Podcast appearances and mentions of steve hey

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About Steve:Steve Rice is Principal Product Manager for AWS AppConfig. He is surprisingly passionate about feature flags and continuous configuration. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, 3 kids, and 2 incontinent dogs.Links Referenced:AWS AppConfig: https://go.aws/awsappconfig TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With tail scale, ssh, you can do exactly that. Tail scale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate.S. Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built in key rotation permissions is code connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. tail scales. Completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This is a promoted guest episode. What does that mean? Well, it means that some people don't just want me to sit here and throw slings and arrows their way, they would prefer to send me a guest specifically, and they do pay for that privilege, which I appreciate. Paying me is absolutely a behavior I wish to endorse.Today's victim who has decided to contribute to slash sponsor my ongoing ridiculous nonsense is, of all companies, AWS. And today I'm talking to Steve Rice, who's the principal product manager on AWS AppConfig. Steve, thank you for joining me.Steve: Hey, Corey, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to a conversation.Corey: As am I. Now, AppConfig does something super interesting, which I'm not aware of any other service or sub-service doing. You are under the umbrella of AWS Systems Manager, but you're not going to market with Systems Manager AppConfig. You're just AWS AppConfig. Why?Steve: So, AppConfig is part of AWS Systems Manager. Systems Manager has, I think, 17 different features associated with it. Some of them have an individual name that is associated with Systems Manager, some of them don't. We just happen to be one that doesn't. AppConfig is a service that's been around for a while internally before it was launched externally a couple years ago, so I'd say that's probably the origin of the name and the service. I can tell you more about the origin of the service if you're curious.Corey: Oh, I absolutely am. But I just want to take a bit of a detour here and point out that I make fun of the sub-service names in Systems Manager an awful lot, like Systems Manager Session Manager and Systems Manager Change Manager. And part of the reason I do that is not just because it's funny, but because almost everything I found so far within the Systems Manager umbrella is pretty awesome. It aligns with how I tend to think about the world in a bunch of different ways. I have yet to see anything lurking within the Systems Manager umbrella that has led to a tee-hee-hee bill surprise level that rivals, you know, the GDP of Guam. So, I'm a big fan of the entire suite of services. But yes, how did AppConfig get its name?Steve: [laugh]. So, AppConfig started about six years ago, now, internally. So, we actually were part of the region services department inside of Amazon, which is in charge of launching new services around the world. We found that a centralized tool for configuration associated with each service launching was really helpful. So, a service might be launching in a new region and have to enable and disable things as it moved along.And so, the tool was sort of built for that, turning on and off things as the region developed and was ready to launch publicly; then the regions launch publicly. It turned out that our internal customers, which are a lot of AWS services and then some Amazon services as well, started to use us beyond launching new regions, and started to use us for feature flagging. Again, turning on and off capabilities, launching things safely. And so, it became massively popular; we were actually a top 30 service internally in terms of usage. And two years ago, we thought we really should launch this externally and let our customers benefit from some of the goodness that we put in there, and some of—those all come from the mistakes we've made internally. And so, it became AppConfig. In terms of the name itself, we specialize in application configuration, so that's kind of a mouthful, so we just changed it to AppConfig.Corey: Earlier this year, there was a vulnerability reported around I believe it was AWS Glue, but please don't quote me on that. And as part of its excellent response that AWS put out, they said that from the time that it was disclosed to them, they had patched the service and rolled it out to every AWS region in which Glue existed in a little under 29 hours, which at scale is absolutely magic fast. That is superhero speed and then some because you generally don't just throw something over the wall, regardless of how small it is when we're talking about something at the scale of AWS. I mean, look at who your customers are; mistakes will show. This also got me thinking that when you have Adam, or previously Andy, on stage giving a keynote announcement and then they mention something on stage, like, “Congratulations. It's now a very complicated service with 14 adjectives in his name because someone's paid by the syllable. Great.”Suddenly, the marketing pages are up, the APIs are working, it's showing up in the console, and it occurs to me only somewhat recently to think about all of the moving parts that go on behind this. That is far faster than even the improved speed of CloudFront distribution updates. There's very clearly something going on there. So, I've got to ask, is that you?Steve: Yes, a lot of that is us. I can't take credit for a hundred percent of what you're talking about, but that's how we are used. We're essentially used as a feature-flagging service. And I can talk generically about feature flagging. Feature flagging allows you to push code out to production, but it's hidden behind a configuration switch: a feature toggle or a feature flag. And that code can be sitting out there, nobody can access it until somebody flips that toggle. Now, the smart way to do it is to flip that toggle on for a small set of users. Maybe it's just internal users, maybe it's 1% of your users. And so, the features available, you can—Corey: It's your best slash worst customers [laugh] in that 1%, in some cases.Steve: Yeah, you want to stress test the system with them and you want to be able to look and see what's going to break before it breaks for everybody. So, you release us to a small cohort, you measure your operations, you measure your application health, you measure your reputational concerns, and then if everything goes well, then you maybe bump it up to 2%, and then 10%, and then 20%. So, feature flags allow you to slowly release features, and you know what you're releasing by the time it's at a hundred percent. It's tempting for teams to want to, like, have everybody access it at the same time; you've been working hard on this feature for a long time. But again, that's kind of an anti-pattern. You want to make sure that on production, it behaves the way you expect it to behave.Corey: I have to ask what is the fundamental difference between feature flags and/or dynamic configuration. Because to my mind, one of them is a means of achieving the other, but I could also see very easily using the terms interchangeably. Given that in some of our conversations, you have corrected me which, first, how dare you? Secondly, okay, there's probably a reason here. What is that point of distinction?Steve: Yeah. Typically for those that are not eat, sleep, and breathing dynamic configuration—which I do—and most people are not obsessed with this kind of thing, feature flags is kind of a shorthand for dynamic configuration. It allows you to turn on and off things without pushing out any new code. So, your application code's running, it's pulling its configuration data, say every five seconds, every ten seconds, something like that, and when that configuration data changes, then that app changes its behavior, again, without a code push or without restarting the app.So, dynamic configuration is maybe a superset of feature flags. Typically, when people think feature flags, they're thinking of, “Oh, I'm going to release a new feature, so it's almost like an on-off switch.” But we see customers using feature flags—and we use this internally—for things like throttling limits. Let's say you want to be able to throttle TPS transactions per second. Or let's say you want to throttle the number of simultaneous background tasks, and say, you know, I just really don't want this creeping above 50; bad things can start to happen.But in a period of stress, you might want to actually bring that number down. Well, you can push out these changes with dynamic configuration—which is, again, any type of configuration, not just an on-off switch—you can push this out and adjust the behavior and see what happens. Again, I'd recommend pushing it out to 1% of your users, and then 10%. But it allows you to have these dials and switches to do that. And, again, generically, that's dynamic configuration. It's not as fun to term as feature flags; feature flags is sort of a good mental picture, so I do use them interchangeably, but if you're really into the whole world of this dynamic configuration, then you probably will care about the difference.Corey: Which makes a fair bit of sense. It's the question of what are you talking about high level versus what are you talking about implementation detail-wise.Steve: Yep. Yep.Corey: And on some level, I used to get… well, we'll call it angsty—because I can't think of a better adjective right now—about how AWS was reluctant to disclose implementation details behind what it did. And in the fullness of time, it's made a lot more sense to me, specifically through a lens of, you want to be able to have the freedom to change how something works under the hood. And if you've made no particular guarantee about the implementation detail, you can do that without potentially worrying about breaking a whole bunch of customer expectations that you've inadvertently set. And that makes an awful lot of sense.The idea of rolling out changes to your infrastructure has evolved over the last decade. Once upon a time you'd have EC2 instances, and great, you want to go ahead and make a change there—or this actually predates EC2 instances. Virtual machines in a data center or heaven forbid, bare metal servers, you're not going to deploy a whole new server because there's a new version of the code out, so you separate out your infrastructure from the code that it runs. And that worked out well. And increasingly, we started to see ways of okay, if we want to change the behavior of the application, we'll just push out new environment variables to that thing and restart the service so it winds up consuming those.And that's great. You've rolled it out throughout your fleet. With containers, which is sort of the next logical step, well, okay, this stuff gets baked in, we'll just restart containers with a new version of code because that takes less than a second each and you're fine. And then Lambda functions, it's okay, we'll just change the deployment option and the next invocation will wind up taking the brand new environment variables passed out to it. How do feature flags feature into those, I guess, three evolving methods of running applications in anger, by which I mean, of course, production?Steve: [laugh]. Good question. And I think you really articulated that well.Corey: Well, thank you. I should hope so. I'm a storyteller. At least I fancy myself one.Steve: [laugh]. Yes, you are. Really what you talked about is the evolution of you know, at the beginning, people were—well, first of all, people probably were embedding their variables deep in their code and then they realized, “Oh, I want to change this,” and now you have to find where in my code that is. And so, it became a pattern. Why don't we separate everything that's a configuration data into its own file? But it'll get compiled at build time and sent out all at once.There was kind of this breakthrough that was, why don't we actually separate out the deployment of this? We can separate the deployment from code from the deployment of configuration data, and have the code be reading that configuration data on a regular interval, as I already said. So now, as the environments have changed—like you said, containers and Lambda—that ability to make tweaks at microsecond intervals is more important and more powerful. So, there certainly is still value in having things like environment variables that get read at startup. We call that static configuration as opposed to dynamic configuration.And that's a very important element in the world of containers that you talked about. Containers are a bit ephemeral, and so they kind of come and go, and you can restart things, or you might spin up new containers that are slightly different config and have them operate in a certain way. And again, Lambda takes that to the next level. I'm really excited where people are going to take feature flags to the next level because already today we have people just fine-tuning to very targeted small subsets, different configuration data, different feature flag data, and allows them to do this like at we've never seen before scale of turning this on, seeing how it reacts, seeing how the application behaves, and then being able to roll that out to all of your audience.Now, you got to be careful, you really don't want to have completely different configurations out there and have 10 different, or you know, 100 different configurations out there. That makes it really tough to debug. So, you want to think of this as I want to roll this out gradually over time, but eventually, you want to have this sort of state where everything is somewhat consistent.Corey: That, on some level, speaks to a level of operational maturity that my current deployment adventures generally don't have. A common reference I make is to my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter threading app. And anyone can visit it, use it however they want.And it uses a Route 53 latency record to figure out, ah, which is the closest region to you because I've deployed it to 20 different regions. Now, if this were a paid service, or I had people using this in large volume and I had to worry about that sort of thing, I would probably approach something that is very close to what you describe. In practice, I pick a devoted region that I deploy something to, and cool, that's sort of my canary where I get things working the way I would expect. And when that works the way I want it to I then just push it to everything else automatically. Given that I've put significant effort into getting deployments down to approximately two minutes to deploy to everything, it feels like that's a reasonable amount of time to push something out.Whereas if I were, I don't know, running a bank, for example, I would probably have an incredibly heavy process around things that make changes to things like payment or whatnot. Because despite the lies, we all like to tell both to ourselves and in public, anything that touches payments does go through waterfall, not agile iterative development because that mistake tends to show up on your customer's credit card bills, and then they're also angry. I think that there's a certain point of maturity you need to be at as either an organization or possibly as a software technology stack before something like feature flags even becomes available to you. Would you agree with that, or is this something everyone should use?Steve: I would agree with that. Definitely, a small team that has communication flowing between the two probably won't get as much value out of a gradual release process because everybody kind of knows what's going on inside of the team. Once your team scales, or maybe your audience scales, that's when it matters more. You really don't want to have something blow up with your users. You really don't want to have people getting paged in the middle of the night because of a change that was made. And so, feature flags do help with that.So typically, the journey we see is people start off in a maybe very small startup. They're releasing features at a very fast pace. They grow and they start to build their own feature flagging solution—again, at companies I've been at previously have done that—and you start using feature flags and you see the power of it. Oh, my gosh, this is great. I can release something when I want without doing a big code push. I can just do a small little change, and if something goes wrong, I can roll it back instantly. That's really handy.And so, the basics of feature flagging might be a homegrown solution that you all have built. If you really lean into that and start to use it more, then you probably want to look at a third-party solution because there's so many features out there that you might want. A lot of them are around safeguards that makes sure that releasing a new feature is safe. You know, again, pushing out a new feature to everybody could be similar to pushing out untested code to production. You don't want to do that, so you need to have, you know, some checks and balances in your release process of your feature flags, and that's what a lot of third parties do.It really depends—to get back to your question about who needs feature flags—it depends on your audience size. You know, if you have enough audience out there to want to do a small rollout to a small set first and then have everybody hit it, that's great. Also, if you just have, you know, one or two developers, then feature flags are probably something that you're just kind of, you're doing yourself, you're pushing out this thing anyway on your own, but you don't need it coordinated across your team.Corey: I think that there's also a bit of—how to frame this—misunderstanding on someone's part about where AppConfig starts and where it stops. When it was first announced, feature flags were one of the things that it did. And that was talked about on stage, I believe in re:Invent, but please don't quote me on that, when it wound up getting announced. And then in the fullness of time, there was another announcement of AppConfig now supports feature flags, which I'm sitting there and I had to go back to my old notes. Like, did I hallucinate this? Which again, would not be the first time I'd imagine such a thing. But no, it was originally how the service was described, but now it's extra feature flags, almost like someone would, I don't know, flip on a feature-flag toggle for the service and now it does a different thing. What changed? What was it that was misunderstood about the service initially versus what it became?Steve: Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a misunderstanding. I think what happened was we launched it, guessing what our customers were going to use it as. We had done plenty of research on that, and as I mentioned before we had—Corey: Please tell me someone used it as a database. Or am I the only nutter that does stuff like that?Steve: We have seen that before. We have seen something like that before.Corey: Excellent. Excellent, excellent. I approve.Steve: And so, we had done our due diligence ahead of time about how we thought people were going to use it. We were right about a lot of it. I mentioned before that we have a lot of usage internally, so you know, that was kind of maybe cheating even for us to be able to sort of see how this is going to evolve. What we did announce, I guess it was last November, was an opinionated version of feature flags. So, we had people using us for feature flags, but they were building their own structure, their own JSON, and there was not a dedicated console experience for feature flags.What we announced last November was an opinionated version that structured the JSON in a way that we think is the right way, and that afforded us the ability to have a smooth console experience. So, if we know what the structure of the JSON is, we can have things like toggles and validations in there that really specifically look at some of the data points. So, that's really what happened. We're just making it easier for our customers to use us for feature flags. We still have some customers that are kind of building their own solution, but we're seeing a lot of them move over to our opinionated version.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog's SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full stack observability for developers, IT operations, security, and business teams in the cloud age. Datadog's platform, along with 500 plus vendor integrations, allows you to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and security signals across your applications, infrastructure, and third party services in a single pane of glass.Combine these with drag and drop dashboards and machine learning based alerts to help teams troubleshoot and collaborate more effectively, prevent downtime, and enhance performance and reliability. Try Datadog in your environment today with a free 14 day trial and get a complimentary T-shirt when you install the agent.To learn more, visit datadoghq/screaminginthecloud to get. That's www.datadoghq/screaminginthecloudCorey: Part of the problem I have when I look at what it is you folks do, and your use cases, and how you structure it is, it's similar in some respects to how folks perceive things like FIS, the fault injection service, or chaos engineering, as is commonly known, which is, “We can't even get the service to stay up on its own for any [unintelligible 00:18:35] period of time. What do you mean, now let's intentionally degrade it and make it work?” There needs to be a certain level of operational stability or operational maturity. When you're still building a service before it's up and running, feature flags seem awfully premature because there's no one depending on it. You can change configuration however your little heart desires. In most cases. I'm sure at certain points of scale of development teams, you have a communications problem internally, but it's not aimed at me trying to get something working at 2 a.m. in the middle of the night.Whereas by the time folks are ready for what you're doing, they clearly have that level of operational maturity established. So, I have to guess on some level, that your typical adopter of AppConfig feature flags isn't in fact, someone who is, “Well, we're ready for feature flags; let's go,” but rather someone who's come up with something else as a stopgap as they've been iterating forward. Usually something homebuilt. And it might very well be you have the exact same biggest competitor that I do in my consulting work, which is of course, Microsoft Excel as people try to build their own thing that works in their own way.Steve: Yeah, so definitely a very common customer of ours is somebody that is using a homegrown solution for turning on and off things. And they really feel like I'm using the heck out of these feature flags. I'm using them on a daily or weekly basis. I would like to have some enhancements to how my feature flags work, but I have limited resources and I'm not sure that my resources should be building enhancements to a feature-flagging service, but instead, I'd rather have them focusing on something, you know, directly for our customers, some of the core features of whatever your company does. And so, that's when people sort of look around externally and say, “Oh, let me see if there's some other third-party service or something built into AWS like AWS AppConfig that can meet those needs.”And so absolutely, the workflows get more sophisticated, the ability to move forward faster becomes more important, and do so in a safe way. I used to work at a cybersecurity company and we would kind of joke that the security budget of the company is relatively low until something bad happens, and then it's, you know, whatever you need to spend on it. It's not quite the same with feature flags, but you do see when somebody has a problem on production, and they want to be able to turn something off right away or make an adjustment right away, then the ability to do that in a measured way becomes incredibly important. And so, that's when, again, you'll see customers starting to feel like they're outgrowing their homegrown solution and moving to something that's a third-party solution.Corey: Honestly, I feel like so many tools exist in this space, where, “Oh, yeah, you should definitely use this tool.” And most people will use that tool. The second time. Because the first time, it's one of those, “How hard could that be out? I can build something like that in a weekend.” Which is sort of the rallying cry of doomed engineers who are bad at scoping.And by the time that they figure out why, they have to backtrack significantly. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I have built that people look at and say, “Wow, that's a really great design. What inspired you to do that?” And the absolute honest answer to all of it is simply, “Yeah, I worked in roles for the first time I did it the way you would think I would do it and it didn't go well.” Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted, and this is one of those areas where it tends to manifest in reasonable ways.Steve: Absolutely, absolutely.Corey: So, give me an example here, if you don't mind, about how feature flags can improve the day-to-day experience of an engineering team or an engineer themselves. Because we've been down this path enough, in some cases, to know the failure modes, but for folks who haven't been there that's trying to shave a little bit off of their journey of, “I'm going to learn from my own mistakes.” Eh, learn from someone else's. What are the benefits that accrue and are felt immediately?Steve: Yeah. So, we kind of have a policy that the very first commit of any new feature ought to be the feature flag. That's that sort of on-off switch that you want to put there so that you can start to deploy your code and not have a long-lived branch in your source code. But you can have your code there, it reads whether that configuration is on or off. You start with it off.And so, it really helps just while developing these things about keeping your branches short. And you can push the mainline, as long as the feature flag is off and the feature is hidden to production, which is great. So, that helps with the mess of doing big code merges. The other part is around the launch of a feature.So, you talked about Andy Jassy being on stage to launch a new feature. Sort of the old way of doing this, Corey, was that you would need to look at your pipelines and see how long it might take for you to push out your code with any sort of code change in it. And let's say that was an hour-and-a-half process and let's say your CEO is on stage at eight o'clock on a Friday. And as much as you like to say it, “Oh, I'm never pushing out code on a Friday,” sometimes you have to. The old way—Corey: Yeah, that week, yes you are, whether you want to or not.Steve: [laugh]. Exactly, exactly. The old way was this idea that I'm going to time my release, and it takes an hour-and-a-half; I'm going to push it out, and I'll do my best, but hopefully, when the CEO raises her arm or his arm up and points to a screen that everything's lit up. Well, let's say you're doing that and something goes wrong and you have to start over again. Well, oh, my goodness, we're 15 minutes behind, can you accelerate things? And then you start to pull away some of these blockers to accelerate your pipeline or you start editing it right in the console of your application, which is generally not a good idea right before a really big launch.So, the new way is, I'm going to have that code already out there on a Wednesday [laugh] before this big thing on a Friday, but it's hidden behind this feature flag, I've already turned it on and off for internals, and it's just waiting there. And so, then when the CEO points to the big screen, you can just flip that one small little configuration change—and that can be almost instantaneous—and people can access it. So, that just reduces the amount of stress, reduces the amount of risk in pushing out your code.Another thing is—we've heard this from customers—customers are increasing the number of deploys that they can do per week by a very large percentage because they're deploying with confidence. They know that I can push out this code and it's off by default, then I can turn it on whenever I feel like it, and then I can turn it off if something goes wrong. So, if you're into CI/CD, you can actually just move a lot faster with a number of pushes to production each week, which again, I think really helps engineers on their day-to-day lives. The final thing I'm going to talk about is that let's say you did push out something, and for whatever reason, that following weekend, something's going wrong. The old way was oop, you're going to get a page, I'm going to have to get on my computer and go and debug things and fix things, and then push out a new code change.And this could be late on a Saturday evening when you're out with friends. If there's a feature flag there that can turn it off and if this feature is not critical to the operation of your product, you can actually just go in and flip that feature flag off until the next morning or maybe even Monday morning. So, in theory, you kind of get your free time back when you are implementing feature flags. So, I think those are the big benefits for engineers in using feature flags.Corey: And the best way to figure out whether someone is speaking from a position of experience or is simply a raving zealot when they're in a position where they are incentivized to advocate for a particular way of doing things or a particular product, as—let's be clear—you are in that position, is to ask a form of the following question. Let's turn it around for a second. In what scenarios would you absolutely not want to use feature flags? What problems arise? When do you take a look at a situation and say, “Oh, yeah, feature flags will make things worse, instead of better. Don't do it.”Steve: I'm not sure I wouldn't necessarily don't do it—maybe I am that zealot—but you got to do it carefully.Corey: [laugh].Steve: You really got to do things carefully because as I said before, flipping on a feature flag for everybody is similar to pushing out untested code to production. So, you want to do that in a measured way. So, you need to make sure that you do a couple of things. One, there should be some way to measure what the system behavior is for a small set of users with that feature flag flipped to on first. And it could be some canaries that you're using for that.You can also—there's other mechanisms you can do that to: set up cohorts and beta testers and those kinds of things. But I would say the gradual rollout and the targeted rollout of a feature flag is critical. You know, again, it sounds easy, “I'll just turn it on later,” but you ideally don't want to do that. The second thing you want to do is, if you can, is there some sort of validation that the feature flag is what you expect? So, I was talking about on-off feature flags; there are things, as when I was talking about dynamic configuration, that are things like throttling limits, that you actually want to make sure that you put in some other safeguards that say, “I never want my TPS to go above 1200 and never want to set it below 800,” for whatever reason, for example. Well, you want to have some sort of validation of that data before the feature flag gets pushed out. Inside Amazon, we actually have the policy that every single flag needs to have some sort of validation around it so that we don't accidentally fat-finger something out before it goes out there. And we have fat-fingered things.Corey: Typing the wrong thing into a command structure into a tool? “Who would ever do something like that?” He says, remembering times he's taken production down himself, exactly that way.Steve: Exactly, exactly, yeah. And we've done it at Amazon and AWS, for sure. And so yeah, if you have some sort of structure or process to validate that—because oftentimes, what you're doing is you're trying to remediate something in production. Stress levels are high, it is especially easy to fat-finger there. So, that check-and-balance of a validation is important.And then ideally, you have something to automatically roll back whatever change that you made, very quickly. So AppConfig, for example, hooks up to CloudWatch alarms. If an alarm goes off, we're actually going to roll back instantly whatever that feature flag was to its previous state so that you don't even need to really worry about validating against your CloudWatch. It'll just automatically do that against whatever alarms you have.Corey: One of the interesting parts about working at Amazon and seeing things in Amazonian scale is that one in a million events happen thousands of times every second for you folks. What lessons have you learned by deploying feature flags at that kind of scale? Because one of my problems and challenges with deploying feature flags myself is that in some cases, we're talking about three to five users a day for some of these things. That's not really enough usage to get insights into various cohort analyses or A/B tests.Steve: Yeah. As I mentioned before, we build these things as features into our product. So, I just talked about the CloudWatch alarms. That wasn't there originally. Originally, you know, if something went wrong, you would observe a CloudWatch alarm and then you decide what to do, and one of those things might be that I'm going to roll back my configuration.So, a lot of the mistakes that we made that caused alarms to go off necessitated us building some automatic mechanisms. And you know, a human being can only react so fast, but an automated system there is going to be able to roll things back very, very quickly. So, that came from some specific mistakes that we had made inside of AWS. The validation that I was talking about as well. We have a couple of ways of validating things.You might want to do a syntactic validation, which really you're validating—as I was saying—the range between 100 and 1000, but you also might want to have sort of a functional validation, or we call it a semantic validation so that you can make sure that, for example, if you're switching to a new database, that you're going to flip over to your new database, you can have a validation there that says, “This database is ready, I can write to this table, it's truly ready for me to switch.” Instead of just updating some config data, you're actually going to be validating that the new target is ready for you. So, those are a couple of things that we've learned from some of the mistakes we made. And again, not saying we aren't making mistakes still, but we always look at these things inside of AWS and figure out how we can benefit from them and how our customers, more importantly, can benefit from these mistakes.Corey: I would say that I agree. I think that you have threaded the needle of not talking smack about your own product, while also presenting it as not the global panacea that everyone should roll out, willy-nilly. That's a good balance to strike. And frankly, I'd also say it's probably a good point to park the episode. If people want to learn more about AppConfig, how you view these challenges, or even potentially want to get started using it themselves, what should they do?Steve: We have an informational page at go.aws/awsappconfig. That will tell you the high-level overview. You can search for our documentation and we have a lot of blog posts to help you get started there.Corey: And links to that will, of course, go into the [show notes 00:31:21]. Thank you so much for suffering my slings, arrows, and other assorted nonsense on this. I really appreciate your taking the time.Steve: Corey thank you for the time. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Really appreciate your insights.Corey: You're too kind. Steve Rice, principal product manager for AWS AppConfig. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment. But before you do, just try clearing your cookies and downloading the episode again. You might be in the 3% cohort for an A/B test, and you [want to 00:32:01] listen to the good one instead.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

