow but it shouldn't be longer than that. If you get a video camera, the iPhone cameras nowadays are better than any expensive things. Throw up a camera, record something, throw it out there. It's all about just getting stuff out there and publishing. I remember Jeff Walker. I read an email from him a couple of years ago that really illustrated this for me really well. He talked about how the best thing you could do in business is start publishing stuff, putting things out there because you can find out what people are responding to. So many people I know are putting all of their eggs in this one basket of a webinar or video sales letter, whatever that thing is. They're putting so much effort on that that it may or may not work. A lot of times, they don't work. I would say half the time, my stuff doesn't work either. Hopefully, each time, we get better and better at making things right but half the time, it's not going to work. You've got to get good at just publishing and putting it out there, and seeing if people are responding to you. Put up a funnel and direct some traffic. If people don't respond to it, then do another one. Create something new. It's not that hard. It doesn't take that much time. If someone doesn't buy your product, guess what? Maybe no one wants to buy your product. I keep seeing people who have been spending six, eight, ten, 12 months trying to get somebody to buy their product when it turns out nobody wants their product. Marlon Sanders, one of the original Internet marketing guys, I heard him speak one time. His presentation was called A Dead Duck Can't Fly. He got up there saying, “Look, I don't care how great you think your product is. A dead duck can't fly. You can keep making new sales letters for it and new videos, do everything but sometimes, a dead duck won't fly – or all the time.” If you know your product is dead and nobody is buying it, or whatever the issue might be, you've got to understand, sometimes people aren't going to buy it. Maybe the product, as much love, effort and stuff you've put into it, maybe people don't want it. I had a friend when I first got started in this business, man, 12 years ago. I met him and he was selling this ebook he had written. He was so passionate about this ebook. He kept trying to sell it and trying to sell it. He spent two or three years trying to sell this book and nobody would ever buy it. I remember saying to him, “Ken, I don't think anyone wants to buy this book. You need to create a new product. You need to try something different. You got the skill sets. You know how to write a book. You know how to put up a sales letter. You've done the whole process once but you need to create a new product because nobody is buying that one. Nobody wants it. As much as you love it, nobody wants it.” I remember he told me, “Russell, I can't. I've spent two years of my life on this. I can't stop now. I can't quit now.” I just got to tell you guys, sometimes it's okay to be a quitter. You got to quit sometimes. You just have to. You can't just keep on. Eventually, the market will tell you if something is sellable or not. It's really cool how that works. If people don't want it, they're not going to buy it. If nobody is buying it, it's because nobody wants it. That's a lot of times the issue. Sometimes, obviously the issue is not getting traffic or your sales letters don't sell well, things like that. But sometimes just people don't want what you're selling. You got to be okay with that. You got to detach yourself from the emotion of it and just focus on what do people want. Awhile ago, when I got started, there was this really cool course called The Underachiever Formula. I later bought that company and renamed it Underachiever Secrets. As you can probably tell, all my stuff is “secrets.” But in that product, it was from Frank Kern and Ed Dale who initially published it. What they talked about was brilliant. It said, “This is the process. This is how you are successful online. Step one, you got to find a hot market. If you're not in a market that's hot right now, you got to change your market. I don't care how passionate you are about whatever, if it's not a hot market, people aren't going to buy it.” Maybe they'll buy it a little bit but if you want to make a lot of money, you got to find a hot market. Find a market that's rabid, that people love buying things, people that are currently buying lots of other things. That's step number one. Step number two is after you find the hot market, then you have to ask them what they want. Never assume that the cool thing you want to create is what they actually want. My guess right now is if you're selling something and nobody is buying it, it's because you didn't ask them what they wanted. You thought about what you would want and you created that. It turns out you're the only dude or dudette who wants that thing. Am I right? You got to ask them what they want. Survey them. Do teleseminars. Do webinars. Ask questions. Call up your customers and find out what their pain points are. Find out what they actually want. Then after they tell you what they want, then you create that. You don't create your own thing. Again, the way this whole process works, it's by surveying — surveys and finding out what your audience wants. It's by publishing, sending out emails, making Facebook posts, driving traffic to it, and seeing what people respond to. If no one is clicking on