It's Joël's first episode as host of The Bike Shed!

The subject on everyone's mind right now is all the different ways the real estate market has been changing. Not to beat a dead horse, but we're moving from a bullish market where sales and transactions moved at an extremely high pace, to one that aligns more with what we might call a normal market. We've talked about it before, and until things settle down, we'll keep talking you through it. On this episode, we're talking about going back to the Hard Things, but don't let the name scare you! It's really best practices that might have fallen to the side while things were moving so quickly.   So what are the hard things? We're going through them bit by bit, and both Steve and Bernie have some perspectives that they've found over the course of their careers. Things like open houses, nourishing your client base, improving your marketing, these are those practices that are those necessary things agents will need to get used to again in a cooling market. But things are shifting and advancing, and there are outside of the box ideas to make these “hard things” work for you.   “The chaos wasn't really chaos, the chaos was that we didn't have to work very hard to bring a consumer into our game; they were joining our circle on their own. Now we're in an environment where you need to bring some skills to the conversation, you need to have conversations that are emotionally intelligent and connect with your clients to help them.” – Bernie   “Most of our listeners are probably 10 years or less in the business, and there's a lot of things that you've never seen put in place in a market that is a shifting market. We need to be more educated  and practice using that education.” – Steve   “Are you having elevated conversations? How are you having purposeful and intentional conversations? What's the one consistent thing that you do in your business? Everybody that is listening right now, I would ask you to take out a piece of paper and write down one thing you do every single day in your business.” – Bernie   “I think right now the only way to gauge your success is in your consistency. Having good conversations, staying consistent on your social media to gain audience acquisition, consistent on your stories where you're adding good value to people's day to day lives, doing those things over the next 90 days will be the absolute most valuable thing that you can do.” – Steve   Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamstevedvalentine/  Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/   You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!

In today's real estate market, you have to ask yourself: are you a pessimist, an optimist, or a realist? The honest answer is that we all are one or the other at any point in time, but the key is inhabiting those roles at the right time to seize on success. In today's market, so many people are pessimists about where the market is rather than being realists. The reality is that there is still opportunity in the market for those who are thinking long term. Interest rates are going up, but they're still at historic lows compared to the markets of the past. Understanding this reality, educating yourself and staying up to date on the ebbs and flows of the market is what is going to separate those who will be successful from the rest of the pack.   Agents need to remember the fundamentals of sales as the market starts to cool down. Keeping in contact with your clients and showing them options that they might not have thought of through that creative, outside the box thinking, that's what's going to keep you in business. It's easier than ever to communicate with your clients, so make sure you're taking advantage of every way that you can to do so. We're moving toward a long game market and the agents who can foster those relationships are going to see the best results. This week's podcast is all about keeping the right perspective and staying real about today's real estate market.   “If you're a pessimist right now, your fear is leading to a lack of action, and if you're overly optimistic you need to be careful and make sure it's calibrated correctly. That's where realism comes into play, where you have to be real about what's happening in the market and get right with your business.” – Bernie   “This is the greatest opportunity. Everybody is looking at prices going down while inventory and rates are going up. However, if you have enough in your war chest to weather the storm, you could get a really good deal on the most motivated people in the market right now, and maybe have $100-150K less debt than you would have in 2020 or 2021 and have a higher interest rate. But can you weather the storm?” – Steve   “So many people should stay in their houses, but there are also other real estate opportunities because of that house that they own. Being able to ask the right questions and getting to the root of what motivates them, that takes emotional intelligence to help those people achieve a positive result that supersedes status or income.” – Bernie   “Don't be afraid to shift, and have some fun with what you're doing, and figure out what is the next thing. There's more wealth built in down markets than there is in up markets, but you have to have the mindset to really look to see that there's a flood of opportunities coming to help people create wealth.” - Steve   Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedvalentine/ Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/   You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!

We're doing things a little differently for this week's podcast, with an episode focusing on Bernie asking Steve some questions about how he's doing as an agent in today's market. The truth is that things aren't always sunshine and rainbows, even for someone who's had success in the market like Steve, but even when times are hard, there is still opportunity to be made if you have the right perspective on things. The reality is that so much of the real estate market revolves around the perspective you have on things: are you playing by the rules as they're set by other people, or are you on the lookout for those outside the box solutions that are going to make you a winner?   The hard truth is that things aren't always going to work out the way that you want them to. Even Steve has been pinched by the changes to the market. As an agent, we need to get out of the mindset that we can predict the future because as we've seen in the last few years, things can change on a dime, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes in harsh ways. Keeping an eye on how things are changing can help to keep a clear head when they do change and maintaining that long term perspective on surviving in the market can help you find those outside the box moves that can keep you floating while everyone around you is convinced that they're sinking.   “Nobody's perfect, and if somebody tells you they've done all these things and they've never lost money, that's all bullshit.” – Steve   “There are some agents out there that are setting real expectations for the sellers by leveraging data and information, and then there are the agents that are still over-promising like it's a fire sale and are desperate calling people to try and make a deal.” – Bernie   “2008 compared to today is completely different. Back then it was greed and all the stuff being buried, and all the bets against the market.” – Steve   “Today's market is much more positive knowing that yes, there are some shifts and things are happening, but the goal is that we need to have more conversations and more guidance and giving people the things that they need. As real estate agents, we have the ability to be either the grim reaper or a hope dealer.” – Steve   Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedvalentine/ Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/   You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!  

What is Emotional Intelligence? That's the subject of this week's episode, and it's a subject that Bernie is very passionate about. So, what is it, and how does it relate to our business of Real Estate? It's the ability to perceive, reason, understand, and manage emotions of others in our day to day lives. For agents, being emotionally intelligent can mean the difference between working with clients on a purely transactional basis or understanding what they're looking for on an emotional level and coming up with those outside the box solutions that working in everyone's interests.   We are in a people focused industry, and the types of transactions we deal with as real estate agents can be very emotionally charged. When speaking with our clients about what our clients are looking for in a forever home, we can get any kind of response ranging from cold logic to emotional milestones. Being emotionally intelligent means more than identifying with a person's feelings in the moment, it's about understanding what's behind the way a client responds to our questions. There are times to empathize with stories of our own, or solutions to the problems brought up, and then there are times when listening is the best course. Being able to build the trust with your clients that you are working in their best interests and working to find solutions to the problems they may or may not have vocalized can be important to your success as an agent.   “Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand what's happening with your feelings at a given moment in time and not acting in them but leveraging that to really understand what's happening within whoever you're interacting with.” -  Bernie   “When we get into our business right there, that's where a lot of people come up short. They're not listening to the full conversation because they're too busy trying to regurgitate their next response, rather than taking a pause to give themselves some time to truly respond.” – Steve   “That's how you connect with other humans is to recognize that just below the surface, there could be things that are going on there that may or may not represent what they're sharing with you. It takes time to build a rapport, to get them to share even more and to be empathetic.” – Bernie   “One thing that I've learned is learning to sit back and be patient and listen and let people talk. Too many times in the sales world that we both live in, we're self absorbed, right? So, we tend to ask some questions, they might give a small response and then we go back into what we're going to do for them and try to fit them into that, rather than answering a question with a question and getting them to move in that direction organically.” – Steve   Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedvalentine/ Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/   You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!  

It's the culture club episode! Today we're talking about culture and leadership in your organization and what works and what absolutely doesn't. A huge blind spot that was exposed by the pandemic and the great resignation is that for many people in many professions, corporate and work culture had become a source for burnout for workers because there has been such a disconnect between the average worker and the people who they work for. When it comes to building a team that sticks around and works to the best of their abilities, it goes beyond a few perks and grinding day in and day out. It's about collaboration and giving the people on your team the knowledge that they matter, and their ideas are going to be heard, as well as knowing the people they work for have their best interests in mind.   When you're looking for a team to be a part of, how that team conducts business and balances work and life is just as important as how much success they have. We're entering a whole new world where team members are looking for more than just a paycheck, they're looking for a workplace where they feel they matter. If you're a leader of a team, or a manager in a bigger organization, knowing what your workers are looking for in engagement and what they might need professionally is key to existing in this evolving market.   “We've had the Great Resignation, and now it's time for the Great Reimagination.” – Bernie   “I think people will ultimately give up certain things for quality of life and a great place to work that's flexible.” – Steve   “A healthy culture will reverse engineer into productivity. If you have a workplace that people don't want to show up to, you're not going to have production.” – Bernie   “Bonuses and raises are great and necessary, but there's things in between that you can do to show your appreciation so that those people feel that connectedness they want.” – Steve   Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedvalentine/ Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/   You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!  

You may have heard that interest rates are going up and that it's a sign that the sky is falling and it's 2008 all over again. Is it time to panic? We here at Thinking OTB are giving you a warm blanket, some tea, and telling you it's all going to be ok. The market is changing, but that doesn't mean it's all doom and gloom. We haven't been silent about the differences between 2008's market and today and how there is still opportunity for some real outside the box thinking to still make a huge difference for yourself and your clients in the near future.   As agents, it's our job to know all the details of what the market is doing and understanding the history of the market and doing our best to be as realistic as possible about where we go from here. The truth that remains is that home buying continues to be one of the best ways to build wealth and legacy, even with rates going up and the market slightly slowing. This is the time that is going to test us as professionals because patience and attention is going to be the best qualities you as an agent can have to help your clients navigate the market and make good decisions about the future.   “We're not done yet, unfortunately. The feds are trying to slow inflation down, and it's going to slow down the demand here. But the bigger thing is that we're seeing contracts come in and still competitive, and we're still seeing multiple offers. So, with that being the case, I think the prices are going to continue to rise here and they're going to stabilize.” – Steve   “If you want to buy a house, you have to get on it. There's going to always be these variables to buying a house or any kind of investment that are going to fluctuate. Right now, the prices are not going to drop. Prices are not going down. They might not rise as fast, but they're not going down.” – Bernie   “I think that the agents that are listening need to immerse themselves and understand the data that's happening so that they can have intelligent conversations with their clients. Have some patience because this is not a quick market. This is going to be a market of your understanding and your ability to educate and to nurture and nourish relationships. You have to understand what's happening with interest rates and what's happening with inventory, and with that you have to understand the different programs that are out there to take advantage of.” – Bernie   “Part of our jobs as real estate agents is to be a guide to people through all things, not just when we sell them a house, or sell their house, but to help them navigate the waters and put them in touch with the best people to help them accomplish what they need to accomplish.” – Steve   Hey you! You're a long-time listener, time to be a first-time caller! Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Drop a line to our DM's at: Steve's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevedvalentine/ Bernie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bernzpix/   You can find us on all the major Podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and more! Subscribe to be notified when new episodes are live and leave us a review and 5-star rating to help the show grow!

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fornier who was sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito this morning. We discussed a some of the new technology being used in the film industry that is coming from the gaming sector and the new LED soundstages and the difference that is making for actors and filmmakers. Then we discussed the Coronavirus and remote work and online education. So, here we go with Steve Fornier. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Allowing them onto the Business Network, which now gives bad guys access to all of the personal information, intellectual property, and everything else that's sitting there on that corporate network. There are so many issues with this. Craig Good morning. Craig Peterson here. Mr. Jim Polito is out touring Ireland right now. He called in to the show this morning, saying that all of the St. Patrick's Day parades in Ireland have been canceled. We know that they canceled our local parade in Boston, which is one of the biggest in the country, and I think New York City, which might be the most prominent St. Patrick's Day parade, as well. He was telling us a little bit about the difference between the Irish marches and the parades here in the US and Boston. Well, of course, the Irish ones tend to be a little bit more Catholic. Ours tend to be a little less religious. Anyhow, I was on Steve Fornier, he's the producer over in Springfield on those iHeart stations. We talked a little about two things. First of all, some very cool new technology for moviemaking and then a bit about working from home with the Coronavirus. That's right. So here we go with Steve. Steve Tech Talk's Craig Peterson in the house, and I don't know if I've ever actually had the pleasure, so this would be great. It's Steve Fornier, how are you doing today? Craig Doing well. How are you doing, Steve? Hey, you are doing a great job, by the way. Steve Hey, thanks I am trying Craig I think we met sideways once or twice, and I think you were on with Jim, and he had you kind of jump in, so yeah, man. I believe we have met. Steve Yeah, that's they usually just like to keep me out on the side. Let me out of my cage, now and again. Let's talk about movies. Because I haven't seen the Mandalorian, but I do remember the day, maybe the PlayStation two time frame where they started putting movies into video games. I thought that was the coolest thing. Now it seems like they're shooting movies with video game technology. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Craig Yeah, this is cool. I remember the very first movie they shot using almost entirely green screens. That's been the way it's been for quite a while now. So what will happen is, let's say that there's a desk and a chair, maybe some flowers and one or two other things in the room, those will be real. Then the whole rest of the set is green. You know, think of movies like Jack Black's King Kong, right, Steve? So there he's trying to pretend, and he imagines what's all around him, you know, the jungle scene, the King Kong himself, right, all of these other things. They may get to interact with another actor, but for many, that's not necessarily even the case. And that makes it difficult for actors. It makes it difficult for the director, the production staff, there's remember, there's not just even one director, there's somebody who's in charge of the found somebody who's in charge of the lighting of the cameras, the camera angles, etc. Steve Well, Michael Jordan, I always give him credit because he's not an actor. But in Space Jam, he had to act with a bunch of cartoons. I bet Bugs Bunny was not standing there on stage next to Michael Jordan. He's not on set. Craig Yeah, but what they do for Michael Jordan in that movie in Space Jam. They had little puppets on sticks that they move around, so he kind of know where to look what to do. Then they remove them afterward. They're not like full puppets but little green things on a stick, right. The Mandalorian, which is quite a good show. It is slower-paced than many. Think of it like Breaking Bad in a movie. They shoot the Mandalorian using an entirely whole new technology in a soundstage. As we've been talking about with green screens and such. Television screens surround the soundstage. The roof was all screens though all Walls are screens. Everything covered with screens. As you mentioned here, Steve, this is using some of the technology from video games. It is amazing. So there's the actor on an LED set, and he can see all of the backgrounds. Nothing is greenscreen. It is a whole new change and an entirely different way of doing it. Steve I would like to take a vacation in one of these things. Just plop me in that thing with a chair and put on a beautiful Sunset over seascape and let me hang out on that thing for three days. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. Craig Like a holodeck, right on Star Trek. Are you familiar with that? Steve Oh, yeah, of course, of course. But I have to assume from an editing perspective, that it makes it a lot easier to edit because it would reduce the process. The time it takes with the green screens removing puppets inserting the characters. I imagine on the back end of things it's got to make the production faster. Craig What surprised me was looking at an article with pictures of the whole stage, including the cameras. Now, remember, again, the camera director and the film director and everybody can see what's going on, which is enormous. And they are in real-time said you know what? That building there in the background is distracting. Let's move it over as though it's 50 feet to the right. Wow. And they were able to do it right then. Right live. The other thing that surprised me about it was that if you look at it with your regular eyes, it seems severely distorted. I mean, like the straight line isn't necessarily straight, right it can be going off in all kinds of weird angles, some of them are curved, and it's all rendered based on what the camera sees and what the camera is seeing. So the camera sees everything correctly. The actors can see what's around them. They can even see the horizon. They can see the sunrise. They can see the bad guys coming at them. They're not there, but now they have something to act around. It's like a 75-foot long set 21 feet tall, and it is impressive. So expect this to be used more and more in the future. It can be the deck of a ship that can be the middle of a desert. It can be anywhere it can be your vacation with Jim right now over in Italy, right? You go to one of these. Steve Yeah, it could be the next video game at Disney World where you're in one of these things, and you got stormtroopers coming at you, and you can use lightsabers and do all kinds of stuff. It sounds like all kinds of different use. Yeah. Craig Very cool. Steve Yeah, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, and you know, let's move on here to the Coronavirus. At the same time, we still have time here, Craig, because everybody's telling their employees just work from home, don't bother coming in, take your work laptop, go home, set it up, connect to the VPN, and we'll do everything remotely. But when everybody's doing that, it is taxing the World Wide Web in general. Craig Yeah, I have training coming up tomorrow. I'm going to repeat this a couple of times because I think it's essential. We're going to do a webinar on working from home because there are so many things people in Businesses just don't understand. And I've been shocked to see what some of them even slightly larger businesses are doing. Working from home is a whole different world. You've got your home computer that might not have patches installed. It probably isn't patched up to date, right? So you have security issues there. Many businesses have people VPN into the office. That can allow that potentially infected home computer or another computer on the network, and it's enabling them onto the Business Network, which now gives bad guys access to all of the personal information and intellectual property and everything else that's sitting there on that corporate network. There are so many issues with this. So I'm going to go through and explain what some of the better ways to do it are. When should you use a VPN? What kind of VPN should you use? And when should you Just try and remote to your desktop that works? What are the pros and cons of that? What kind of people can do that? Or can't do it. I'm going to go through the critical approaches that tactics and tools to get the most from remote work. And if you want to know about this, just go right now to Craig Peterson dot com if you sign up, it comes up on the top of the screen sign up for my mailing list. I'll be sending out an email later today. But this whole trend of working from home, Steve, I think is going to stick because of the aside the myriad of security problems. Yeah. That I think companies are going to have Steve, though. The bottom line is that as a rule, people are more productive working at home. They get more done in the people love it. Right who likes to get stuck in a traffic jam, right? Steve Oh, yeah, I mean, look, I gotta I buzz through. Have concocted a little radio studio in the basement, you know, because I'd rather have to if I'm an emergency do stuff from home than have to, you know, it's a short drive, but have to have it in here and do it, you know? Craig Yeah, it's, I think it's a great environment for most people. And most of the time at work, people are wasting money. Of course, you can make money in the meantime. Of course, you can waste-time at home, right? Get sucked into Facebook or something that you don't want to do. But there are tools for that as well. I use a few. We know we could talk about those. Because these are going to be live webinars. I'll answer everybody's questions. But it is, I think, going to change the economy, this Coronavirus, not not the virus itself, but the panic that's ensued. And so many employers have not tried to have people work at home. They haven't tried to use these digital collaboration systems, which we'll also talk about what they haven't tried to use. We don't things like zoom or WebEx, by the way, zoom, extremely unsafe, very poorly designed versus WebEx. You know, some of these things like, like WebEx has its teams, the same thing people use slack for, etc. We will cover all of those you understand it, and that's the point, Steve, I don't think most businesses have looked into these seriously enough as they grow in popularity. There are businesses, I think, Steve, that we are going to see some significant improvements in productivity, and they're just going to let more and more employees work at home. However, IBM last year pulled back on the whole work at home thing. IBM found for them, anyway, it was more important to have people bump into each other in the hallways and have an impromptu discussion than to have everybody really kind of siloed away. Unknown Speaker 11:57 Real quick, Craig. While I have you on that same topic. Let's talk about college campuses because we're seeing her in Mass colleges sending everybody home and saying work online. Is this the kind of thing that I mean, we've seen a lot of these universities trend online? If there are going to be campuses shutting down for periods, and we know how expensive colleges is, is it something that we could see trending in the college environment? Craig Yeah, it already is. Steve, we're seeing colleges that are now 100% online, and are doing very well. Two of my kids got their MBAs almost entirely remotely, and it's worked out very well for them. So yeah, watch out colleges, with your big fancy campuses and high tuitions. They are getting threatened. Steve, I think it's going to make a big difference. Steve Yeah, Craig, we get it. You have smart kids. Thanks for rubbing it in. I know. If you want to take part in that webinar tomorrow, which btw, sounds fascinating, and I feel like I need to be a part of that. I go home and fire up that VPN, and I don't pay any attention to it, and I probably should. If you want more information like this, from Craig, you can text My name Steve to this number? Craig You can text Steve 855-385-5553, or you can email me anytime with a question. Just meet me at Craig Peterson dot com or text Steve to 855 385 5553. Steve Excellent. Standard data and text rates apply. Again, Craig doesn't bother you or anything, but he does give you the updated stuff. I mean, still, everyone everywhere in all departments and all facets of life is trying to adjust to this Coronavirus. Craig is this staying ahead of it in his line of work. So we appreciate that Craig, thanks for the time as always, and we'll catch up next week. Craig Hey, take care of Steve. Thanks again. Craig It is happening. Keep an eye out on your email Wednesday. I'm planning on having one of these at four, and I may try and do one in the evening as well on Wednesday and then another one Thursday. Watch for my emails today. Take everybody, talk to you tomorrow. Bye-bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

*increase team volume, secret mlm hacks, teach your downlines, the power of the internet   Listen to a recent Secret MLM Hacks course member, Nick Bradshaw, as he tells us how is team volume nearly 20X'd after using these modern MLM recruiting principles...   INSIDE SECRET MLM HACKS   This is an interview that I've done with one of my good, Nick Bradshaw. He's got his own show but he wouldn't tell me what it is. You should track him down and ask him.   We have about 500 people in the Secret MLM Hacks program. For the next few episodes, I'm actually going to share with you guys some of the interviews I've been doing with people who are in the program and share what's been happening.   Nick  has almost 20X-ed his team volume since using the Secret MLM Hacks methods, which is crazy. I didn't know it was that much! I thought it was just doubling, not 20X!   He's going to walk through and talk about how he's been using this stuff and teaching the same strategies to his downline, which is ultimately what's been my goal in creating this stuff.   It's not so that everybody has to join Steve Larsen. It's so that you can learn how to do this stuff on your own and then teach your downlines and explode stuff.   A lot of MLMs are refusing to be influenced from the top down on the strategies that I'm teaching. I'm just telling you… This is the landscape of the atmosphere that we're in around here.   A lot of big MLMs are not wanting to take on some of the strategies like the internet, which is ridiculous. It's because they don't know it themselves. They don't know how to train or teach on it.   The strategy I've been teaching is actually to go from the bottom up. It's for the little guy.   HOW TO TEACH YOUR DOWNLINES   Secret MLM Hacks has been focused on training from the ground up. I don't care what MLM in you're in. That's why I'm not here pitching you guys all the time. I'll drop every once in a while what I'm in if you guys are interested, but that's not the purpose of it.   The purpose of it is for me to go and influence MLM from the bottom up. To hand tools to people inside of MLMs from the bottom up who can go reteach it to their people and explode past their uplines.   That's been the point and it's been working. We've had a lot more MLMs reaching out, asking things like, "Would you come build funnels for us?" I'm like, "Where were you when I was talking about it earlier?" It's flipped the whole table on its head.   I have a very special guest today. Somebody I have been watching and seeing everything that has been going on... And I've been impressed.   There’s not many people in MLM who use the power of the internet. I've got a very special guest for you today. It's very easy to see who is in MLM online because there aren't that many. When I first saw other people doing it I was like, “Oh my gosh I'm not alone!” I was so excited about it.   I want to introduce you to and welcome Nick Bradshaw.   SECRET MLM HACKS INTERVIEW WITH NICK BRADSHAW   Steve: Hey man. Thank you so much for being on here.   Nick: Dude it's been absolutely my pleasure. It really really is.   Steve: It's gonna be awesome I'm pumped for it. Just so people understand more about what you do, tell me when you first got into MLM?   Nick: I've been in the MLM game myself about two and a half years. Funny enough, my wife is actually the one who started all of this and I jumped in halfway through. It's really skyrocketed and taken off from there.   My wife's been doing this for about five years. And during that time I was actually a car salesman. I was working 60 - 80 hour workweeks, every single week.   When I started in car sales I had one kid and then next thing I know, I had two kids. I blinked three times and next thing you know I'm sitting next to a six and four year old kid. I'm like, “Where did all the time go?”   I was burnt out on it. I had set all these goals and I had reached the goals. I had worked my way up the corporate ladder so I could provide for my family and let my wife be a stay at home wife.   I got to that roadblock that said, “Where do I draw the line of how much time I'm spending at work versus how much time I'm spending at home?”   From there it was like, “Alright, well what do I do? How do I remedy this, how do I fix it?”   Steve: Something's gotta change, right? We've gotta shake it up a bit.   WHAT IS INSIDE SECRET MLM HACKS?   Nick: How do I be a better father to my kids? How do I be the father that I want to be rather than just the provider and someone that my kids don't even know? I was literally leaving for work before they woke up and I was coming home two hours after they'd already been in bed.   That's where my journey started with MLM. My answer to all of that was, “I'm gonna jump on board and help my wife build this business”.   And so that's what I started doing. I've got all these sales skills. I've been doing this hardcore sales stuff for five years now. My wife was relatively well. She was a silver rank in her company which equated to $2,500 a month.   So I said, “Okay, if I'm gonna quit my job and I'm gonna do all of this, I’m gonna quit cold turkey”.   Steve: You just up and left?   Nick: Yeah, just up and left. I said, “I'm done”.   Here's the crazy part… We moved from Indianapolis to Austin, Texas two months afterwards. We completely restarted. Hit the reset button.     I've got all these sales skills and one of the things that I see really lacking inside of the MLM world was people knowing how to sell. So that was the problem that I said I can fix.   I jumped into our team trainings and I started doing all of these things. I started teaching them menu selling (which is a car world term) but it's just narrowing down the options.   Instead of giving them this huge, 16 page spreadsheet of all of these things that they can buy, you're gonna narrow it down and say, “Okay you have this option, this option or this option.”   HOW TO INCREASE TEAM VOLUME WITH SECRET MLM HACKS   I started doing that and in four months, our team volume jumped from $30,000 a month to $80,000 a month.   Steve: Wow, big jump.   Nick: Yeah big jump. Just within a couple of months of just getting people to understand how the sales process actually works and implementing those skills.   But then we really came to a plateau. You can only do so much to the customer base that you already have.   Steve: Right. You need some more people eventually.   Nick: Eventually you need more people. That was the brick wall that I ran into at that point. I was like “Okay, so how do I do this?”   Marketing, duh.   If sales pushes and marketing pulls, I need to pull more people into this business.   But I had no idea how to do it because I'm not a marketer. I've been doing sales my entire life. And honestly, that's when I found Steve Larsen. I started listening to Secret MLM Hacks and I signed up to ClickFunnels.   From there… I failed. Miserably. On my face.   Steve: Sure. We pretty much all do the first few rounds.   Nick: I jumped in and I'm like, “Oh this is gonna be awesome! I'm listening to you but I'm not really hearing you”, you know what I mean?   Steve: I always laugh when people are like, “I've heard this training before”, and I'm like, “No it takes a few rounds, go again.”   Nick: I jumped in and started building these funnels and I'm like, “This is going to be awesome” and then I hit launch...   And I launch that first funnel and nothing. It was just crickets and I'm like, “Alright, back to the drawing board”.   INCREASE TEAM VOLUME WITH CLICKFUNNELS   I paused my ClickFunnels account because I realized that I didn’t have the skills that I need to be successful doing what I'm doing.   Steve: Right.   Nick: That's when I really jumped into it and I remember the time specifically. I was at a leadership retreat which is an invite only retreat for a company. I had just gotten Expert Secrets and Dot Com Secrets. I bought the black book with the funnel hacker's cookbook and all of that. And I brought it with me.   I'm sitting in our hotel room and I started reading Expert Secrets and I didn't put it down. I went all through the night and the next morning. When it was time to get up and go to the retreat I was still sitting there with my book on page 240 or something like that.   All of these things just started hitting me and it was like the fire was lit. I started really consuming and I even started hacking Secret MLM Hacks.   Steve:  I noticed that's what you were doing. I watch a lot of people do that which is great and I think they should model it.   Nick: When I was hacking Secret MLM Hacks somehow, someway I ended up in the membership site and I hadn't paid for it. I messaged you and I'm like, “Dude, I have no idea how this happened but I'm here.”   Steve: We were in the middle of tweaking some stuff. Yeah, I remember that. It's not that way anymore.   Nick: It's not that way anymore. A whole new revamped course and everything. I got there and I started watching your videos, consuming and I implemented.   For my relaunch basically modeled exactly what you were doing. This was probably seven months ago, eight months ago?   HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO INCREASE TEAM VOLUME?   Steve: A while ago now, yeah.   Nick: Since then we went from$80,000 a month in volume to averaging about $150,000 a month in volume.   Steve: WHAT? I didn't know it was that big dude… Are you serious?   Nick: Yeah. In the past 12 months, we've done a little over $1.5 Million.   Steve: So you're saying it works?   Nick: I'm saying it works dude. That's probably about the time that you really started noticing me singing your praises. I'm sitting here inside of my own business and I'm watching these things grow and accumulate exponentially.   And I'm trying to teach this stuff to my team and get it through their heads… There's no other way!   Steve: I don't know another way either. I'm not making fun of you who are like, “I love talking to friends and family. I love going to home and hotel meetings”. Good on you. But you can only do that for so long.   It's so much better to have something automated.   Nick: Yeah, absolutely. I start learning more about marketing and it's a constant learning curve obviously.   But you know that? It’s so true that MLM is a personal growth opportunity with an income opportunity attached to it.   Steve: Right.   Nick: That's what it is. It's a great way to start for the traditional person who doesn't know anything about marketing or sales. You can start talking to family members and friends and doing all of that.   But the reason that 99% of us out there are failing is because we don't ever move past that portion of it.   The growth never happens and where we get into real marketing or real sales.   PERSONAL GROWTH WITH SECRET MLM HACKS   Steve: Reaching out to your network only gets you so far. After a while you have to learn how to attract more people, market to them, change beliefs, sell and close.   It's funny when people are like, “I'm just gonna treat this like a hobby.” You're not going anywhere then, sorry.   It's a business not a hobby.   Nick: That’s the way that I see this. We talked about this the other day. The way that I see MLM moving, the way that I see this momentum going... It's having a rebirth, almost.   If you've lived in our world, it's changing the way that it's happening. We're slowly moving out of those 1960's origins and moving to 2020.   You're seeing a lot more sales and marketing professionals get into the game. I'm trying to teach everybody that, I'm trying to show everybody that.   If you're not moving in the direction that things are going, you're going to become extinct.   You're going to have real professionals in this game, doing things, exploding and leaving everybody else in the dust.   Steve: There are social media platforms that were never around until 10 years ago. The distribution channels that exist now are massive and you can tap into them for near nothing.   Most MLMs are mad when you go do that kind of stuff. What is wrong with you? You could be selling so much more if you just use them! It doesn't mean you have to be on Facebook saying “MLM”.   What are you guys are doing right now that's working best for you? I'm just interested in that, because the course is big. Secret MLM Hacks is not a small course.   What is it in there that has been most helpful so far?   TEACH YOUR DOWNLINES WITH SECRET MLM HACKS STRATEGIES     Nick: The thing that I think that's been most helpful… It's just gotta be the confidence to go out and PUBLISH.   Steve: Oh yes.   Nick: The confidence to go out and publish and talk about what you're doing. It's one thing to sit there and learn it for yourself. It's another to go out and actually teach people what you're doing.   Steve: Sure.   Nick: Not only because, in my personal opinion, I think that you learn it better and but you learn how to communicate it better. The more that we've been publishing, the more that we've been putting it out there, the more that it attracts people.   Steve: Sure.   What's being published right now? Is it a podcast right now?   Nick: I've started a small little podcast at the moment.   Steve: What is it called? Feel free to shout it out.   Nick: I don't know if I want to at this point...   Steve: That's okay then, never mind.   Nick: I'm still trying to find my voice. My wife's Instagram account has been blowing up. She's got 42,000 followers right now.   Steve: That's big.   Nick: We do a lot of not direct marketing there. More like back page marketing.   Steve: Sure, that's one of my favorite kinds. Especially in MLM.   Nick: I modeled you and I set up my own little course. I started targeting people who want to make money online. The people who actually want to own a business. Not people who want to do a hobby.   Sending people through that mini-course has yielded great results.   THE POWER OF THE INTERNET AND MLM   Steve: That's awesome.   What does your funnel look like right now? I talk so much about funnels, and most of the MLM world is still very new to the funnel term and concept. But what is it that you guys are doing right now?   Nick: The big thing we're doing right now is the little mini course which basically teaches marketing for MLM.   Steve: Sure, that's awesome.   Nick: The big idea behind that is, if you want to recruit more people into MLM and you don't want to talk to your friends and family, then:     You have to target people who actually want to own a business but people who aren't necessarily getting the results that they want out of the current business that they're in.   Setting up this little mini course that teaches people how to market. People who actually want to learn how to market their MLM. Then we invite them to join the downline.   At the end of this course I affiliate for you and I say, “Hey, there's two ways that you can learn this…”   Steve: Which I see by the way, thank you.   Nick: “... You can either go join Steve's Secret MLM Hacks and learn it from the master. Or you can join my downline and I'm gonna teach you exactly what I'm doing to grow my downline to do $1.5 Million per year.”   You can say in your current business and learn from Steve or you can join me and learn from me.   Catching that low hanging fruit, I suppose. Taking advantage of the way that the current MLM system is.   You have so many people that are unsatisfied with the business that they have because they're not learning the things they need to run their business.   TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO INCREASE TEAM VOLUME   Steve: Which reeks of opportunity for the rest of us who actually know what the heck's up.   Nick: Exactly. That's exactly what it is. It's kind of like a smorgasbord of low hanging fruit.   Steve: It is, yeah.   Nick: As far as extra recruiting goes and getting new people, it's great when people actually want to use the product, they believe in the product, they love the product and all of those things.   That's an amplifier but it's not a requirement.   Steve: So you guys have a course, you're selling, you're driving traffic to the course and then on the back you’re saying, “Hey, if you want to come join, this is what we've got”.   Nick: Exactly.   Steve: That's awesome. I was filming some training for my own team three weeks ago now. And I just wrote RECRUITING.   That is what most MLMs teach you and the method for it is just walk around. Think about the power of what we're doing with this stuff.   We're taking the recruiting model and replacing something in front of it so that we're not actually promoting the MLM.   How long did it take you to create your course?   Nick: I created the course in about seven days.   Steve: RIGHT? It's not crazy, man. You create this course so then you're no longer promoting an MLM. So Facebook is okay with you suddenly.   You drive traffic to that and take the money to dump it right back into ads. It's amazing and it changes the whole model.   It's literally INFO PRODUCT + MLM. Mashing together two different industries.   Are you doing phones sales as well? Closing them on the phone?   TEACH YOUR DOWNLINES THE POWER OF THE INTERNET   Nick: To a degree yes. I will offer that to people and I have an application process (modeled after you).   Nine times out of 10 when someone goes through the application process, I set up my auto-responder. My email service will kickback a set of emails that walk them through the process of setting up their account.   Then I've done an automated overview. A business overview that teaches them about the company.   During this entire time, I never even mention my company's name.   Steve: This is the craziest part! Same thing!   Nick: I've literally modeled what you've done.   Steve: I LOVE IT!   Nick: For months my entire office was covered with print out after print out of exactly what you did.   Once I finally mapped it out in my head, it was more about the concepts at hand.   Another thing that I think a lot of people struggle with inside of the funnel world is that they think it's about pages.   Steve: Right yeah, it's not.   Nick: It about the framework. What is the state of mind that he's putting every single person in?   Once I finally understood the framework behind it, I knew that's why I failed the very first time that I tried ClickFunnels. Because I thought that it was just all about pages.   But once I understood the core framework and moving somebody through the funnel and how that's done, then all of a sudden it made sense.   Steve: Right.   INCREASE TEAM VOLUME WITH SELF-LIQUIDATING OFFERS   Nick: One of the coolest things that happened out of all of this and how I feed this recruiting machine is by putting self-liquidating offers throughout the course.   The course is dripped out over five days and on each day there's a small self-liquidating offer.   Whatever I talk about that day, I then give them an offer to say, “Hey, if you want to learn this more in depth right now, click this”. Then it goes to a new page with a little sales video for an offer for $7.   Right now it's $1.50 per opt in on the front end and on the back end it's churning out $38.   Steve: You're speaking louder than whole MLMs even know how to!   Nick: Exactly and it pays for itself 17 times over. I'm paying myself to recruit people.   Steve: Last week on Secret MLM Hacks we put $1400 in and we got $20,000 back out (not including how many people got recruited and then they get handed the same recruiting systems). I don't know how it fails.   The biggest issue is the education. Most MLMs don't know how to do this which is understandable. It's a newish thing.   What would you tell to somebody who is on the fence about trying this?   ON THE FENCE ABOUT SECRET MLM HACKS?   Nick: The biggest thing that I would tell people is fail and fail fast. Just do it.   When we over think it, nothing ever gets done. I'm a perfectionist myself which is why I listened to Secret MLM Hacks 18 months ago and I just started doing this six to eight months ago. It wasn't really until the last three months that it really took off.   I’m still constantly tweaking and doing things to it but the fact is that I just did it.   I finally put down the pen, I finally put down the book and I went out there and I did it. Then I hit publish and I wasn't scared to feed the machine up front and put a little bit of money into it.   Nothing is ever gonna get done if I just sit here and read books. The knowledge is great...   Steve: But nothing happens.   Nick: You just gotta do it. Be active in your pursuit of what you want.   Steve: Be clear about the fact that this is not a hobby.   We've treated this like an actual business. We've got phone closers, we're talking to people and training.   I hate when someone joins because they're trying to do you a favor. Then they're wondering why they don't go build.   You recruited the wrong who! We gotta change your who altogether!   Nick: Every bum on the side of the street needs an opportunity.   Steve: Right!   Nick: I live in Austin and if you walk down downtown Austin you're guaranteed to see about 10 every 100 yards.   They might NEED an opportunity, but they don't' want it. You gotta find those people that actually WANT to succeed in whatever it is that you're doing.   DO YOU WANT THE SECRET MLM HACKS OPPORTUNITY?   Steve: Dude I am so thankful that you got on here. Thank you so much for sharing. I did want to ask one last question.   How many people have you been recruiting since you turned it on six months ago?   Nick: I would say we're probably getting five to seven a month.   Steve: That's awesome! On autopilot?   Nick: Yeah, on autopilot.   Steve: And the quality of person is really high which is awesome.   Nick: Five to seven a month is what we're recruiting into our organization and we get paid for a lot of people that say no to us as well.   Steve: Yeah, they bought the thing up front which is the beauty of it.   Nick: And I say five to seven, that's five to seven that we ACCEPT.   Steve: We get three to four applicants a day but I immediately cut out at least half off them because I can just tell…   Nick: Once you get to a certain point, you have to be able to say no. You have to self-select and be able to weed out people because otherwise it just becomes too overwhelming.   Steve: Then you turn into a life coach rather than a “Here’s what we're doing in our company this week” coach.   Nick: Exactly.   Steve: With love, I'll say that as tenderly as I can.   Nick, thank you so much for being on here, I really appreciate it. This was awesome, man. Really means a lot that you jumped on.   HEAD OVER TO SECRET MLM HACKS NOW   I know it's tough to find people to pitch after your warm market dries up, right? That moment when you finally run out of family and friends to pitch. I don't see many up lines teaching legitimate lead strategies today.   After years of being a lead funnel builder online I got sick of the garbage strategies most MLMs have been teaching their recruits for decades. Whether you simply want more leads to pitch or an automated MLM funnel, head over to secretmlmhacks.com and join the next free training.   There you're gonna learn the hidden revenue model that only the top MLMers have been using to get paid regardless if you join them. Learn the 3-step system I use to auto recruit my downline of big producers without friends or family even knowing that I'm in MLM.   If you want to do the same for yourself, head over to secretmlmhacks.com. Again that’s secretmlmhacks.com.