your posts, if you're spending $20, $30, and nobody is sharing or clicking on your posts, then guess what? Nobody wants it, okay? That's fine. Move onto the next thing and keep moving until boom, eventually you're going to hit a quarry. That's what people want. I can't tell you over the 12 years of me doing this how many products I've launched and they've flopped. I mean, flop after flop after flop. It was kind of like Michael Jordan where he goes out there. They said he missed more shots than anybody else but he also made more shots than anybody else, right, or more game winning shots, whatever the thing is. You got to put a lot of stuff out there. I cannot tell you – I have a road of hundreds of offers that we have published that have flopped, but we've got a handful, maybe a dozen that have blown up and become multimillion dollar projects but I would never have got to those dozen had I not flopped over and over again. You guys got to understand that this is a process. You building out a sales funnel, think of it like school. You go to school for four, six, or eight years depending on what your major is. When you're done, you go out there and then start trying to do it. It's the same thing here. Your first funnel, your second funnel, or your third funnel and your tenth funnel, this is your education. This is you learning the process, learning how to write copy, learning what people respond to, learning what they're not responding to. I'm sick and tired of people getting all upset, “Oh, my Web site's not making any money,” and they want to quit. It drives me crazy. The first one didn't work. Make a second one. If that one doesn't work, make a third one and keep doing it until you're successful. When I was first getting started, I remember I was listening to this seminar from I think Brian Tracy actually. He was talking about there was this news show. They had 15 self-made millionaires up on stage. I'm going to screw up the numbers but the concept, I understand. Basically he asked these guys, he said, “How many businesses did you fail in before you became a millionaire?” They were trying to add it up. They cut to a commercial break and came back. Everyone added it up and they said that the average of all these 15 millionaires was they had launched and failed I think it was 11 times before they were successful – 11 times, 11 companies they've screwed up on before they made millions! Okay, then Brian Tracy asked, “Do you think it's because they all got lucky on the eleventh time?” Do you think Einstein got lucky on the whatever, 3000th time he tried to invent the light bulb? No! What happens is you try one thing and it doesn't work, people don't respond, so you try something else, and try something else. Eventually, you've tried everything that doesn't work. Eventually, the next thing has got to work. Eventually, you've figured out all the ways that people are not going to buy and one of these times, you're going to hit one that people do buy. The difference between me and the person listening to this who is not having success right now is not publishing enough. People are like, “Russell, you put out so much stuff.” Guess why? Half of my stuff flops, okay? I'm not sure which half is going to flop until I put it out there, so I got to keep putting it out there and keep putting it out there, and keep putting it out there. When they respond to something, and you say, “Boom, this is the winner,” then you keep ringing that bell and keep pushing and keep pushing it. For example, when we launched Click Funnels the first time, guess what? It was a flop. I hate to admit it, it was a complete flop. We launched it, we did a big huge launch with prizes, and it was a flop. Nobody bought it or very few people bought it. For me, I felt the product was still good but I had to figure out something else so we tried another thing and tried another thing. I probably rewrote the sales letter, I don't know, 10, 12, 15 times and none of those things works. I finally was so depressed I was going to give up and Mike Filsaime called me and said, “Hey, I need you to speak at my event about Click Funnels.” I'm like, “Dude, nobody is buying this thing.” But he's like, “You got to figure it out and you got to sell a $1000 version of it.” I created a new webinar pitch. We called it Funnel Hacks, launched it at the event, and the rest is history. Since then, we've sold over 3000 copies at $1000 apiece. That's $3 million right there in the last six months. Then on top of that, we've used at that as a tool to add over $4000 active customers to pay $97 a month so it works. But guess what? It didn't work the first time or the second, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth, okay? You guys got to be comfortable with publishing. This is your education. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth funnel that you guys do, just plan on it not working and be okay with that. Quit complaining. It's so funny, in every other business in the world, people understand that hey, you got to spend time, effort, and money. My friend is a chiropractor. He had to go to 10 years of school. Then he had to go get a SBA loan to build his office. Then he had to go get clients. Five years later, he's profitable. Somehow, for some reason, we think that the laws of business don't function online. There's too many people out there teaching get rich overnight, get rich quick, all that stuff and you can, and people do but it usually comes with a lot of effort, a lot of work, a lot of you cutting your teeth trying thing after thing until you find out boom, that's what works. When I got started, it was 18 months before I made my first dollar online – 18 months! I don't even know what I was doing for 18 months but I was trying, spinning my wheels before I realized how to actually sell things. Obviously the coaching, programs, tools, and everything we're giving you, my goal is to shortcut that success. That's why we teach the Funnel Hacking concepts. You find someone who has already failed 1000 times. You look what they've gotten and you model it from there. Typically, if you do that, you're going to be starting at a better spot. You're going to be starting about where they left off. Hopefully, you're going to cut out tons of the trial and error but even with that, you got to understand that it's okay if your first thing or your second thing, or your third thing doesn't work. You are creating a business. You are trying to attract people. You're seeing what people respond to, and when you figure out what they respond to, then you ramp it up and scale it. One of the guys in our coaching group we're working on is kind of in the survival market. He's done three, four, or five versions and has this ad that just works like crazy but the different landing pages he's got just haven't been working. He's tried two or three or four. I actually created one for him. We have a couple versions. So far, none of these things are working but he's getting traffic. Things are happening. He just hasn't quite figured out what's that thing that these guys are going to respond to. As soon as he figures that thing out, boom, it's game over for him. You got to try. You got to be patient with it. You can't complain and whine because that's how this game is played. Anyway, that's my rant for today. I hope that for those of you guys who are publishing stuff, it inspired you to know you're on the right track. For those of you who have failed, I hope it inspires you to know that I fail all the time. For those of you guys who are getting started and you're frustrated because you're not making yet, I hope that paints a clear path of what to expect and how to get there. The last thing I want to mention before I jump into the office here is, is it worth it? Is it worth it to fail five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times before you smash one out of the park? Yes, it is because one of these things that goes right, one of these things that connects with your audience, the right way when they respond they want to buy, you can make money in a month, two month period of time than most people make in a lifetime. It's worth it but you got to understand that it doesn't always happen first try. You got to become okay with that and go on the second try and third try. Just keep doing this because you will keep learning and find out what people respond to. Eventually, you're going to hit a grand slam. It happens all the time to those who don't quit after the first failure or the second, who keep going because they've got faith. They've got a vision. They've seen that it works for other people. They've seen that man, this guy named Russell, it works for him. This guy over here, this girl over here, if it works for other people, it can work for me. I just got to figure out what my audience responds to and create exactly what they want. If I do that, like I said, you can make more in a month than most people make in a lifetime. It's definitely worth it. Don't get frustrated. Stay the course. Have fun with it. This is your education period. This is your time to learn and to grow and to have fun with it. If you do that, I promise you guys it will be worth it. It's worth it in the long run. All right, I'm at the office. Today I'm going to have some fun. I got a lot of fun things I'm publishing and see what people will respond to, see what gets them to part with their hard earned money. I'll find out. If it works, we'll scale it. If not, we'll check out something new tomorrow. Appreciate you guys, hope you have an awesome day and we'll talk soon.
Are you frustrated because nobody is buying your product? This episode will show you the secret to guaranteeing a success! On today’s episode Russell talks about what to do if your funnel flops. He talks about how the average millionaire fails 11 times before they have success. Here are some cool things to listen for on this episode: Why you should keep trying even if your funnel fails the first, second or even third time. How many times Clickfunnels failed before it actually became a successful business. And what a successful business has in common with Michael Jordan. So listen below to find out what to do if the funnel you have built flops. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell. I want to welcome you to Marketing in Your Car. All right everyone, today, the message for you guys today is all about publishing, about putting stuff out into the world. It’s been interesting as I’ve seen those in our high end coaching program who are successful versus those who aren’t. It’s almost one very common theme that happens over and over again. Those who are having success are publishing a lot of things. They’re writing emails, sending out blog posts, making funnels, making videos. They’re doing stuff. They’re moving forward. The ones who aren’t making money, they’re focusing on one perfect funnel and not doing anything else except for making this thing just the most perfect thing in the world. They’re spending months and months trying to do it. The nice thing about Click Funnel is it’s about the process we teach at Funnel Hacking. You should be able to build a funnel in a day, maybe two days if you’re slow but it shouldn’t be longer than that. If you get a video camera, the iPhone cameras nowadays are better than any expensive things. Throw up a camera, record something, throw it out there. It’s all about just getting stuff out there and publishing. I remember Jeff Walker. I read an email from him a couple of years ago that really illustrated this for me really well. He talked about how the best thing you could do in business is start publishing stuff, putting things out there because you can find out what people are responding to. So many people I know are putting all of their eggs in this one basket of a webinar or video sales letter, whatever that thing is. They’re putting so much effort on that that it may or may not work. A lot of times, they don’t work. I would say half the time, my stuff doesn’t work either. Hopefully, each time, we get better and better at making things right but half the time, it’s not going to work. You’ve got to get good at just publishing and putting it out there, and seeing if people are responding to you. Put up a funnel and direct some traffic. If people don’t respond to it, then do another one. Create something new. It’s not that hard. It doesn’t take that much time. If someone doesn’t buy your product, guess what? Maybe no one wants to buy your product. I keep seeing people who have been spending six, eight, ten, 12 months trying to get somebody to buy their product when it turns out nobody wants their product. Marlon Sanders, one of the original Internet marketing guys, I heard him speak one time. His presentation was called A Dead Duck Can’t Fly. He got up there saying, “Look, I don’t care how great you think your product is. A dead duck can’t fly. You can keep making new sales letters for it and new videos, do everything but sometimes, a dead duck won’t fly – or all the time.” If you know your product is dead and nobody is buying it, or whatever the issue might be, you’ve got to understand, sometimes people aren’t going to buy it. Maybe the product, as much love, effort and stuff you’ve put into it, maybe people don’t want it. I had a friend when I first got started in this business, man, 12 years ago. I met him and he was selling this ebook he had written. He was so passionate about this ebook. He kept trying to sell it and trying to sell it. He spent two or three years trying to sell this book and nobody would ever buy it. I remember saying to him, “Ken, I don’t think anyone wants to buy this book. You need to create a new product. You need to try something different. You got the skill sets. You know how to write a book. You know how to put up a sales letter. You’ve done the whole process once but you need to create a new product because nobody is buying that one. Nobody wants it. As much as you love it, nobody wants it.” I remember he told me, “Russell, I can’t. I’ve spent two years of my life on this. I can’t stop now. I can’t quit now.” I just got to tell you guys, sometimes it’s okay to be a quitter. You got to quit sometimes. You just have to. You can’t just keep on. Eventually, the market will tell you if something is sellable or not. It’s really cool how that works. If people don’t want it, they’re not going to buy it. If nobody is buying it, it’s because nobody wants it. That’s a lot of times the issue. Sometimes, obviously the issue is not getting traffic or your sales letters don’t sell well, things like that. But sometimes just people don’t want what you’re selling. You got to be okay with that. You got to detach yourself from the emotion of it and just focus on what do people want. Awhile ago, when I got started, there was this really cool course called The Underachiever Formula. I later bought that company and renamed it Underachiever Secrets. As you can probably tell, all my stuff is “secrets.” But in that product, it was from Frank Kern and Ed Dale who initially published it. What they talked about was brilliant. It said, “This is the process. This is how you are successful online. Step one, you got to find a hot market. If you’re not in a market that’s hot right now, you got to change your market. I don’t care how passionate you are about whatever, if it’s not a hot market, people aren’t going to buy it.” Maybe they’ll buy it a little bit but if you want to make a lot of money, you got to find a hot market. Find a market that’s rabid, that people love buying things, people that are currently buying lots of other things. That’s step number one. Step number two is after you find the hot market, then you have to ask them what they want. Never assume that the cool thing you want to create is what they actually want. My guess right now is if you’re selling something and nobody is buying it, it’s because you didn’t ask them what they wanted. You thought about what you would want and you created that. It turns out you’re the only dude or dudette who wants that thing. Am I right? You got to ask them what they want. Survey them. Do teleseminars. Do webinars. Ask questions. Call up your customers and find out what their pain points are. Find out what they actually