I frequently get interviewed by new content creators. The purpose of this episode is that EVERYTHING I show you is completely learnable and doable by YOU… Every Tuesday, I leave my morning open to go on anyone's show.   So, once a week, I just wake up, get ready, and check my calendar to see who's scheduled time for me to get on their show. I typically do two-three interviews every Tuesday, and I don't even care who with. It helps me: Keep connected with the audience Understand what peoples' questions are Understand who the other influencers-to-be, or current influencer are My calendar is pretty packed up, but if you want to book a slot, then go to interviewsteve.com. Recently, I had an amazing person set up a time with me. It was her first EVER show… and she just jumped in and asked me the MOST amazing questions. THE POWER OF PUBLISHING If you've listened to my podcasts at all and you've NEVER heard me say, “Everyone should publish!” I think you're probably lying. I say that all the time, and it's something that’s changed my life. I am massively convinced that if you want to increase your income, especially on the internet... The checklist is very simple: Step number one: Create some content Step number two: Keep offering people stuff Step number three: Keep getting attention Step number four: ...I really don't know whatever the steps are beyond that…. It's super simple, okay? Step number five: Just go back to number one. Truly, that's it! On a daily basis:  I create content I make sure that I offer something to somebody  just kinda keep getting attention for my business and what I do. The thing that always makes me MOST pumped is when somebody who’s just starting out sets up a time for me to get on their show. Currently, I’m a 2 Comma Club X Coach and a One Funnel Away Coach; I'm the guy that yells at everybody every day! I also have my own program, Offer Lab, I have another program in the MLM space. I spend a lot of time coaching... A constant theme that I push in EVERYTHING I do is that EVERYONE NEEDS TO PUBLISH. I can tell who’s MOST likely to have a successful funnel by whether or not they start publishing. Publishing is the safety net. It's the parachute for all the stuff. Frankly, you can stop listening to 80% of the tactics I teach you and just publish consistently, then come back to me in a year... and tell me that your life's not different! Seriously, it's that powerful. HOW TO START PUBLISHING I’m ALWAYS really pumped whenever somebody who's brand new comes on to interview me.... Because they’re just doin’ it! #success Recently, an amazing lady called Angela Clark jumped in and booked me for the first episode of her show. She’s created a podcast called Side Hustle Strategies, (which I think is a great name). Now, I wanna turn your attention to two things. Number one: She's just doin' it! Number two: Check out the types of questions that she's asking me - notice their simplicity. Not all interviewers are good, and she was very, very good. It’s one of my favorites interviews that I've done recently. When we were done, I asked, “Do you mind if share this on Sales Funnel Radio?” She said, “Yes, absolutely. Go for it.” I want you to see how awesome it is that Angela is just doin' it. I want to show you that YOU can do it too! About half the time, the person interviewing me is a newbie. Whether it’s for a new show, a blog, or whatever... I thought it'd be kinda cool capture one of 'em, toss it out here.   MY PUBLISHING STRATEGY Now, I wouldn’t be Steve Larsen if there wasn’t a strategy underneath my Tuesday morning interview sessions ;-) It’s helpful because I get interviewed all over the place... I've noticed when I'm being interviewed, I tend to dive into topics,  teachings, and strategies that I have a hard time replicating without somebody asking me questions. Here's what I'm getting at… If you have a hard time creating content or teaching what you do, stop asking yourself for answers. Don't let EVERYTHING come from your own head. Instead, get someone to ask YOU a whole bunch of questions. Let them pull the answers out of you… Then all you have to do is delete all their questions and BOOM! You have a course… Or BOOM! You got the podcast. It's one of the reasons why I ask so many questions in my group, The Science of Selling Online; I'm trying to see where the holes are. In my head, there's a model, there's a picture, and a framework, but I need to know where the questions are.   DUPLICATE YOUR TIMEI'm super proud to just have a whole bunch of people who’ve actually started their shows. It doesn’t matter whether you’re publishing on a: Podcast Blog Facebook YouTube Whatever platform you publish on, I don't care, as long as you’re actively talking, because... If you're NOT speaking, no one knows you exist. You WILL BUY your customer, whether it's with your time or your money. If you're like, “Stephen, I don't have money for ads.” Well, then you better be willing to spend some time! One of the best ways I know to duplicate time is to create content. I have to do it once, and it lives on the internet forever. Between my two shows, I’ve got almost 400 episodes now... which is crazy! That's a lot of hooks pulling people into my world and adding value for my entire life. If you're NOT willing to spend money, BE willing to spend time. It would suck to walk around the street and be like, “Hey, can I tell you my recent podcast episode?”  I'd rather duplicate my time by creating content. One of the biggest hacks of the game, create content, make offers to people consistently, and that's kind of it. Gain attention, there you go, there's the hack, there's the BIG SECRET... and that's what I'm doing. One of the easiest ways to buy your customers and make a real asset on the internet is by consistently publishing. Now, let's cut over to Angela's interview with Side Hustle Strategies. If you like what she's asking, go say hi to her, and thank her as well. AND REMEMBER… you don’t need credentials to get started... Just a willingness to jump!   SIDE HUSTLE STRATEGIES Angela: Alright, so I know you from ClickFunnels fame, Sales Funnel Radio, Secret MLM Hacks. So, for those who don't know you, can you tell us a little bit about your story? Steve: Yeah, totally. I was newly married... seven years ago. I call myself the seven-year overnight success story.   I failed my face off in tons of business attempts. My wife and I could barely feed ourselves, and life was really intense for a while. I know a lot of people are still in that sort of scenario. It was a college town, so no one was getting jobs for more than like three dollars an hour. It was a new town we moved to, we didn't know many people. She didn't have a job, and I couldn't get a job. It was crazy. There were more students than there were jobs. I was like, “We're gonna die. I gotta figure out a way to make money.” I asked my dad to float us some cash while we waited for some student loans to come in... just so we could just have like a base, right? Then I was gonna go run hard and try and make some more money some other way and thankfully, he's on the phone and he goes, “Son, No. If I give you this money you will not exhaust the resources you didn't know you had.” It was really intense. It was very wise of him to say that to me, though. I had the fire in the gut to provide that I think most people just fail to ever light. And when you have that fire, little details that you otherwise get stuck on, they don't really matter as much. How am I gonna figure this out? Doesn't matter! Do I need to know that? No, run! And so, it gave me this lens of action of just move versus getting focused and distracted by all these other things. So, I started trying all these businesses and none of them were working. I was spending money, that frankly, we really didn't have trying to make something just kick off. Over three and a half years, four years, I went through 12 business attempts and they all failed or kinda broke even. Each time, though, I was learning some stuff. It was very valuable stuff. I was in college for marketing, business, and entrepreneurship... and I started learning MORE in these attempts than what I was learning in my classes. Because of this, I started getting into fights with my teachers over different principles. It was like, “No, I've tried what you just said and it doesn't work very well that way. I'm doing it right now. It doesn't work!” I'd be praying to God in the evenings, like, “Please, help me find a way. It's not that I'm not willing to go through pain, I am, I'm in it right now.” I believe he totally guided me through failures that were needed for my future success. That's really interesting to think about it that way. I started blowing up these different businesses, trying these different things, and running into ClickFunnels. If you guys don't know what ClickFunnels is, it's basically a way to sell things online or offline... but it allows you to have higher average cart values. Basically, meaning: People spend more money buying more of your things that they probably wouldn't have otherwise because you just didn't ask 'em... so you make more money. It's really cool! ...And you don't have to be a coder to put these things out on the internet. And I'm not, I don't know how to code. I have no idea how to do that stuff. I started making all these sales funnels. I still didn't have much money. And I was like, “Who made this software? Russell Brunson! Does he even shave? This guy looks freakin' young, should I even trust him?” You know what I mean? I was like, “Who is this guy?” And I had my own reservations because the first time I saw him, I was like, “This guy's 12.” You know? He's just a very young-looking guy. If you don't know who he is, we're good friends, so I can say that, and I don't think he'll get mad. Anyway, so I was like, “I gotta go to his event.” I was in college still, I was about to graduate. It's like, “I can't get to his event.” So, I started changing the question in my mind. This was towards the end of college for me. It was like, “What if I just get resourceful... 'cause I don't have resources?” And I was like, “Well, I could learn how to build one of these funnel things.” And I went and I started trading funnels for tickets to his next event; funnels for plane tickets and funnels for hotel nights. I bootstrapped my way to the event I was nerdy enough in their software that they knew who I was when I walked up to their event. They said, “What's your name?” I said, “Steve Larsen.” And the guy looked up and he goes, “You're the guy pulling off all that Star Wars ninja crap in our software, right?” That's exactly what he said. And I said, “I dunno.” He's like, “You are! I need you to apply to ClickFunnels.” ...And I ended up getting five job offers at their event, and one week later, I graduated, and three days later, I was sitting next to Russell as his funnel builder. It was just super fast. Really fast pace. Angela: Wow, great. Steve: That's kind of the quick and dirty. Angela: Alright, so now, today, what drives you to do the work that you do? Steve: Honestly, I felt so much shame, which is stupid. Maybe I shouldn't have, but the fact that I couldn't provide just destroyed all semblance of self-esteem for me. I started coming home right after we got married, and I'd walk into our little apartment... It was overpriced, we barely had any money, neither of us could get jobs, we really had no income, but I wasn't thinking about that. It was honeymoon phase, and I was mad in love… Anyway, I started coming home, my wife would still be in bed. She'd already graduated college and I was like, “Are you okay? We alright? You okay?” She's like, “Oh yeah.” So, I'd go back the next day to school, and come back home... *same thing* “You okay?” She's like, “Oh yeah, no, it's nothing, it's fine.” Same thing, same thing, day after day after day after day… I finally got her to admit to me, (and she didn't wanna tell me, 'cause she didn't wanna hurt my feelings), she’d only been eating one meal a day ‘cause we didn’t have money. Angela: Wow! Steve: She’d been doing that so long that she was physically weak. I had no idea. She was literally eating like, some beans… And all the while, still making my lunches so I could have energy in school, and she would just eat a scant meal of dinner with me in the evenings... and that was all she was eating. I am telling you, it destroyed me. A lot of men get their identity based on how well they provide or what they do, and I couldn't do it... and it rocked my world. Rocked everything. I can't describe the pain, and it didn't leave. That's when I called my dad and said, “Hey, will you give me some cash?” And he said “NO,” which is great, I'm glad he did. I went and just started running, just trying stuff. The pain, the level of shame I felt, I had to hide that from people. I was in classes trying to focus but knew my wife was starving at home. It was nuts. It was super nuts. That went on for a really long time… So what drives me today is, I'm a capitalist pig, right? I intend to make a lot of money, but do it in a way that provides a lot of value for the world. There's nothing wrong with that. What drives me is to help install that belief in people's brains, rather than this weird belief a lot of people have around cash. Make money, make a lot of it... because that lets you go help people at a faster pace than you could if you didn't have money. What drives me is that... and when I see people who are still in that zone I was at the beginning of our marriage, like that... Oh, my gosh. You can tell, even now, I'm NOT over it. That was very, very challenging. It was hard on me and I don't want people there either... Angela: What advice would you give to someone who's stuck, who's in that place, who maybe is discouraged, and not able to see the light at the end of the tunnel? What advice would you give to someone to kind of muster that energy to move on? Steve: Few things. It's a great question. The first thing I would tell you to do is, and I was doing this… A lot of these lessons I know because I was doing the exact opposite of it and that's why I learned the lesson. You want depression, here's how you get it... You CANNOT compare yourself to another person's success or the speed that they gained it. It was the fastest way for an entrepreneur (or somebody who's trying to make it) in this game to die. The only way. If you start comparing yourself to these ideals, “Oh, that guy did it at that speed,” I guarantee that's NOT true. Nor is it the first thing they tried… That's the visible side. All of us have years of just trying and trying and trying and beating and beating on our craft. What's interesting is ideals aren't measurable. Pop culture changes every second, and if I measure myself to an ideal, I will never hit it because I can't measure it. Therefore unattainable. You end up measuring your self-esteem, your self-worth, your value to yourself and others on something that is constantly shifting and fictitious. That's totally a huge thing in the entrepreneur world today. Entrepreneurship finally, thankfully, is cool now. It's awesome, it's super cool. It's like this big fad, it’s awesome. But what's funny is, if I go in and rent a freakin' Lambo to take a picture in front of and make on my Facebook profile picture, 'cause that's what I think causes success. That's the most jacked-up crap on the planet. It's NOT true. I've noticed that those types of people will ride this little high, but because it's based on things that are fake, they crash real hard.  All of their worth, all their business worth, all their sense of self is based on something that is constantly shifting. Sit around and be like, “Oh man, I'm a bad mamma jamma! Look what I did yesterday that I could not have done six months ago!” My level of opportunities changed based on how I changed. The whole game's a game of progression. Man, I got the nicest kid award in high school. It's not 'cause I was nice, it's because I was shy. No one knew that, and I had to overcome the fear of speaking. I had to overcome a fear of adults that was near clinical. I had to overcome a lot of stuff. I was dumb, I was kicked out of my first semester of college; I didn't know how to study. I am the least likely success story. The only way I got around it was by comparing me to me yesterday. In that way, I stopped comparing myself to others. I stopped looking at the clock of others, and I know totally ranting right now, but this is a HUGE thing I achieved in my life. Angela: No, but you touched on something important. I've seen lots of your videos and I've heard you tell a little bit of this story before about being very shy, so in my head... I've got two kids and I've got one that's really reserved with most people, but at home, she's a wild woman. Steve: Yes, exactly, at home, you would have no idea. Angela: Right, so my question for you is, ('cause I think that that's pretty important), there may be a lot of people out there who have a hard time putting themselves out there. Russell Brunson has said that he considers himself a more introverted person, but when you see him, he's like, “Wah!” So, where do you get that from? Where do you muster that energy to be on, like on demand? Steve: I think the biggest thing someone can do that will destroy them is starting to self-hate. That'll just wreck 'em. Instead, everything that I know that is NOT gonna be an aid in my business, his name is Stephen, and he's shy... and he's a little bit more reserved. I wouldn't say I'm shy, but I'm a little more reserved. Anyway, I would not be wearing shirts like this or like, “Bleh, Rah!” People ask all the time, “Stephen, how do you have so much energy all the time?” I have a lot of energy when I need to become Steve. Steve is a second person I created... and I know it's stupid, and this sounds really weird, but even Tony Robbins teaches that we all have multiple personalities inside of us. And so... there's Stephen... And Stephen, he's cool, he's the man. He's everything that I needed to be in order to learn the painful lessons I needed to create Steve. And most of the time, I'm Stephen. Steve, that dude's nuts. He is a killer on stage, oh my gosh. He is the one talking to you right now. He destroys the microphone. He tells Russell Brunson to get stage insurance, 'cause he's gonna try and crack it. He’s a deliverer. I love Steve. So, every time I'm about to go on a video, do an interview, or record a podcast, I take a moment to become Steve. ... And it sounds weird, but I had to do it that way... because otherwise, I would've just stayed reserved... kinda just like, “There's no way I'm gonna get on video.” I would NOT be doing this at all if I stayed Stephen 100% of the time. Angela: So, what does that transition look like? I mean, are you like amped up on music? Is there caffeine? Steve: It's a little bit. It's not much. When I do take a lot of caffeine, it jacks me up. But it's a little bit of caffeine. A lot of times though, it's the mentality that I'm taking on. This sounds kinda dark, but one of the things that I try to do is... Man, it's so funny… The moment you start trying to level up your game, you get a lot of lovers and haters. It's like you are the Red Sea. It's like the split, that's what you're walkin'. Both voices get louder. For quite a while, I cared too much about what people thought about me and so, what I decided to do, (and I didn't mean to make this a public thing, it was actually just for me.)   I went and bought this heavy punching bag that's shaped like a human, and I wrote Poverty on it... and I beat the crap out of that thing on a regular basis. It's like this little self-therapy that I will walk through if I need to become Steve. If that thing's not around, I'll imagine beating the snot out of it. But what I do is I write every single thing that's negative that I'm hearing from my audience, another audience, or online, I write it on the freakin' dummy. Most of the time, what I realize what I was trying to do is act like the negativity wasn't there. I would try to shield and shelter, and be like, “It's NOT there, No, no, no! I should just move forward.” Everyone says just to move forward. For me, that was cool, but it was like this weight. For me, in business, I compete on strengths. In my personal development though, I kinda have to work on my weaknesses in order to qualify for more business opportunities. So I write down all the negativity that I hear from the world... and people are really tough behind their computer screens. Some are just straight-up jerks… So, now, there are just tons of words all over it: Not enough Terrible Stutters Say too many “um’s” Big eyes You're not gonna make it Not sustainable Watch him fail and burn. ...Anything that's negative. They're just freakin' jerks! I write it down, I face it, and I consume it. I allow myself to feel it, and I accept it's there. Then I beat it up. Despite knowing the negativity is there, despite all that stuff, I just move forward. So, when I sit down in this chair, I am in a state of war. I am ready to deliver. I will provide and go to war for my family. I will make a lot of value out there, and I will make money while I do so... and that's totally awesome. But that transition zone was very practiced at first. I had to really work on that and meditate over it, and try to... Not that I'm downplaying who I am or who I was, but realizing that my business most likely needs somebody else besides me. A new me in order to actually run in the first place, am I willing to become that person? Not a fake me, but somebody else! So, anyways, music is definitely part of it. Angela: So, let me ask you this... I know a lot of entrepreneurs don't have the support of family and friends. Was that something you had and how did you find your tribe to sort of have those people that you could bounce ideas off or just be a sounding board for whatever your challenges were? Steve: Yeah, there's a lot of family and friends that are out there who, for all of us, it's not that they're trying to be negative, they just DON’T understand what we do and they don't get it at all. ...And frankly, the entrepreneur, for a long time, sucks at explaining what they do. So, you have these two differing angles, and most of the time, I found... What was that book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? Angela: Yeah, great one. Steve: Yeah, a super good book, right? He's like, most fights or little tiffs are a result of a misunderstanding of roles and goal.  So, if you start working under a different framework, your blueprint starts to change a little bit. That can be threatening to people. A lot of times, I remind people of the things that they didn't take risks on… they're not telling me I'm bad, or they're being mean… What they're doing is reacting to things they've tried to hide in themselves. That's a big thing that I noticed. I was the only person that I physically knew who was doing what I was trying to in my physical sphere. You know what I mean? No one else was building funnels. For years, it was that way. The reason I wanted to go to Russell Brunson's event so bad is that I wanted to be around, for the first time in my life, other people who knew what a sales funnel even was. Even though I was in sales. I was in my sales classes, I was in entrepreneurship classes, in marketing classes… we still weren't talking about how to actually make money. I I'd say, if any entrepreneur's experiencing kind of negativity with family, friends, or even just in general, don't act like it's not there, but just be patient with it... and understand that they're operating from a completely different mindset, and have no idea. They didn't have the same epiphanies you had in order to be doing the logical things that you’re doing, the things that you think are logical. Most of it's just a misunderstanding. Angela: Well, great, thanks. I think you've given some great nuggets for folks who are in the trenches or considering getting in the trenches. So, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. Is there anything you wanna share about what you're working on or where people can go to find out more information about you or maybe some of your projects or products? Steve: Yeah, I think it was business 17 that actually worked. 17, right! That’s a crazy, crazy amount of failure. It was around business try number 12 though, where… Everything I was launching, I didn't get it. I thought I had to have a better product. I thought it was all about the product. I've realized, though, that's actually not true. I could sell any piece of junk. Most people believe that they need to have so much belief in their product. ...But I can sell things I don't believe in. I'm NOT telling anyone to go do that, but it's because of the principles I've learned about marketing and sales... and understanding that they're different. Understanding that closing and sales are different. Those are the things that have made all the difference in the world for me. So, it was around business try number 12 when I started learning what funnels even were, how to do them, how to use them.  That's when things started shifting up for me. I love affiliate marketing. I’ve found that most people get distracted by the creation of the product. They have no idea how to: Sell Position themselves Write copy to get attention So, if you don't have a product and you're trying to learn this game, I would actually tell you NOT to learn how to make a product. I would go do affiliate marketing. I created a program for this exact reason called Affiliate Outrage, affiliateoutrage.com. It's completely FREE, and it walks you through how to market other people’s products, and get paid for it. It's 30 days long, and I brought in all these other experts to teach all the stuff inside of it. What I like about affiliate marketing is that it lets you practice. Just because somebody else made the product, doesn't mean you don't need to make marketing. So it's like marketing training wheels. That's why I like it. So, I would go there. Angela: Okay, so affiliateoutrage.com, that's where we can get more info and step-by-step instructions from you. Steve: Yeah, definitely. Angela: Alright. Steve: Hey, thanks for listening. As you likely have heard in my podcast, I left my job in January 2018 to build my million dollar business completely from scratch without any funding or any help... AND I HIT IT, right on February 1, 2019... Just 13 months later, we actually grossed a million dollars, which is pretty awesome. Better yet, I got to keep a lot of the cash, just 'cause my costs are honestly NOT very high. That said, there are several tools, though, I use to automate vital pieces of my business and ClickFunnels is one of them. ClickFunnels lets me build automated sales machines all over the internet that are non-stop pitching people for me. It's ONLY $97 a month. Better yet, I don't need to be a coder. If you're asking yourself, “Stephen, are you giving me a blatant pitch for ClickFunnels right now?” YES, 100%! I think it's dumb when people don't use ClickFunnels. It makes you MORE and saves you MORE. Basically, I have the power of an entire tech team in my hand and I want you to have it. Go grab a free trial of ClickFunnels by going to freecftrial.com. I want EVERYONE to experience the power of ClickFunnels in their business, so they're letting me hook you up at freecftrial.com.

https://awesomers.com/58 Part 1 - Steve’s 11 Axioms to Help You Win More in Business and Life Axioms are critical in conducting business and serve as guardrails in our personal and daily lives. On today’s Insights episode, Steve talks about his first eleven axioms which he learned and continuously tries to infuse in running his own businesses. He also encourages his listeners to learn and apply these axioms in their own day to day lives. Here are more awesome takeaways on this episode: Axioms as a critical factor to ongoing success. Steve’s eleven axioms and detailed explanations for each one. What cost per acquisition means. And why it’s okay to fail fast in running a business and a lot more. So put on your headphones and learn valuable insights from Steve’s 11 axioms in business and life. 01:15 (Steve opens the podcast by giving a short overview on today’s topic.) 02:39 (Steve starts giving his axioms, starting with axiom zero: I don’t know nothing about nothing.) 06:08 (Axiom number one - “You can’t have a world-class brand in a single channel.”) 08:41 (Axiom number two: you don't have a “real business” until you can pour money in the top of the funnel and have a predictable, repeatable, and profitable cost per acquisition at the bottom of the funnel.) 12:12 (Axiom number three: Every upgrade is a downgrade at first.) 15:22 (Axiom number four: Beware of unintended consequences.) 19:22 (Axiom number five: Data-driven decisions outperform emotional driven decisions in business.) 23:03 (Axiom number six: Do what needs to be done when it needs doing.) 28:55 (Axiom number seven: I'm getting tired of being right all the time.) 32:23 (Axiom number eight: We're flying the airplane while we build it.) 37:13 (Axiom number nine: No score, no game.) 41:22 (Axiom number ten: Fail fast.) 45:15 (Axiom number eleven: Do more with less.) 49:16 (Steve recaps today’s episode.) Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 01:15 (Steve opens the podcast by giving a short overview on today’s topic.) Steve: Hey, everybody. It's Steve Simonson, and we are back again for another Awesomers.com podcast. This is episode number 58, and we're going to talk a little bit today about Steve's axioms. These are my axioms for how we conduct business and are my general philosophy and a philosophy I tried to infuse throughout the organizations and the people that I deal with, and I've referred to these axioms in prior times, prior episodes and quite regularly actually throughout my career. Sometimes, I'll just repeat things over and over, and some number of years ago, five plus years probably at this stage, I decided to name them axioms

“Go take action, do something, get into motion, go be an athlete, be an artist, be in love, be somebody, be yourself. You've got to make a difference, go be strong.” These are just some of the few words of wisdom that today’s guest shares with us. On this episode, we get to know Michael Pinkowski, President of Parsimony.com. Michael has been involved in E-commerce since building his very first transactional website in 1998. Since then, he has used his expertise to help multiple companies find success on the Internet. Here are some of the things he shares on this episode: His journey from a corporate executive to entrepreneur and founder of successful companies. Why it is better to figure out your strengths and goals; whether it’s money, security or growth and development. And how he helps E-commerce businesses get access to world-class technology and be able to deliver solutions that are sophisticated and affordable. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 1:15 (Steve Simonson introduces the guest, Michael Pinkowski of Parsimony.com.) Steve: Hey, it's episode number 15 of the Awesomers podcast and we've got a super-secret insider tip for you. If you go to Awesomers.com/15, you'll be able to find the relevant show notes links and details that we talked about today. So you don't have to worry about keeping track of it yourself. That is Awesomers.com/15 and we're going to have all the show notes there for you to try to make your life a little bit easier. Today's guest is Michael Pinkowski, who I've known for almost 20 years probably. Michael has been involved in e-commerce since building his very first transactional website in 1998. That's right kids 1998, that's a long time ago. Since that time he's used his expertise to help multiple companies find success on the Internet. In fact he was the COO of I-Floor, as they grew from a start-up $0 revenue to 50 million in sales in less than five years and was also the director of marketing for AEG stores which was acquired by Lowe's on their journey from about 50 million to over 100 million. Since that time he's founded his own companies brought his expertise to half a dozen other e-commerce companies. At this time Michael's putting all his energy on this new entrepreneurial focus startup called Parsimony com which is a complete ERP system for e-commerce entrepreneurs. Michael earned his MBA in finance and marketing from Ohio State University and he and his wife Jennifer, of over 30 years by the way. His wife of over 30 years have the two best boys in the world and live in Bellevue Washington just east of Seattle his battle cry as always is goal be strong. Michael

Steve: Hey. What's going on? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Oh yeah! So, here's the real mystery. How do real MLMers like us who didn't cheat and only bugged family members and friends who wanna grow a profitable home business, how do we recruit A-players into our down lines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That's the glaring question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. What's going on guys? Hey. Hope you're doing fantastic. It's been so nuts. We've been going around, I've been traveling like crazy. I just hired a full-time support person, employee/assistant/he's a buddy of mine actually. We built one of my first successful Funnels together ever while we were in college. Our paths have recrossed, and I'm super excited. He's actually moving up here. I'm in Boise, Idaho. I'm actually from Denver, but [ClickFunnels 00:01:04] headquarters is here in Boise, which is why I'm here. That's who I was working for, obviously full-time for quite a while. Anyway, he's moving up here. I've been traveling. I've traveled the last two weeks in a row. I got two weeks of no traveling, and then another week of traveling again, and it's just been crazy. But, it's been so fun you know. To see this, it's been fun to see the people who are having success with our program. Obviously, this is a Secret MLM Hacks Radio. The actual program is Secret MLM Hacks though. I'm sure you guys know that. It's been fun to see the progress and the success stories from people who are actually inside the program and loving it, and it's been really interesting. You know, there's something that happened I just wanted to share with you guys. I think it's a powerful lesson. It's powerful enough that it will certainly affect your wallet and how fat it gets. Okay? And, how quickly it gets chunky. We all want fat wallets, not fat bellies, obviously! So, I was out in ... where were we? We were in Dallas going all over the place, can't remember where I am sometimes. But, we were in Dallas. And, we were over in Dallas and I was speaking at my MLM's event. It was a lot of fun. It was 1000 people in the room. I think it was about 1000. I spoke, and it was awesome. It was awesome to share what I am doing with my people. Obviously, it's grabbed the attention of a lot of the leaders in my MLM, of course. That's one of those things that I always let everyone know, it's like; look, when you start doing the things that I'm teaching inside of MLM, you are most likely gonna be one of the only people doing it inside of your MLM, which is awesome. That doesn't mean let's go break rules; break your MLM's policies and stuff like that. There are certain ... you take what I'm sharing, you do the aspects you can do, and you run with it. I obviously have gained a little bit of eyeballs for my MLM, looking at what I'm doing and being like; oh man! What is this kid doing? So, I was able to go present what it is. And, they were like; holy crap! That's what you do? It's like; yeah, yep! It's been really fun to go around and share, because I kinda kept it under wraps for a little while just to prove that it worked. I wanted to make sure that it was being successful, and not just me, that other people also being successful with it before I go and I start touting it around a little bit; sharing what it is that I'm doing with the rest of my MLM. We are finally in that spot now. We're getting a lot of attention, which is exciting. Something interesting happened though. I was on stage. I was speaking. I was teaching. I was sharing what I was doing. I was teaching them how to do that kind of stuff, and this really interesting thing happened. This happens most of the time that I speak in front of groups. Here's what happens. I go up. I tell my story where I came from. If you guys have ever joined any of our web classes at all, you've heard me tell a story of how I actually started this whole thing. So, I start telling this same story so they all know who I am. And then, I dive in and start teaching some stuff. And about maybe a third of the room, I noticed starts to check out. I was like; huh! And you can feel that as a speaker. If you've ever spoken on a stage before, you can tell when the audience is with you versus you just monologuing. I hate the feeling that they think I'm monologuing. So, I try to be extremely engaging throughout. I'm high energy. I tell stories. I share tactics, and I make them laugh. I like to play with emotions a lot, because then it's more fun to watch a speaker that's more dynamic. I try and practice that actively. I'm not saying that I'm the best at it, but I practice it. And so, I'm speaking. I was teaching. And I can feel that a third to maybe half of the room starts to get disconnected from what I'm doing. I was like; huh, interesting. I know that what I'm teaching is amazing, because it's actually working. That was the thought that start to hit my head really fast; I was like; I need to switch my story. I gotta change the story. I gotta reach out to ... okay. And, this really fast that hit me, I'm losing, I change story. Boom! I go, I launch into this other story, and it re-engages part of the room again. When you're speaking in front of a lot of people like that, you gotta be, you know. Bear with me a little bit. You feel like; Steven have never spoken from a stage like that, that's fine. The same thing happens. I've gone through in this podcast. If this is the first episode you've ever heard of mine, please go back and listen, because you guys know. I dive deep into what causes belief. If I can change the way someone sees the world through their beliefs, it is way easy to sell to somebody. I don't have to do hard sales. I don't have to do hard closing. Very little amounts of that compared to what the rest of the industry has to do, which is part of the reason my stuff works so well. You'll start to develop this sixth sense as you get better at storytelling. As you get better at what it is, you'll start to develop this sixth sense where you're like; I can feel that you're not with me. You'll start to get that feeling. You ever told a story to somebody, or you explain something that's really interesting? You know it's absolutely incredible, and at the end their like; huh! And that's the only interaction you get from; their like; huh! And you're like; did you not hear me? Maybe you didn't hear me. You tell them again, and they're like; oh, yeah. No, I heard you! That's cool. You're like; how are you not freaking out right now? That's crazy! Have you ever been in that scenario before? It's because you didn't tell the story well enough. You told the facts instead of the emotions. That's one of the major keys to being a good storyteller, is being able to tell part of the emotions and help them feel the emotions that you felt. You bring them on the same state that you are in, in the middle of that story. Does that make sense? That's what you're trying to do. And so, I realized when I was on stage and I was speaking, I realized that about half the room was freaking out super excited. And then, there was another half of the room, a third to a half of the room, that was kind of checking out. I was like; I've gotta ... aw crap! What's a story? It happened real fast in my head. I was like; what's a story that I can tell very quickly to be able to grab and resinate with that part of the room better? Luckily, because I tell a lot of stories, I was able to reach down into my pocket of stories and grab one that I knew would resinate with them. [Boosh 00:07:44], and blast it out there. I broke from my script pretty hard in several places. When I realized that what I had prepared was resinating well with this one group, bit of a younger group, and more of an internet savvy group. Just being honest. And, maybe a little bit more of the older people or generations, people who may not be as internet tech-savvy. Remember, I'm not a coder or programmer. I'm just putting the other systems that already exist. That's what I teach you how to do in some of the programs. But, I was like; man, I gotta pull some stories out real fast. Bam! So, I can just interact with them. I did really fast off the cuff. Boom! I start breaking from my script, and it totally worked. I had both demographics. I'm trying to be sensitive here. You guys understand what I'm saying, right? You guys understand what I'm getting at. I had both demographics now resinating with me. I felt the difference. It was very interesting. It's something that happens to me every time speak. It's something that happens to me even when I podcast. It's something that, when I first started podcasting, telling stories, and teaching this stuff, you know what I mean? Being in these courses, I can tell if I'm getting out in the weeds. I can tell when I'm going way off the edge. And, I'm like; crap! I gotta drop a story. I gotta do this. Funny enough, when I go straight to tactics, and I start saying; yeah, here's the tactics. I always lose everyone. Even though it's what everyone always thinks they want, if I don't wrap it in a story, they don't remember it anyway. There has to be a story wrapped around it, or else no one remembers the tactic anyway. It has to be some kind of emotional quick response, even if it's a really brief. That's what makes facts stick. They stick with the glue of story. And tactics and all that too. So, anyway, it's really fascinating. The only thing I want to drop to you guys is, if you've been telling people about your MLM. First off, you gotta ask a lot of questions about them. They gotta feel like you're interested in them as a human being; you're not just there to pitch them your stuff. But when you get to a place where you feel like; aw man, I really wanna hear about your thing. Tell a story. Don't just jump right in. Whether it's your MLM's story of how the MLM came about, or if your story of how you chose. You should definitely tell that story; the story of why you decided to get in. There's a story behind it. It's not because the comp plan. You did not get in your MLM because they had a great product. What was the story? What was going on in your life? You tell that story. If you're telling that story and you're not getting a response, number one, you're probably telling facts, not emotions. So, get better at telling emotions. And then number two though, you might have to change the story. Does that make sense? That's what I had to do on stage. I was like; huh! I switched the story real fast, and I ... these are like arrows in your quiver. You don't let them all out at once. I'm not telling every story at the same time. But, I reached back, and I was like; you know what will be good for this? [Cwoo 00:10:46]! I pulled the arrow out, I stretched it back, I launched that one, and I see the reaction. And it worked. It was really, really cool. Because of that, afterwards, I had a ton of people from one crowd that I knew who was with me, and then another crowd that I knew I had a harder time getting with me at first, both crowds came up. Does that make sense? Anyway, that's all I'm trying to teach you guys. That's the literally entire purpose of this episode. But, that does not come without you repeatedly telling your stories over and over. You will start to feel people's response. I don't how else to describe it. It's the weirdest thing. You'll start to feel their response. You'll start to feel how it is that they are accepting what it is that you're saying. Does that make sense? Every single time that you go out and you tell a story, or you are challenging somebody's belief, there's this scale of believability that they're starting to go through. They're starting to say; yeah, no. I can totally see how what you're saying is true. That's one side of the spectrum. Or, on the other side of the spectrum is; dude, that's not true at all. There's no way that's true at all. That's total garbage. That's crap! Does that make sense? There's this scale. It's the believability-to-complete-crap scale. Back and forth. That's what they're trying to do. They're starting to look at your story and go; that's complete garbage! It's like, if you see an advertisement, and the story says; I lost 475 pounds eating nothing but a grape for three years. You're gonna look at that and be like; oh, that story sucks! That's probably not what you're gonna say, but your thought on the believability-to-total garbage scale. Yeah, I totally believe that, versus total garbage. You're gonna be on the garbage side. You're gonna be like; that's terrible! And, I can tell that the story ... all the stories that I tell are true. Although, I could tell that how I was telling it. I could tell that the elements I was tossing in was not resinating in the current story I telling on stage. I had to switch it out. Boom! So, if you are not feeling like you're connecting well enough with people, continue to write out the major story lines that have happened in your life, and how it applies, and how you can teach with them your MLM opportunity to other people. Does that make sense? Go and actually write down. I've totally done that. You write down all these story lines, tons of headlines, lots of them. That's half of how I come up with these podcast episodes you guys. I go, and I start writing a story; cool thing going on in my life, interesting thing going on in my life, controversial thing going on in my life. Does that makes sense? I start writing down all these different things that is going on in my life, and that is how I actually get out there and resinate with people so that they are in a place to receive the fact that I wanna draw to. So that they are in a place to receive the nugget; by doing that, that's how they get into a place to understand your comp plan. In a place to understand, otherwise, you're literally throwing ... it's like taking a squirt gun and trying to put out a forest fire. It's not really gonna work. Does that make sense? You need to be in place to receive it; any new thing into your life. You do that by first getting someone in the same state that you were in when you were in the middle of that story. In order to be able to do that, you gotta be able to tell emotions, not facts. So, get good at telling anyway. I feel like I'm talking in a circle now, but I hope you understand the point of what I'm saying here. Get good at the storytelling thing. I've said it before on this podcast. I know I'm saying it again right now. The reason why is just to illustrate exactly what I went through. I had to pull an different arrow from my quiver, launch it out there, and see their reaction. I've done it enough times, and I've done it from enough stages that, that arrow stuck real well. And then, I had the other part of the room that I could feel was not with me. The way I could feel it was, their eyes go down. They suddenly stop making eye contact. When I say something, there's no; Oo, ah, hey! You know like when you're launching fireworks on the Fourth of July? Oo, ah, you know what I mean? When someone's with you, they're looking at you. Does that make sense? I hate it when people are like; aw! Have you ever been in a room with someone in a meeting, and they're looking down at their phone, and you're talking right at'em? They're like; go ahead, I'm listening. There's no real connection happening, right? If you're really being prolific in what it is that you're saying to somebody, if your story's really captivating enough, they will put the freaking phone down. They will make you a priority in their life. If they are not, your story is not captivating enough. You've gotta get better at telling it. That's all I'm trying to say. Practice it. Practice with several different story lines, because you will feel. You will sense. There will be physical actions in their body language that tell you; hey, I'm not with you. They will be telling you that, but not verbally. They'll be doing it with their body language, with their eyes and their mannerisms. Whether or not they're connecting with you, whether or not there's little; hmm, ah, uh, oh really, huh! Right? It's a great book called The Definitive Book of Body Language. It teaches that if somebody's feet are pointed away from you, it says that their head is wishing that they were away from you also. That makes sense? If someone's feet are facing you, have you ever tried to stop somebody who's walking somewhere already? You try and stop somebody, and their feet continued, and they continued to point the direction they were going. What's your natural inclination? To let them continue going, right? It's the same thing when you're fact-to-face, and you're speaking with somebody. They're face-to-face with you. It's the weirdest thing. It's true though. Pay attention to that. Watch the direction people's feet ... if their feet ... The foot points where the body wants to go. It's the same thing when you're face-to-face. If they're looking at you, if they're looking down, if they're sideways, like; oh. Their body languages are slouching, or they're sitting up. They're leaning forward. They're engaging. Their eyes are getting big. They're going; woo, ha, uh, really, mm, right? They're making all the little noises. They're with you the whole way, they clap, or they're excited. It's easy to see when someone's with you. It's easy to see when someone does not wanna be around you. It's easy to see. On the internet, the way I do it is when people are engaging with me. If it's a chat box or a lot of different ways. I'll continue to ask a lot of trial closes, things like that to make sure that they are with me as I'm saying it. You'll begin to feel how your stories are being received. That's the only thing I'm trying to help you guys understand. So, anyways, continue to look through the different storylines. Make sure your storylines are being received, and understand that when you're saying your story, it's not a one story fits all method. As you put out your major story of how you got on the MLM, or if you tell your origin stories. As you tell it emotionally, not with fact, start to feel if it's being received. If you feel like you are not being received, you are most likely, and number one, are not telling with enough emotion. Or, number two, you're telling the wrong story. Does that make sense? The third option is, you might just be telling the wrong person your story. The story might be great. It's your job to feel out what those scenarios are. Does that make sense? It's not like a catch-all for those things. Gotta be good at telling with emotion. You gotta be good at telling the story. You might have to switch up the story. Number three, though, you actually might be saying it to the wrong person. And you know what? That's fine. If you've heard my story, and you don't resinate with that, there are others who will hear it and run to me. Does that make sense? So, don't get discouraged if you're like; aw man, I keep doing this thing Steven. No one, uh! Don't worry about it. That's totally fine. Just keep practicing telling the stories. That's why I encourage everybody to start publishing. Everybody just start publishing. I don't care if it's a podcast you start doing, a blog, whatever it is. Just be consistent. And, within a year, you'll be shocked at the traction you've made and the amount of following that you create. It's very fascinating. But, it gives you a platform to practice this stuff. Alright guys, thanks so much. I will talk to you later. Bye. Hey. Thanks for listening. Please remember to rate and subscribe. Whether you just want more leads or automated MLM Funnels, or if you just wanna learn to get paid more for your products, head over to secretmlmhacks.com to join the next free training today.