want. Then after they tell you what they want, then you create that. You don’t create your own thing. Again, the way this whole process works, it’s by surveying — surveys and finding out what your audience wants. It’s by publishing, sending out emails, making Facebook posts, driving traffic to it, and seeing what people respond to. If no one is clicking on your posts, if you’re spending $20, $30, and nobody is sharing or clicking on your posts, then guess what? Nobody wants it, okay? That’s fine. Move onto the next thing and keep moving until boom, eventually you’re going to hit a quarry. That’s what people want. I can’t tell you over the 12 years of me doing this how many products I’ve launched and they’ve flopped. I mean, flop after flop after flop. It was kind of like Michael Jordan where he goes out there. They said he missed more shots than anybody else but he also made more shots than anybody else, right, or more game winning shots, whatever the thing is. You got to put a lot of stuff out there. I cannot tell you – I have a road of hundreds of offers that we have published that have flopped, but we’ve got a handful, maybe a dozen that have blown up and become multimillion dollar projects but I would never have got to those dozen had I not flopped over and over again. You guys got to understand that this is a process. You building out a sales funnel, think of it like school. You go to school for four, six, or eight years depending on what your major is. When you’re done, you go out there and then start trying to do it. It’s the same thing here. Your first funnel, your second funnel, or your third funnel and your tenth funnel, this is your education. This is you learning the process, learning how to write copy, learning what people respond to, learning what they’re not responding to. I’m sick and tired of people getting all upset, “Oh, my Web site’s not making any money,” and they want to quit. It drives me crazy. The first one didn’t work. Make a second one. If that one doesn’t work, make a third one and keep doing it until you’re successful. When I was first getting started, I remember I was listening to this seminar from I think Brian Tracy actually. He was talking about there was this news show. They had 15 self-made millionaires up on stage. I’m going to screw up the numbers but the concept, I understand. Basically he asked these guys, he said, “How many businesses did you fail in before you became a millionaire?” They were trying to add it up. They cut to a commercial break and came back. Everyone added it up and they said that the average of all these 15 millionaires was they had launched and failed I think it was 11 times before they were successful – 11 times, 11 companies they’ve screwed up on before they made millions! Okay, then Brian Tracy asked, “Do you think it’s because they all got lucky on the eleventh time?” Do you think Einstein got lucky on the whatever, 3000th time he tried to invent the light bulb? No! What happens is you try one thing and it doesn’t work, people don’t respond, so you try something else, and try something else. Eventually, you’ve tried everything that doesn’t work. Eventually, the next thing has got to work. Eventually, you’ve figured out all the ways that people are not going to buy and one of these times, you’re going to hit one that people do buy. The difference between me and the person listening to this who is not having success right now is not publishing enough. People are like, “Russell, you put out so much stuff.” Guess why? Half of my stuff flops, okay? I’m not sure which half is going to flop until I put it out there, so I got to keep putting it out there and keep putting it out there, and keep putting it out there. When they respond to something, and you say, “Boom, this is the winner,” then you keep ringing that bell and keep pushing and keep pushing it. For example, when we launched Click Funnels the first time, guess what? It was a flop. I hate to admit it, it was a complete flop. We launched it, we did a big huge launch with prizes, and it was a flop. Nobody bought it or very few people bought it. For me, I felt the product was still good but I had to figure out something else so we tried another thing and tried another thing. I probably rewrote the sales letter, I don’t know, 10, 12, 15 times and none of those things works. I finally was so depressed I was going to give up and Mike Filsaime called me and said, “Hey, I need you to speak at my event about Click Funnels.” I’m like, “Dude, nobody is buying this thing.” But he’s like, “You got to figure it out and you got to sell a $1000 version of it.” I created a new webinar pitch. We called it Funnel Hacks, launched it at the event, and the rest is history. Since then, we’ve sold over 3000 copies at $1000 apiece. That’s $3 million right there in the last six months. Then on top of that, we’ve used at that as a tool to add over $4000 active customers to pay $97 a month so it works. But guess what? It didn’t work the first time or the second, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth, okay? You guys got to be comfortable with publishing. This is your education. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth funnel that you guys do, just plan on it not working and be okay with that. Quit complaining. It’s so funny, in every other business in the world, people understand that hey, you got to spend time, effort, and money. My friend is a chiropractor. He had to go to 10 years of school. Then he had to go get a SBA loan to build his office. Then he had to go get clients. Five years later, he’s profitable. Somehow, for some reason, we think that the laws of business don’t function online. There’s too many people out there teaching get rich overnight, get rich quick, all that stuff and you can, and people do but it usually comes with a lot of effort, a lot of work, a lot of you cutting your teeth trying thing after thing until you find out boom, that’s what works. When I got started, it was 18 months before I made my first dollar online – 18 months! I don’t even know what I was doing for 18 months but I was trying, spinning my wheels before I realized how to actually sell things. Obviously the coaching, programs, tools, and everything we’re giving you, my goal is to shortcut that success. That’s why we teach the Funnel Hacking concepts. You find someone who has already failed 1000 times. You look what they’ve gotten and you model it from there. Typically, if you do that, you’re going to be starting at a better spot. You’re going to be starting about where they left off. Hopefully, you’re going to cut out tons of the trial and error but even with that, you got to understand that it’s okay if your first thing or your second thing, or your third thing doesn’t work. You are creating a business. You are trying to attract people. You’re seeing what people respond to, and when you figure out what they respond to, then you ramp it up and scale it. One of the guys in our coaching group we’re working on is kind of in the survival market. He’s done three, four, or five versions and has this ad that just works like crazy but the different landing pages he’s got just haven’t been working. He’s tried two or three or four. I actually created one for him. We have a couple versions. So far, none of these things are working but he’s getting traffic. Things are happening. He just hasn’t quite figured out what’s that thing that these guys are going to respond to. As soon as he figures that thing out, boom, it’s game over for him. You got to try. You got to be patient with it. You can’t complain and whine because that’s how this game is played. Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I hope that for those of you guys who are publishing stuff, it inspired you to know you’re on the right track. For those of you who have failed, I hope it inspires you to know that I fail all the time. For those of you guys who are getting started and you’re frustrated because you’re not making yet, I hope that paints a clear path of what to expect and how to get there. The last thing I want to mention before I jump into the office here is, is it worth it? Is it worth it to fail five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times before you smash one out of the park? Yes, it is because one of these things that goes right, one of these things that connects with your audience, the right way when they respond they want to buy, you can make money in a month, two month period of time than most people make in a lifetime. It’s worth it but you got to understand that it doesn’t always happen first try. You got to become okay with that and go on the second try and third try. Just keep doing this because you will keep learning and find out what people respond to. Eventually, you’re going to hit a grand slam. It happens all the time to those who don’t quit after the first failure or the second, who keep going because they’ve got faith. They’ve got a vision. They’ve seen that it works for other people. They’ve seen that man, this guy named Russell, it works for him. This guy over here, this girl over here, if it works for other people, it can work for me. I just got to figure out what my audience responds to and create exactly what they want. If I do that, like I said, you can make more in a month than most people make in a lifetime. It’s definitely worth it. Don’t get frustrated. Stay the course. Have fun with it. This is your education period. This is your time to learn and to grow and to have fun with it. If you do that, I promise you guys it will be worth it. It’s worth it in the long run. All right, I’m at the office. Today I’m going to have some fun. I got a lot of fun things I’m publishing and see what people will respond to, see what gets them to part with their hard earned money. I’ll find out. If it works, we’ll scale it. If not, we’ll check out something new tomorrow. Appreciate you guys, hope you have an awesome day and we’ll talk soon.
The post Episode #34 – Teleseminars Are Back appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales.... There's no school like the old school. Start using the old marketing methods that still work. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I am doing something exciting today. I am promoting a teleseminar. The last time I did a teleseminar was years ago. It's been so long since I've done a teleseminar. Let me tell you why I decided to do a teleseminar instead of a webinar. I'm lazy. I don't know about you guys, but webinars take a lot of work to create and design and get the slides and all this kind of stuff. While I could do that, I don't have enough time. I'm too busy right now to go and create another webinar. I was thinking, “How do I do this a lot easier?” and I thought of teleseminars. It was funny to me, and maybe this is just me, but I think a lot of us do this. We find something that works really well, and for some reason we stop doing it. I made my very first million online by doing teleseminars. Every single week I was doing teleseminars. When I started creating the registration page for this teleseminar, I was looking at my old hard drive that had all my old websites and stuff on it. I found one that had every single one of my old teleseminars. I started looking at all these pages. I remember seeing a teleseminar page with Marlon Sanders, Matt Basac, Vince James, all these people I used to do teleseminars with. We made so much money doing teleseminars, and it wasn't nearly as difficult as doing a webinar. We would get on a teleseminar, we'd start talking and hanging out and at the end of it we would sell something and we always did awesome with it. It makes me laugh because I haven't done a teleseminar in years and years and years. It's this tool, a profitable tool that we have that we never use. I don't know if you're like me, but if you are, I want to challenge you guys to do a teleseminar for your list. Again, the prep time is about a thousandth of a percent what it takes to do a webinar. Just see what happens. I'm doing one this Friday. My plan is, now that I'm back from winning the Ferrari and everything, is I want to just do a breakdown with my list going over the seven or eight steps of what they need to do in the next 30 days. I'm going to show them that blueprint. At the end of it, I'm going to have an application for them where they can apply for our coaching program. It will be fun, it will be no stress, we'll hang out, we'll have a good time and I'm excited for it. I want to throw that out there as another marketing tool for you guys to bring back into your arsenal. If you haven't been doing them for years like me, we should try them out. We talk about pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are huge. If we are doing webinars every single time, webinar, webinar, webinar, after a while our audience starts realizing there is going to be another webinar and this is how the process works. You've got to interrupt the pattern every once in a while. That's why I'm excited for teleseminars. I'm not positive, but I'm guessing that you'll see me doing a lot more teleseminars over the next few months, just because it's going to be fun to mix it up a little bit. When everyone else is zigging, we're going to zag. Same thing as right now: everyone is doing email and social media and we're going old-school with direct mail and telephone. Just have some fun mixing up your marketing messages, hitting people with different media, different ways. I think you'll be surprised at the results.
There's no school like the old school. Start using the old marketing methods that still work. ---Transcript--- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I am doing something exciting today. I am promoting a teleseminar. The last time I did a teleseminar was years ago. It's been so long since I've done a teleseminar. Let me tell you why I decided to do a teleseminar instead of a webinar. I'm lazy. I don't know about you guys, but webinars take a lot of work to create and design and get the slides and all this kind of stuff. While I could do that, I don't have enough time. I'm too busy right now to go and create another webinar. I was thinking, “How do I do this a lot easier?” and I thought of teleseminars. It was funny to me, and maybe this is just me, but I think a lot of us do this. We find something that works really well, and for some reason we stop doing it. I made my very first million online by doing teleseminars. Every single week I was doing teleseminars. When I started creating the registration page for this teleseminar, I was looking at my old hard drive that had all my old websites and stuff on it. I found one that had every single one of my old teleseminars. I started looking at all these pages. I remember seeing a teleseminar page with Marlon Sanders, Matt Basac, Vince James, all these people I used to do teleseminars with. We made so much money doing teleseminars, and it wasn't nearly as difficult as doing a webinar. We would get on a teleseminar, we'd start talking and hanging out and at the end of it we would sell something and we always did awesome with it. It makes me laugh because I haven't done a teleseminar in years and years and years. It's this tool, a profitable tool that we have that we never use. I don't know if you're like me, but if you are, I want to challenge you guys to do a teleseminar for your list. Again, the prep time is about a thousandth of a percent what it takes to do a webinar. Just see what happens. I'm doing one this Friday. My plan is, now that I'm back from winning the Ferrari and everything, is I want to just do a breakdown with my list going over the seven or eight steps of what they need to do in the next 30 days. I'm going to show them that blueprint. At the end of it, I'm going to have an application for them where they can apply for our coaching program. It will be fun, it will be no stress, we'll hang out, we'll have a good time and I'm excited for it. I want to throw that out there as another marketing tool for you guys to bring back into your arsenal. If you haven't been doing them for years like me, we should try them out. We talk about pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are huge. If we are doing webinars every single time, webinar, webinar, webinar, after