Copywriter, author and copy coach Steve Roller stops by our studio for the 84th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Steve is the founder of The Copywriter Cafe Facebook group—a group that a lot of club members are also in. We asked Steve to share his thoughts about his book, the field of copywriting and a whole lot more. Here’s what this episode covers: •  how a 17-year career in sales (and an online course) led to his second life as a copywriter •  how he connected with his first client (it involved pancakes) •  the advice he gives copywriters who are struggling to gain traction •  the advantage copywriters with a sales background have over other writers •  what it takes to foster engagement in a Facebook community •  the importance of relationships for all (but especially new) copywriters •  the books he recommends to copywriters who are just starting out •  the skills you need to be good at on client calls •  why every copywriter needs to write their own book •  how writing a book has affected his business •  the dark side of freelancing (spoiler: you won’t make millions working at the beach) •  the lighter side of freelancing—it’s definitely not all bad •  what Steve sees happening with copywriting in the future This was a great conversation with someone who is doing a lot to support other copywriters and help them succeed. It’s no wonder we feel such a kinship with Steve. You can get this interview on iTunes, Stitcher or by scrolling down to click the play button. Or you can read the transcript if you scroll down the page a bit.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Café Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie The Freelancer Manifesto by Steve Roller Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Cafewriter.com Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: This podcast is brought to you by The Copywriter Think Tank, our mastermind group for writers who are serious about taking their businesses to the next level. In the Think Tank, you’ll learn from guest experts who share their business and copywriting expertise; you’ll have the opportunity to sit in the hot seat while the other members of the group brainstorm solutions to the challenges you’re facing; and, you’ll have exclusive access to a small, focus group of professional copywriters who are all working together to get better at what we do. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth the investment. If you’re interested in learning more, visit www.copywriterthinktank.com. Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 84 as we chat with freelance copywriter, author, and community leader Steve Roller about the dark side of freelancing; the skills you need to make it as a consulting copywriter; why you must ride a book; and the impact a great community can have on your career. Kira: Welcome, Steve! Rob: Yeah, welcome Steve! Steve: Hey! Thank you very much for having me; I’m honored to be here, and excited to talk to you today and share some ideas with your readers. With your readers...I’m thinking ‘book’ already! With your lis— Kira: They’re going to be readers! Steve: Laughs Rob: Readers, listeners, yeah. Steve: With your listeners! No, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Rob: We’re really grateful that you are taking the time to talk to us. You’ve been on our list for a little while. We’ve sort of watched what you’ve done in your community and with your book and so, we’re just really excited to just kick off this conversation. Steve: Excellent, excellent.

Live listener Q&A about how I keep my "state" in the right place to build quickly... Oh, what’s going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you’re listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you’ll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today’s best internet sales funnels, and now here’s your host, Steve Larsen. Hey, guys, got a cool episode here today. I get asked this question shockingly ... I expect this question to come along, but not with how often it's asked. Anyway, this is gonna be a cool segment. I'm gonna pull in a question that I got from Gerim Atkinson. I appreciate the question, man. I get a lot of questions from you guys and if you guys want to ask a question to me just go to salesfunnelradio.com. If you scroll down, there's gonna be a green button on the bottom right. You can ask any question. It will voice record straight off your browser directly to me and then I can toss it in. Anyways, here's the question from Gerim. Gerim: Hey, Steve, Gerim Atkinson here. First, I just wanted to tell you thank you so much for your awesome podcast. I love all the content that you cover here. I love the super high level stuff. Then, I also really love when you get in the weeds; the tactical podcasts where you're talking about different techniques that you found have been successful in building funnels so really appreciate all the value you bake into here, as well as, the different funnels you built out. Just appreciate all you do so super huge thanks for that. The question I had for you was as you're getting into the zone to build out funnels and pulling from what Tony Robbins often talks about of getting into state. I would love to hear what you personally do to get into state to build funnels. Like what anything looks like for that process. Are there things you do beforehand to get you focused and concentrated to sit down and work as you're building away? Are there foods that you found are really good for you to help keep up energy levels and keep you focused? Music? Headphones? Anyway, I would just love to hear what that process looks like for you that allows you to be zoned in on your game of building funnels and chasing after what you're working on. Anyway, thanks again, and I hope you handle my question. Thanks. Steve: Hey, Gerim. Hey, man, thanks so much. Appreciate that. Hope you're doing well personally, as well, my friend. Hey, great question. I honestly get that ... I've always been shocked at how many people ask that. Not so much ... I always expected that I would get that question quite a bit, but not how ma' ... A lot of people ask me that. What's the ... In fact, a lot of people at the PHAT event that we did asked that question. That was one of the biggest ones. What's the state you have to be in? What's the mental control? I always have made fun of the whole mindset training industry. When they're like, "I'm gonna teach you some mindset training." It's like, "What the heck does that mean?" It sounds so fluffy to me. It's taken me awhile to figure out my own process, but I have one, and it's been by accident as I've put things together, and I've built 'em and things like that. Here's what I do. This might be weird or whatever, but in the morning when I wake up there's actually a YouTube playlist that I've been building over the last while. What it is, it's a lot of my favorite motivational videos. I hate calling them motivational videos because I don't need motivating. I err on the side of doing too many things. There's no one putting a cow prod to my back. I just move. I know I move. I'm a shaker and that's one of my strengths; is I don't need motivating, but every once in a while, I get in a slump. I'm not gonna lie. Like the last week, I felt a little bit like I've been in a little bit of a funk. There's some vulnerability for you right there, right? I mean we all feel it. Everyone I know feels that eventually. It's not like ... I don't just run around screaming all the time, but it is a great way to break state. It's a great way for me to ready and get excited. Even if I'm really, really tired, there's times where we'll be at the office till two or three in the morning. It's like I'm dying, but I get back into state by choice. That's the whole key. It's by choice. I'll start jumping around, physically. Russell and I, we literally, we'll start jumping around. We'll play some music that's really fast and upbeat. We'll jam out to some rock music with some really silly air guitar stuff. You know what I mean? I mean that's the whole thing. I've never been successful or a very good marketer or very good business person or very fun person around be, or I'm sorry, a very fun person in general to be around if I'm not having fun. Does that make se'? Even when crap hits the fan, even when stuff's really hard, even when it's very, very challenging ... The number one thing is I've gotta find a way to have fun with it. Even in college, when I did not like classes or when there's stuff to go, I had to find something that I was doing, I had to find it interesting. Some aspect of it needed to be interesting to me, or I had find a way to make interesting. Or I just didn't care. I'd enter into this total state of apathy. That's one of the easiest things you can do when you're starting to build funnels. I mean or your business or whatever it is. It's this game and when you realize it's a game, like in my mind a lot of the pressure gets taken off. I'm like, "Well, I don't totally know what's gonna work so let me just throw it all against the wall and let's see what it does. Oh, that does, cool. Now, let's move forward." You know? And that's how ... and with that backdrop, this gets a lot easier. Number one, man, state control; tons of state control. There's a lot of times. I've mentioned many times before that I'm in the middle of getting out of the army. When I was in basic training and when I was there, and I was doing all the ... We were running around, and it was super hard. It was really challenging. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to be the fastest. I wanted to shoot the best, so I basically was, almost the whole time. I was the second fastest in my entire platoon and company. There was one other guy that could beat me. He was so freaking quick. He was like the second fastest runner in Nigeria or something. He was so ... Oh, my gosh. He was running the two miles in 10 minutes and 30 seconds. The guy was hauling. My fastest was only 11 minutes and 52 seconds. I mean, he was killing me by whole minutes. Anyway, ah, still, I'm very competitive. I wanna be the best so like it's still ... That guy's awesome. He's the man. Rono's the coolest dude ever, but geez. Anyway. There was a phrase that we would repeat a lot of times when it was freezing. I went in the middle of winter. That was a terrible time to go to basic. I went at a time when they were shutting down the different parts of the base that I went to and so they couldn't feed us normally. The amount of food we got was drastically less. I lost a ton of weight that I didn't need to lose while I was there. Other guys in training were not that way at all. They were well fed. I mean anytime crap hit the fan and we would just ... Sometimes we'd just start yelling, be like, "Right." We just back into state. There was a phrase they would repeat over and over again and they would yell, "Fake motivation is still motivation," okay? That sounds cheesy, but there's some serious truth to that. Especially when crap gets hard, and I guarantee you it's gonna hit. Look, when I'm trying to build a project, I see the beginning to the end on a macro level. It is impossible to see it on a micro level, though. I can't tell you how many times ... Literally, every single time we launch a funnel at ClickFunnels, something bad happens. Mega bad. I'm not talking like, "Oh, we forgot to write an email sequence." No. For some reason, this integration over here didn't work, totally broke half the thing, whatever funnel we're building. Or major changes. Or massive hiccups. You know what I'm saying? Literally, every single time. I'm trying to say this you so that you understand that it happens to every single person and to think that it won't happen to you is ludicrous. You're gonna feel crappy sometimes. There's gonna eventually be a part where pure grit is involved, and your ability to withstand adversity mentally. You're gonna have one or maybe two people come out of the gate and tell you, you can't do it. But by the time it hits your ears, and it goes into your head, we translate it as precedents for how everyone's looking at us. That's true anytime you start anything. It's true every time I start anything. I'll go launch something. I'll get a lot of people saying, "Hey, that's sweet." I'll get some people saying, "Oh, that sucks. Like mwa, I can't believe you're doing that. Eh." They're the haters and just expect that, but what's funny is that the tendency, and what I see a lot of people like who I coach and who I help and things like that, the tendency is to hear the one or two people and mistake it for being everybody. Everyone hates my thing. No. It's two people, and they hate everything in life so don't even worry what they think. No, it was only two people, and they're just the kind of people who wanna be miserable their whole life, and they're trying to find something else to do, too. You just happen to be the next victim. That just happens. Any time you put something out there, just know, number one, it's gonna take a lot of mental grit for you to combat a lot of the negativity that's gonna come your way. Whether you are a funnel builder, or you are the face of stuff and don't know anything about funnels, which is fine. Or you're a copywriter or whatever it is, any one of our roles. There's always very unanticipated resistance. Every time. To think it's gonna be different is totally ludicrous. Any time I've ever launched anything from both friends, families and enemies, I've always had a lot of pro stuff and negative stuff. It's just the way it is, and it's fine. Eventually, you gotta just understand, you're not gonna please everyone, and you shouldn't try to. In fact, the fact that you're not pleasing everybody is a great thing. It means you got polarity inside your attractive character. I just said something before that's probably gonna offend a lot of people. I think mindset training, like selling mindset training, it is the most fluffy thing on the planet to me. I don't understand it. Define it then at least. Like mindset training, it's like I do that everyday anyways. Not that I'm trying to, but I realized if I touch the hot stove, I can't do that. It hurts. I know it's not how it works, but you see what I'm saying? 'Cause we all have pros and cons. We have pushes and pulls towards everything going on around us. To think that everyone's gonna be happy about the things that you do, it's just not true and that's okay. That's why you build a community and culture around you. It's a support system. One thing that I know the Russell does is he just doesn't look a lot of times at comments, whether he's in the middle of a webinar or on a Facebook live or stuff. When he's actually delivering the main thing, he doesn't look at comments. It's because 90% of it is really great stuff, but there's always 10% or just the freaking idiots. They decide that they wanna crap on everyone else's parade. It throws him off. It throws me off, so I don't look at the comments for a while. That is one trick. While in the middle of delivering a presentation or a webinar or Facebook live or whatever it is, for a while, I look at the comments like crazy when I'm in the middle of the launch when I'm putting things out there 'cause I'm ask campaigning stuff, but besides that though, I don't really look at the comments for a while until I get the thing up. Then feel free to poop on it 'cause that's just how it works. Anyway, I wasn't meaning on going off the whole thing, but I just I want you to know and everyone that's listening, I plan stuff on a macro level as deeply as I can, also, on the micro level, okay? I see the macro. I'm like okay, I'm gonna go from this funnel to this funnel. People are generally really good at that piece. Then I try and get really nitty gritty on the micro level. Okay, well, this page is gonna have this and this page. It gonna have this offer and this automation over here and it's gonna have this, this, this, this. I'm gonna do these things. I'm excited about it, but it never goes that way. Ever. In the 300 funnels I've built in the last 18 months, it doesn't ever go how we're actually gonna ... We'll put stuff together. I mean it's so rare that there's not a hiccup or there's something that I've realized. Oh, you know what? I've taken it as far as I can. We have to have XYZ video. I thought we could get along without it, but we need it now. You know what I mean? It always ends up that way. This game has more to do with how fast can you get over the crap and just keep moving on? The tendency for most people, though, is they'll hit something. They'll hit a wall and they'll go, "No. Dang it, a wall. Eh." And they get uh, no, a wall. Then they fixate on it and it becomes bigger than it actually was in the first place. They start saying, "Well, I'm not successful because of the wall that came up. I wasn't expecting, and well, that guy didn't have a wall over there." Not that you could see, but he probably had a ton more than you could see. Then they get fixated on this thing that was never that big in the first place. All they had to do was go around the left of it, around the right of it, over it, under it or they could just blow straight through it. A lot of success in this, not just in funnel entrepreneurship, in life comes down to the ability to move past stuff quickly, the unexpected quickly, whatever the things are that are coming up. I'm not telling you to not acknowledge your emotion when you have that upset. Acknowledge it. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah. It's bad and then boom, move on. You had the pity party. Go forward, okay? That's it because otherwise you fixate on this thing, and then it becomes the object in your mind for why you're not moving forward. Then you start to fear the obstacle leaving because then you're like, "Crap. Now, I have to move forward." It becomes this backwards and forwards thing. I see that a lot of times. I mean there's over 500 people inside the Two Comma Coaching Program. I see that a lot. Every one of us goes through it. Every one of us struggles through it. Every one of us ... When it comes to publishing for the first time, that's a biggie. A lot of people have a hard time with that one. Especially, creating a dream 100 list and actually starting to build relationships. That's one a lot of people stumble on. Creating a new niche. Creating a new offer. Building out not just the funnel part, but ... the actual building of the funnel and sitting down and doing it, that's the sexy part that everyone wants to do, but they don't actually sit down, actually write the copy. In every one of those aspects, there's gonna be these hiccups. Hey, either you're not good enough, and you gotta figure it out or hire somebody. Or some other unexpected thing's gonna pop up. It's this game every single time, right? One of my favorite quotes. I'm gonna botch it, but the idea ... is that, hey, look, you can measure the success of anybody based on the number of hard problems they've solved. If you want to be super successful, you have got to look at yourself as a problem solver. You can't look at others for the solution. You gotta solve it on your own. Be a self-solver. The faster you can self-solve, the faster you're gonna be successful with it. I mean every time I put something out, that's how it works. Every time. You know what's fun? It's almost like ... That's why I call it mind muscle. It is like that. At first, it's really hard. You're like, "Oh, this is the first time I've experienced any kind of adversity in something that I want. The world doesn't seem to want to give it to me. They're asking me what my value is, and I'm not sure what my value is yet." You're flexing this muscle in your brain for the first time. Then you get it out. You actually launch the thing or whatever, and it's like, "Ah, now relax for a second." Now, let's do the next one. It's a big mind muscle flex again. You're like, "No, my gosh. This sucks. It's so hard." It's the same thing over and over and over again, but now you watch Russell's team. You watch the way he and I interact. You watch the way he interacts with his other people. It's like here's an adversity. Boom. With three ways, we could solve it. Sucks, but we're over it. Boom. Here's three ways we could fix this. Boom. Here's two ways we could do this. What was cool is that I know one of the major attitudes that I've had, that has helped me tremendously in my very short career, as it's been so far, is I go to Russell or you might go to your boss, or you might go to whoever your higher up is, or you might go to your spouse, you might go to whoever, your girlfriend, your significant other and you say these words, give me your hardest problem, okay? You say those words, and you're gonna have a lot of guaranteed mind muscle flexing, right? You're gonna have a lot of iron pumping with your brain. It's gonna be really hard, but if you're willing to go through that, holy crap, your speed increases so intensely and you can get so much stuff done in your life. You can move forward because you don't get caught up on petty crap like, "Uh-huh, they didn't like something I said. I got three negative comments back. Uh." So what? Just do the next one... Keep going... You gotta practice that over and over and over again... My suggestion when you're building these things, especially when it comes to your brain, is understand when you're about to have burn out. I actually have a ... It's this white cube. It's got all these different times on it and whatever side pops up ... I'll put a 30 minute timer on. Boop. Hear a little beep? And then in 30 minutes, the timer's gonna go off, and I'll switch over to the five minute one. Now that means you get a five minute break. Then I'll switch back to 30 minutes, then go back to five minutes. 30 minutes/five minutes. Then I go back and forth and back and forth. That's one way I go faster and for longer periods of time without needing to have this big massive break. That is one strategy that I do use. Another strategy that I use is I try to make three moves a day, meaning I just try and make, if you think ... like a chessboard, I try and make three moves per day, right? If I only have 24 hours per day to get whatever I'm trying to done, let's see, I'm gonna be at the office for a certain amount of time. I'll be home for a certain amount of time. I gotta sleep, a necessity, for a certain amount of time even though I hate it. At some point, I gotta work out even though I'm not really been doing that for a while. You know what I mean? I only have 24 hours. If I can just make three moves per day, it will at least always be moving the ball forward. If I don't make any moves at all during the day whether it's for my own stuff or for Russell or for a client, for anybody, if I could just move just three moves a day, then you can define what that is, but they can be good sized moves, stuff that matters. Okay. I got in contact with this correct person I needed to. Awesome. I did this podcast episode. Cool. I designed this page and least have the layout for the remainder of what the funnels gonna be like. Boom. Three things. Whoo. All right, I can go to sleep. You know what I mean? I try and make three moves per day. That's a great way to pace yourself. We like to always think that we can sprint towards the end, but the reality is you gotta plan out how long you think it's gonna take you to build a funnel or a business. Then double that assumption. If you're like, "Hey, it's gonna take me three months." Okay. Plan on six, right? Work like it's gonna take you three months. Work like the plan is three months, but just know that you're actually gonna do it in six. That's another ... Same with cost. I think it's gonna cost me 10 grand to get this project out. All right, that means it's actually gonna be 20. What can I do to increase cash flow? You know what I mean? Those little things that I do to expect and plan for any type of hiccups or bumps along the way. Then honestly, I just listen to sweet music. I can't listen to music that has words in it very much. That distracts me too much and distracts my brain, but I know I have a little bit of enough ADD in my brain; actual ADHD a little bit, a lot of symptoms of it that I need some other stimulus going on in order for me to focus, so I'll have music playing, which is usually over 120 beats per minute, which sounds cheesy, but that's true. It's over 120 beats per minute. Then I go ... The music doesn't have any words really that much. It's a lot of house music almost, and I just zone out and do my little 30 minute/five minute, 30 minute/five minute. Try and get three moves done in the day. That's how I do it. If stuff ... Sorry. I'm getting stuttery. If stuff begins to get in somewhat of a lull, I need to stand up. I recommend standing desks. Usually, I stand the first half of the day. I stand the entire first half of the day without sitting, and I'll sit the last half of the day. That keeps me more engaged as well. I guess those are some tricks ... actually wasn't thinking about, that I do. Then mixed with the mental, I call it mind muscle. It's a post that I did on my personal Facebook page if you wanna go look at it, but it's the playlist, the playlist itself. Here's the post I wrote. I'll end with this. Okay. Mentally, I think of myself as just a freaking warrior, like whether or not that means that physically or whatever. Says, "I'm Steve. Hear me roar. The latest conversation with me, myself and I." Then I said, "Enjoy your brain you're already marvelous. I don't need motivation. That junk fizzles and dies quickly anyway. Some place, at some time, you'll need actual grit in whatever you. Look forward to the grit. When motivation leaves so do the hobbyists." It's a super key line. "When motivation leaves so do the hobbyists so although I love living and smiling on with purpose, make it hard, Coach. I found that this is all more about saying no to stuff rather than yes. Wonder junkies and Renaissance men have the toughest time of all so control your mind and rage after the goal like the last drop in a desert. Embrace the suck." That's another phrase from the Army a lot. "A ticked off drill Sargent at my basic training said that. They called him The Dragon." "Never tell me what I can't do. I'll kick you in the neck. Has nothing to do with drinking my own Kool-Aid. I know my own weaknesses. Periodically, I lay in my office floor, seeing marvelous visions of my own goal," which is very true. I actually do that a lot, too, so I'll lay on my office floor here at home, and I'll just stare at the ceiling, and I just envision, and I embody what I'm trying to be. I try and take that on. I try and shed things that I'm not trying to be. I do that many times also. There's all these things I'm remembering that I'm doing I forgot about. Let me keep reading here. It says, "But I really only need and want to see the immediate three steps in front of me at all times. It's how I control noise. I've learned to love ambiguity. The battle is in you. It's against your own mind. Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts." That's from Buda. "Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts." "Business karma is real. Be a crappy human, and it'll return. Whoever said, 'The customer's always right' was probably a politician because that's total garbage, but everyone" ... I'm having a hard time reading this. I'm looking through my little foam screen thing here that's attached to my mic, and it's blurring my vision. Anyway, the whole point of it is you gotta freaking move forward. Abraham Lincoln said, he said, "Gentleman, why not laugh, with the fearful strain that is upon me day and night, if I did not laugh, I should die." Just have fun with it. There's a whole bunch of little mind things. You'll figure out what works for you. You'll figure out what those things are, but when it comes to ... You just gotta be a freaking tank in your brain. I mean because no one else cares about what you're doing, okay. It's a sad reality. I'm not saying that people don't listen to this. They don't care. I'm not saying people don't care, but you're the only one ... Let me say this another way. You're the only one who's passionate enough about what your thing is to actually go through the crap, in order to get it done. You're the only one. No one else can have that responsibility on their shoulders. Don't look to anyone else. Don't try and put it on anyone else. No one else cares as much as you do to actually get your thing up and out the door. If it's already moving, nobody cares enough to actually get it to the next level. It's only you. You are so alone in that. It's actually not a freaky thing to realize. I'm not saying like, "Oh, you're all alone," or whatever. What I'm saying is it's actually a liberating thing to realize and understand that you have total control. You can get things on your own.  I'm not saying it's totally on your own. Create a team. Put the pieces together you need to, but you are the driver, and it's exciting when you realize that. Like, "Ah, wow. The battle really is against my own brain and the critic inside of my own head. Huh?" It gets really, really easy after that. Anyways, guys, it's a long episode again. The last two have been long. I'm so sorry about that, but Gerim, it's great question. When I heard that, I was like ... Massive fire behind that so, anyways, appreciate that. As far as a recap, I would find out what your own mind muscle is. I would flex your mind muscle. Figure out how that works for you. Work on state control like crazy. I stand. I listen to music that's fast paced, not crazy, but that keeps me engaged. No words with it. I plan the micro, and I plan as much as I can ... I'm sorry. I plan the macro, and I plan as much as I can the micro; all the small little details, but then I 100% expect that that's gonna be false. It's totally gonna be different when I actually get in the weeds. Anyway, whatever you think time and cost wise it's gonna take for you to get something out the door, I would make an entire launch plan before you ever start building anything. Plan the whole thing out with dates, when you're doing what and then hold your own feet to the fire, but then double that timeline to make it more realistic. Then plan on making three moves per day... When you actually do three moves per day, what it lets me do emotionally is it lets me have personal wins that I need in order to stay engaged. If I don't have a personal win in something for a little while, I feel a loss of momentum in motion. It actually make me feel a lot of anxiety. Like I'm not doing anything when I could be doing a lot still. Anyway, hopefully that helps. Be freaking tanks and figure out exactly what it is that keeps you ticking when stuff gets hard 'cause it's gonna happen. Expect it, but only look to yourself for the answer to get over it. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today’s best internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroker.com/freefunnels to download your prebuilt sales funnel today.