a while our audience starts realizing there is going to be another webinar and this is how the process works. You've got to interrupt the pattern every once in a while. That's why I'm excited for teleseminars. I'm not positive, but I'm guessing that you'll see me doing a lot more teleseminars over the next few months, just because it's going to be fun to mix it up a little bit. When everyone else is zigging, we're going to zag. Same thing as right now: everyone is doing email and social media and we're going old-school with direct mail and telephone. Just have some fun mixing up your marketing messages, hitting people with different media, different ways. I think you'll be surprised at the results. I know I'm excited for this, excited to see the results. Maybe I'll share with you guys on a future podcast. My recommendation for today is to start thinking about the telephone, start thinking about teleseminars. The service we use is www.InstantTeleseminars.com. It's a really simple, easy system to use to do a teleseminar. They probably have a trial, so go test one out, make a bunch of money with it and then pay the first month's bill. That's about all I've got today. I'm actually not heading to the office. I'm heading to the gym right now. This is Russell Brunson and I will talk to you guys all again soon.
There’s no school like the old school. Start using the old marketing methods that still work. ---Transcript--- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I am doing something exciting today. I am promoting a teleseminar. The last time I did a teleseminar was years ago. It’s been so long since I’ve done a teleseminar. Let me tell you why I decided to do a teleseminar instead of a webinar. I’m lazy. I don’t know about you guys, but webinars take a lot of work to create and design and get the slides and all this kind of stuff. While I could do that, I don’t have enough time. I’m too busy right now to go and create another webinar. I was thinking, “How do I do this a lot easier?” and I thought of teleseminars. It was funny to me, and maybe this is just me, but I think a lot of us do this. We find something that works really well, and for some reason we stop doing it. I made my very first million online by doing teleseminars. Every single week I was doing teleseminars. When I started creating the registration page for this teleseminar, I was looking at my old hard drive that had all my old websites and stuff on it. I found one that had every single one of my old teleseminars. I started looking at all these pages. I remember seeing a teleseminar page with Marlon Sanders, Matt Basac, Vince James, all these people I used to do teleseminars with. We made so much money doing teleseminars, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult as doing a webinar. We would get on a teleseminar, we’d start talking and hanging out and at the end of it we would sell something and we always did awesome with it. It makes me laugh because I haven’t done a teleseminar in years and years and years. It’s this tool, a profitable tool that we have that we never use. I don’t know if you’re like me, but if you are, I want to challenge you guys to do a teleseminar for your list. Again, the prep time is about a thousandth of a percent what it takes to do a webinar. Just see what happens. I’m doing one this Friday. My plan is, now that I’m back from winning the Ferrari and everything, is I want to just do a breakdown with my list going over the seven or eight steps of what they need to do in the next 30 days. I’m going to show them that blueprint. At the end of it, I’m going to have an application for them where they can apply for our coaching program. It will be fun, it will be no stress, we’ll hang out, we’ll have a good time and I’m excited for it. I want to throw that out there as another marketing tool for you guys to bring back into your arsenal. If you haven’t been doing them for years like me, we should try them out. We talk about pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are huge. If we are doing webinars every single time, webinar, webinar, webinar, after a while our audience starts realizing there is going to be another webinar and this is how the process works. You’ve got to interrupt the pattern every once in a while. That’s why I’m excited for teleseminars. I’m not positive, but I’m guessing that you’ll see me doing a lot more teleseminars over the next few months, just because it’s going to be fun to mix it up a little bit. When everyone else is zigging, we’re going to zag. Same thing as right now: everyone is doing email and social media and we’re going old-school with direct mail and telephone. Just have some fun mixing up your marketing messages, hitting people with different media, different ways. I think you’ll be surprised at the results. I know I’m excited for this, excited to see the results. Maybe I’ll share with you guys on a future podcast. My recommendation for today is to start thinking about the telephone, start thinking about teleseminars. The service we use is www.InstantTeleseminars.com. It’s a really simple, easy system to use to do a teleseminar. They probably have a trial, so go test one out, make a bunch of money with it and then pay the first month’s bill. That’s about all I’ve got today. I’m actually not heading to the office. I’m heading to the gym right now. This is Russell Brunson and I will talk to you guys all again soon.