Click above to listen in iTunes... I LOVE video…. And traffic. I have over 200 videos on Youtube now and here's what I wish I'd known… Steve: Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Announcer: Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Steve: All right, you guys. Hey, I'm super excited. I'm super pumped for today because we get to talk about something that has always intrigued me. It's actually kind of the way it got started in internet when I first started working for Paul Mitchel and driving internet traffic with one of my buddies. Since then I really haven't done much so I'm excited to welcome on to the podcast an expert in this area, thank you so much, Nick Arapkiles. How are you doing? Nick: I'm great, man. Thanks for having me on. Steve: Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on. I was just looking through Facebook messages before you and I got on here and I didn't realize I think you had asked if we could push the time back and I'm such a morning person, thanks for getting up this early to do this. Nick: Hey, no problem at all, man. I'm happy to do it. Like you said I'm not much of a morning person, but when someone like you gives me an opportunity like this I'm happy to get on. Steve: It's nice that you did, I appreciate it. For everyone listening, this really is probably the first time, I mean, this is the first time that we'd really spoken like this. The guy that connected us is Ben Wilson obviously. Ben is the guy. He and I we're doing that things, Paul Mitchel and several other companies just think the world of him. He sent me a message and he goes, "Dude, I got this awesome guy. He's the man." I think I still have the message just to put it on the podcast or something. It's pretty funny. He's like, "This sweet guy, man, he's this genius and he said he wants to come." "Hey, sweet." I'm always looking for talent, for people because I get boring for everyone I'm sure. I'm excited to have some mix out. Nick: It's kind of a funny story. I met him at an event here in Colorado and then I actually ran into him at the Rockies, in the baseball game. Then he messaged me about you and here we are. Steve: Dude, that's great. What event was it? Nick: It was actually for a book publishing event ironically ... Steve: He told me he's going to that. Okay, cool. That's fantastic. It's funny this whole internet marketing world, it's actually a lot smaller than people think it is because people get in it, they'll get out of it, they'll get in it but the people that stick around I don't think there's ... Anyways, get around quick. What is exactly that you're doing then? You told me that you're awesome with YouTube which is awesome. Most people forget you can even advertise there I feel like but what is it that you're doing? Nick: Basically, I've been doing this stuff for a lot. Do you want me to just go on to my story a little bit? Steve: Okay, man. Let's hear it. Nick: Okay, cool. I've actually been online for about six years now and two and a half of those first six years were complete and utter struggle. It's usually the case with a lot of people's stories. I don't think I'm too much different... Steve: Anyone who says otherwise I feel like they are just lying or throwing a sales video. Nick: Yeah, I mean, it sucked at the time. Obviously it sucked at the time not having, you always expect when you get started you're thinking you're going to make money in your first day, first week, first month at least but it was tough man, it really was. I forfeited a lot of things going on. I was actually in college at the time... It was the summer before my last year of college so all my friends were going out partying and going to pool parties, different stuff like that. I was just dedicated to this thing. I essentially locked myself in my room that whole summer and I was dedicated to making it work and I didn't even make it work that entire summer and even years after that. It just led me on this path I think once you get into this like you're essentially infected with the entrepreneurial bug as I like to call it. You can't really go back from that. I mean, I kept on trying different things. I even went into the trading Forex and stuff like that but eventually came back into the marketing realm and that's where I am now like you're asking I've done a lot of YouTube stuff. That's the big thing is I really always focus on driving traffic because if you can drive traffic then you have a business. You really can do anything, it depends on what traffic you're using. Most the time I promote different funnels like business opportunities or just affiliate programs... I haven't really dove into much of my own stuff. I just leverage other systems that people put out and that's pretty much what I'm doing but it all stems from driving traffic and then calling people from YouTube into my world. I like to really call it my world more so than my list. I think a lot of people say my list or build a list. That's great, obviously you need to build a list but I think it helps me come from a better mentality than it's I'm building a list of people or a list. It's more so I'm building an audience of people, they are in my world now. Because I think a lot of people secure a list and they just think of numbers and what it really comes down to is that these are people that are interested and they want to connect with you and they want to learn more. You have to treat them as such and I think when you do that you get a lot better results. Steve: Interesting. That's interesting. A lot of people I know will talk about, they'll have you fill out something. Who are you trying to attract? What's their likes? What's their dislikes? What do they hate? Sometimes I feel like that gets pretty artificial after a while. You're just targeting people like yourself. I feel like it's the easiest way to go... Nick: Yeah, to be honest I didn't express this fully but basically what I do right now is I don't actually do too much advertising where I'm paying for the clicks and stuff like that. It's mostly just all organic. I've done a little bit of advertising here and there but the big thing is just putting content up. I know you're asking if I could drop some nuggets for YouTube and stuff like that but the biggest thing is just to continually put out content just like any other type of platform whether that's Facebook, Instagram, even Snapchat now. It's just continually putting out content because the more content you have out there, the more likely people are going to find you... I mean, there are some videos that I have that have seven views but there's also other videos that have 100,000 views. You never really know exactly which videos are going to hit. You might have an idea depending on the keywords and how optimized your videos are but the biggest thing that I stress and every day I learn more and more, I'm always learning is the fact that you never really know exactly until you start putting up content which videos are really going to stick and gain some traction until you upload them. Steve: That's interesting you say that. Back in college also I started really, really diving into this also, same thing. I sucked at it. There's a guy I listen to and he was saying, "You should always be publishing. Try and get a way to be in front of your people. Produce content." Just exactly what you're saying. I started doing that and making all these Periscope videos and I would put the recordings on YouTube. I can't tell you how cool that was. Stuff started happening when I did that. The exact reason you're saying. I had some videos that were terrible but then others were completely surprising to me. People started watching them and pushing them around. What the heck is this? My products started getting sold organically. I was like, "This is kind of cool," I totally agree with that but I have to ask though, you're putting YouTube videos out. Try to put as many up as you can. How do you rank a YouTube video? It's hard to... these words for spiders to go crawl and stuff like that like a blog post. What are some strategies you use to actually try and get them out there? Nick: It almost feels like it's changed throughout the years, I think the algorithms and everything. I'm not that geeky like that but I just noticed some trends here and there. As of late, I've noticed that a bigger channel with more subscribers and just a little bit more authority, maybe it's been on for a little bit of while or a little while, those are the videos that's pushing up towards the top of the search engines. You can pull back links. I know that probably gets a little bit more complex. I don't know if you're familiar with back linking. Steve: 100%, yeah definitely. Nick: Okay, I just didn't know if your audience would or not but that's basically you can go out there and get some other people to put your video in a bunch of different places. The idea behind that is that the search engines see your video all over the place and they are like, "This must be a video that is good. Let's start pushing it up towards the top of the search engine." Especially a couple of years ago that was huge and it definitely got me a lot of results but the thing again that I've noticed lately is that just having a big channel and having some decent subscribers and having people actually watch majority of your video is what's really pushing your videos up. I've had some videos where I just started making videos and they don't get much traction at all but then I have one of my bigger channels and I just put it up and I don't really optimize it at all, I don't really do anything to it and right away it's like one of the first videos on the search engine. Steve: I hear of Traffic Geyser. Nick: Yeah the name sounds familiar. Steve: These sites where you just submit your video and they'll just blast it across the internet so that you could get more views. I mean, totally spam-my stuff, you know what I mean? It's the dream for every entrepreneur or internet guys to just put your stuff everywhere. What strategies do you use for finding people to put your videos up? You know what I mean? Did you have to find related channels to yourself? Nick: Not necessarily. I use a website called Fiverr a lot of the times or at least I used to. I haven't been using it as much lately but it's a really cool website. You're obviously familiar with it but I'll explain it for your audience. Basically, it's just a website. It's called fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R dot ‎com and basically it's a site that has a bunch of people doing a bunch of different gigs. They'll literally do anything for you for $5. I think there's a processing fee now for like 50 cents. Essentially people will do anything for you on the internet. I should be more specific with that. Steve: It's funny though because I've had people like, "Rap my name." I've had people, "Beat box stuff," they'll do anything for five bucks. Nick: Exactly, there's a lot of different stuff that you can do. Basically I just go on there and look for back links or maybe social signals and it's not to complicated. I mean, you just have to find someone with good rating, good track record and just test them out and that's the whole thing that I always tell people too is that you just have to test things out. You'll never really know what's working, what's not working until you go out there and actually apply it yourself... I think a lot of people are always asking me for the secret, asking me for different things that are just going to make it click and they're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's really never the case. You know this just as well as anybody is that you actually have to go out there and do the work, see what's working, see what's not working and then throw out the stuff that's not working and then just ramp up the stuff that is working... Steve: This is one of the reasons why I laugh so much when you brought up Fiverr because it started out as a great class. I'm sorry if anyone's listening that was in that class. It was like an SEO class in college and it started out great. We're learning all these cool strategies for SEO and things like that. Then it just got like the strategies were really old. I've been doing it long enough by that point that I just knew that what I was earning wasn't significant or anything. He's like, "Hey, what you're all going to go do is you got to go create a YouTube video and think about a topic a lot and the competition in the class to see whose video can get the most views." I was like, "I could totally game that." We went and we made this, you know that, "Do you even lift, bro?" Those videos that are out there right now, have you seen it though? Nick: I'm not sure. Steve: "Bro, do you even lift?" Nick: Okay, yeah. Steve: The next Star Wars is coming out and we said, "Do you even Jedi, bro?" We made all these funny videos of people. It was pretty cool but I totally went to Fiverr and I paid this dude $5 to send like 10,000 bot clicks. For no views at all to just this massive spike and we went and we gave the ending presentation stuff like that like we have over 10,000 clicks on this thing and everyone's like, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing." It's in the last few weeks and what's funny is that we ended up getting contacted right before the class ended by this ad agency. They were like, "Hey, we want to use your video to promote Star Wars stuff on." I was like, "Okay." None of them knew that this were like ... I'm sure that 50 of them were real clicks out of the ... Maybe. What's funny though is that obviously YouTube after a while can start to see if that's crap. The views on the bottom went from 0 to 10,000 to 12 and it stayed there. We're looking at the analytics for a while and then just totally drop. They took away all of them all the way back down to 3 views or something like that after the class was ended. Anyways, the only reason I bring that up is because A, it was a total failure and I knew what happened. I knew enough about that world that time but it was I mean, how do you go through Fiverr and figure out who's going to be sending you real clicks and not. You know what I mean or who's going to be pushing your video around the right way or not? Because most of it ... I like Fiverr for testing a lot of the lower level stuff but it sounds like you've got a cool way to do it that isn't that way. Nick: Yeah, that's actually a good point... I'm glad you brought that up because that's very important that you find good gigs because if you are sending a bunch of fake traffic to your YouTube videos it can get your video shut down and even your account shut down because YouTube will recognize that and they see that you're just throwing all these views on there and they are all fake. They don't like that. I've had the experience of getting a lot of my stuff shut down because of that in the early stages. Anyone listening, make sure that you're not sending crap gigs over to your videos because YouTube will shut that down real quick. In terms of finding good stuff, basically I just make sure that the vendor has a good track record. There's one specific guy that he's probably one of the bigger gigs. He's got so many different gigs on there. I'll just let you know his name is Crorkservice. Steve: Crorkservice, you know, I might actually seen him before. Nick: I'm sure you have. Honestly he's probably one of the best out there and he's got the best ratings. He's like the top of the top sellers... I mean, it's no hidden secret. You just have to go through his gigs and figure out what exactly it is that you want. If you are going to purchase views I really haven't done that in a long time. I know there are some people that do it and they do actually have success because again like I was saying before, if you can get high retention views where people are watching the majority of your video, that actually can really, really help you with ranking your video on YouTube in specifics. Just make sure that is a high retention view and again it has a good track record because that can definitely help with rankings on YouTube. Steve: Interesting, okay. What are you doing? I heard some people talk about we’ll give some formula or outline for what to make, what to put in the video to make sure that they’ll push pass minute seven or whatever it is. Do you have anything that you would recommend there? Nick: Yeah, for sure. There’s a couple of things. The first thing that you definitely need to know, basically how I get all my traffic for the most part is it’s all based on keywords. People come into the search engines and this is just like general in terms of search traffic. Basically people will come in, they’ll be searching for something, I mean you and I have done this just as much as anybody else is that they have a concern, they have an issue, they need help with something. They come into the search engines and they start typing it out whether that is how to lose weight, how to grow tomatoes. It doesn’t really matter, it just pertains to whatever your business is but they’ll start searching things in and then they’ll find your videos if you start uploading videos, you do it on a good channel, you start optimizing it. Your videos are going to start rising towards the top of the search engines. What you need to do when you’re making your videos is that you need to let your viewers know that they are at the right place. Let’s say for example that you did make a video about how to grow heirloom tomatoes for example. What you need to say in the beginning of the video, you need to let your viewer know that they’re in the right place at the right time. You say, “Hey, you probably landed on this video because you are looking, you started searching out how to grow heirloom tomatoes,” right then and there they know that they are at the right place. That's what starts it out and then if you can get technical and say, you need to say this, you need to say this, but I think it ultimately comes down to is that you need to let them know that they’re in the right place and then give them value. I know it sounds stupidly simple but I think there’s many people out there that just like they’re trying to heighten all this traffic, all this stuff through your website. People are smart, you can’t bullshit people... When you’re genuine, when you give value and you’re just a real down to earth person then that’s when people recognize that. People will connect with you just on that fact based alone, they might be coming searching for information they want to learn how to grow tomatoes or lose weight or whatever it is. A lot of times people just want to connect with somebody and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that happen where people just, they’ll hit me up on Facebook and they’re like, “Yeah, I mean, your video is great and all that but you just seem like you’re a down to earth person, you seem like a good dude and that’s why I came out and connected with you.” Steve: Interesting... I have had it happen before also and I never realized that that was probably it. I’m trying to be authentic on camera, you know what I mean? I’m just being myself and I have people come back and say, “Hey, you’re the man. I have this feeling when I was talking to you I should reach out to you,” and I was like, “What kind of feeling? All right, thanks.” Interesting. Yeah, that’s cool you bring that up... There really is as simple as that just answer the question, let them know that they’re there and then connect with them. There’s a guy I was listening to and he was saying something like, “The first 20 seconds you have to do something crazy to keep their attention. The next 60 seconds then you got to teach a little nugget then the final two minutes do something that’s also a little crazy to make sure they come back next time.” I was like, “Man, that’s a lot. All right,” but that’s so much more simpler route to do that. What kind of timeline do you usually look at when you’re trying to rank a video? You know what I mean, like how long it usually take? Nick: Again, it’s kind of goes along the same thing I was talking about just before and there’ll be a lot of people that say, “You got to make two to four minutes.” I certainly agree to that to an extent because like I was saying before it’ll help you start ranking your videos a little bit more if people are watching more of your video. If you have a shorter video it’s more likely that people are just going to watch more of it. If you have an 11 minute video then obviously less people are just going to watch it just because everyone has shorter attention spans. It does depend on the video that you’re doing because specific keywords especially like I do a lot of reviews. I’ll be honest that’s where a lot of my traffic comes from, a lot of my buyer traffic. That's just kind of a nugget right there. If you can start doing some reviews like that’s going to be some of your best traffic out there. I’ve got review videos that are like 10, 11, 12 minutes long and people watch the majority of it because buyers, think about this, buyers will watch, they will watch everything and they’ll read everything because they're thinking about it from your perspective. If you’re going out there and let's just say for example you want to buy a new MacBook or yeah, let’s just go with that example. Are you going to go to the website and just like look at a couple of pictures and then buy? No, you’re probably going to be going, you’re going to watch the hour long keynote presentation, you’re going to watch the ten minute video that shows all the details and all the benefits and features on the MacBook. You’re going to be talking to people, you might even reach out to a support. Buyers they will do their research. To just tell you, “You have to have it four minutes long,” or, “You have to have it ten minutes long,” I can’t really tell you that exactly because if you just target keywords that are buyer keywords, people are going to be searching that stuff until they make that buyer decision. Does that all makes sense? Steve: Yeah, it does. That’s a great insight. It’s not like a two to four minutes, there's not a hard fast rule, it's just hey whatever is … Make sure first that you’re actually delivering value and answering the question and coming back to them. Nick: Yeah, and if you’re asking for a short answer, I would say keep it shorter if you can but if you need more time to explain everything that you need I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Steve: What kind of buyer keywords? I mean is there’s a trend in good buying keywords, you know what I mean that you’re saying? Like across mostly internet or things that will pull your videos apart because those keywords are more valuable or you know what I mean? Nick: I’ll just be honest, review videos are probably the best videos that you can possibly make. Steve: Really? Nick: Yeah, because the reason people are coming and looking for reviews is because they saw a video or they saw a product and they’re a buyer. They’re looking for more information on that, they want to get everything they can possibly know about that. Once they figured out, once they see your video, once something clicks and they make sure it’s the right product for them then they’re ready to buy right there. Does that makes sense? Steve: Interesting. Yeah, 100%. I was just thinking too I’ve got like, I don’t know, 150 videos on YouTube but 90 of them are unlisted or whatever so that I can put them inside of websites and things like that. Do you have a preference at all? Have you found that there’s any kind of, I don’t know. I don’t even know, favoritism given to people who stay on the YouTube website versus watching YouTube video embedded on a page? Nick: I haven’t really done too much embedding on different pages so I can’t really speak for that. One other thing I was going to touch is the fact that you can actually look at your analytics too and you can see which videos people are watching longer. You can see the average duration on how long your viewers are staying on your video... Steve: Yeah, I love the stat section in the back of YouTube, it’s nuts. Most people don't look at that by a part but it’s pretty fascinating. Nick: Yeah, it’s great stuff and I actually just like within the last few months I’ve really started looking at that stuff a lot more and it’s really helped me. We just go back to the whole thing about testing seeing what works and then start doing more of what works. That what I was doing is I was really taking a look at the analytics, see what the videos that people are staying on for a long time and then just making more of those videos. Because there’s some videos where people are staying on for less than a minute through an average of 10,000 views. I’m like, “Okay, that obviously didn’t work so let’s throw that away. It was a good test, that was some good feedback, I won’t do that anymore so let’s move on and let’s find something better.” Steve: I just wanted to touch on something because this really matters a lot in kind of my world. I build funnels all day long, just tons of sales funnels and that’s kind of what I was looking through on your site mentorwithnick.com which is super cool, everyone should go there, mentorwithnick.com. You’ve got a quiz there and we’re a huge a fan of quizzes, it kind of pre-frame people. You got a welcome video from you and automated email that I got and then a link over to $1 offer. Kind of a cool biz opportunity there or business product I should say. Usually what we do when I build these types of funnels. You just kind of took me through in that mentorwithnick.com is we’ll always take those videos and enlist them and put them inside a funnel. I mean, I never let people just sit inside of YouTube format. I think it’s interesting that you just said … I mean it sounds like almost all of your review videos they’re all on YouTube anyway which makes sense. That’s what people are searching. That’s fascinating though. I guess I’m just recapping that. That’s cool though. Do you ever embed it all I guess, I mean you obviously did on that welcome video with Mentor With Nick. Nick: Yeah, that is one place that I do embed, I kind of almost forgot about that but those are like the only places. Mostly just like welcome videos or I like to call as bridge pages, like you said I do promote different things, different opportunities and stuff like that. What a lot of people will do is they’ll just send traffic directly to an offer and while that can work for sure like I’m not saying it can. Steve: It’s rough though. Nick: Yeah, pre-frame that a little bit and kind of just introduce them, kind of welcome them into your world. That’s a big thing it’s just like saying, “Hey, I’m here for you,” like, “I got your back,” like, “Don’t worry,” like, “We got this taken care of and you know I’m going to introduce you to this thing and you can certainly take us up on that but if not, you know, just connect with us.” So many people just want to connect with somebody, that’s what my whole video is about and after they opt in it’s just kind of saying, “Hey, I’m here,” like, “If you need anything from me you’ll be receiving some emails from me and you know I’m here to help you out.” I think that’s just a lot better way to do things instead of just like hard driving traffic to offers... My honest opinion that’s going to drop convergence but it’s also going to drop your audience where they just think that you’re just trying to sell them all the time. Steve: Yeah, 100% I agree with that and I was impressed with that video that you put out there, I thought that was really good. I always draw out funnels like crazy and in my world we call it funnel hacking. I was going through your funnel and drawing all that out, the emails that came, things like that and it’s not like you need that welcome video, the one from you. Technically you don’t but I thought it was interesting and cool that you put it in there because I watched the whole thing and it made sense to me is like, “Hey, there’s a lot of trust and there was a lot of ...” What’s the word? I can’t think the word. After watching the video I was like, “Hey, this guy is real. That was cool. What a good video,” and it set me up because I have to tell you when the next video started I was like, “Eh.” I don’t know but because I watched you, I was like there was a lot more trust, like a lot more stock in that video. Anyways, great example right there, I thought that was fantastic... Nick: Thank you. I appreciate that. Steve: Yeah, everyone go checkout mentorwithnick.com, that’s an interesting process for a bridge page right there. That’s really good. Nick: Thank you. Steve: Do you send people to quizzes a lot also? Nick: I use that capture page right now because it seems to be converting the best. I’ve noticed that in the past like I even got opt in pages like that up to like 50% opt in rate for all my traffic which is really good. Right now I’m sitting at around like 39%. I mean that’s for the best that I’ve done. I’ve tested with a lot of different stuff and everything else have been kind of sitting around like 32 to 33 maybe like a little bit higher than that. I just use that because it just kind of like gets them invested... They have the two step opt in and you are obviously very familiar with all this stuff and that works really well where you have to click on something that makes it a little bit more congruent. They’ve already invested a little something to make sure they put their email address in but the survey just kind of adds a little bit more like they’re taking a quiz and then they’re like, “Okay.” Now, they need to put their email address in and they’re already a little bit more invested so they’re more likely to continue with that action, that whole congruency. Steve: 100% plus then you can follow up with them, you got their email address and you can re-market to them and ask them if they got the trial. Yeah, great for you, great for them. Yeah, I completely agree with that too. I had this quiz who’s probably about 50% also, same thing. It’s just quizzes are great things for people. It was only like four questions but it set them into my … It was the same thing that you did which is what I was laughing at, “Where did you hear about us from?” and it was like, “Facebook, Oprah, Obama mentioned me,” and then other. I’ve never been on those things before but because they heard those names first and then your name last or even other, it’s a lot more stock also. Just increases your authority like crazy, not that you want to be deceptive but it does give you more authority. The next question was like, “What age range are you in?” and these are questions that sometimes don’t even matter or you can ask questions that just kind of poke them in the eye a little bit. “How much do you make on your side business every week?” “Zero. A hundred bucks,” and then just, “I got to choose the lowest one.” For a weight loss product, “How many products have you tried?” but at the time your solution comes up they’re like, “Man, he’s right. I fail every time at this. I do need to buy this product.” That’s interesting though. Cool. Hey man, I don’t want to just keep taking your time. I appreciate you getting up early to do this with me. Where can people learn more about you and join your world like you were saying? Nick: You can add me on Facebook, that’s a good place. I am kind of maxing that out now. Lately I’ve been going pretty hard with getting people add me and everything like that. My friend list is kind of maxing out right now so I did also start up a new Instagram account, a new Snapchat account which my usernames are Mentor With Nick, just kind of goes along with my website. You can also go to my website like you mentioned before which is mentorwithnick.com. Steve: Mentor With Nick Instagram and Snapchat, mentorwithnick.com also and then also on Facebook. Hey Nick, I appreciate it man. Thank you so much for taking the time again and for dropping all the nuggets you did. Nick: Yeah, for sure man. It was fun. I always love getting on with like-minded people and just chat marketing something I’m very passionate about. Steve: Yeah, I appreciate it. Everyone else usually who talks about it, sometimes they feel alone in this world. Anyways, it’s cool to meet you man and I do appreciate it. Nick: No problem, man. Happy to be on. Steve: All right, talk to you later. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live Hey Steve Show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.

Click Above To Listen Or Listen In iTunes Steve: All right everyone. I've got a very special guest on with me today. I'm very excited for this actually. I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time. Guys I want to introduce to you Jaime Smith. He's done amazing things with the ClickFunnels community. Jaime thanks so much for joining. I want to talk a little bit about how you got your start. All the cool things you've done. First of all I want you to know, actually Russell and I were talking about you because you've done so many things for the ClickFunnels community. You remember that video, you may not, but I put a video out and I was like hey Russell and I we're looking for some help for some poor things and things like that and you reached out. We were going through this list of people. Over and over and over again I was like, Jaime's the man. Jaime would be the man, Jaime would be the man. The only reason why, I don't know ... He's so good. I think he'll get bored. Jaime: Ah. Well thanks man I appreciate that. I appreciate that, yeah. Steve: Yeah and Russell's saying, hey he's done so much for the ClickFunnels community himself. It's not like we're asking you to, it's not like we've done anything to do extra promotion for you or anything. It's like everyday I see a new thing that you've done for the ClickFunnels community, for all of us non coders and it just blows our minds. It's like black magic to me man. I have no idea how you do what you do. Jaime: Yeah well lots of years of kind of doing some intense stuff. Honestly my background is as a senior web app developer. I've been working since 2000. Started out, my first project was actually an enterprise level project with Eli Lilly. I've always been the cowboy coder writing enterprise level applications. Always web based. I've done desktop software and stuff like that but that's not as much fun for me. After doing enough of those things you learn how the back ends work. I'm able to take some of that experience and see how the front end works, and get into the ClickFunnels admin area and see okay, I can kind of tell from the URLs and the functions that are available how the backend pieces are pulled together. That allows me to say, okay well if the backend works this way, then if I add this to the front end, then the backend should support it. Just having that visibility into both sides of how things work makes it easy for me to go in and know that if I can customize the front end a little bit it'll work with the backend. Also just being able to inspect the code that's being spit out by the ClickFunnels tools on the front end, and add some java script into them that just adds a little functionality or a little style or whatever. It just kinda comes easy so I figure, hey if I can throw some of that stuff out and help people out then that's, I would love somebody to be able to come in and help with all the things that I am not the greatest at. Steve: Yeah. I cannot even imagine what those topics could be because I mean, you've been in the ClickFunnels community for a long time and I have also. I got in right after beta. I was building stuff and it was fantastic, my buddy and I are making money together. All of a sudden I started seeing, whose Jaime Smith? You keep putting things like, hey anyone want some cool CSS that's going to make, yada yada yada. I was like, holy crap I don't know how to do that. Yeah. Then like the next day it'd be like, hey someone else want some java script I wrote that's going to make you're whole funnel act like an e-commerce store. I was like, what? Oh my gosh. It was like over, and over, and over again. I got to tell you, that's one of my biggest regrets. I went to college for, I finished with a marketing degree but before that I was actually a CIT computer degree. I remember I went through one semester, I was sitting in one of my coding classes. Maybe it was the teacher, but I cannot blame it on that with a clear conscience. I don't know what it was but sitting and coding, I remember getting out of there and going, I'm never going to sit in front of a computer all day.  Jaime: Yeah, and now you're doing it. Steve: It's the one thing that I wish I had learned, was how to actually program. My dad was an executive at IBM. He and I, we ran like a 120 port network inside of our house that we built together, running through the walls. We did so much stuff together and it was awesome. I just have never learned the guts of it. I'm totally jealous of your skills man, it's fantastic. Jaime: Yeah, well. Yeah it's a blessing and a curse sometimes because I see some of these questions come up like, hey can I do this? Then it's like that itch that you just have to scratch. Okay I'm not going to rest until I figure out how to do this thing. It's a lot of fun. I think, my background's kind of weird. I don't know what it is. I feel, I was talking with somebody actually I was just out in Boise here last week for an event there with Russell. The Ignite Inner Circle Program. That was great. While I was there I was talking to somebody and just talking about my background. I just felt like, what I said was I feel like my biggest blessing, and I hate to say my genius because I'm not trying to brag by any stretch of the imagination- Steve: Go for it. We'd love to hear it. Jaime: I feel like my biggest area of genius is my ability to extrapolate and apply a concept I've learned in one area to a completely different area. I started when I was young doing mechanical stuff. My family actually owned a hardware store and my dad did a lot of installations, hot water heaters, central air units, and stuff like that. 10 years old I'm installing furnaces, and air conditioning units, and hot water heaters, and running electricity, and doing all this mechanical stuff. Not really any training it was just, hey your dad needs a hand so I'll just watch what he does, he'll tell me what to do, and I'll go do it. I kind of took that and then when I graduated high school I actually went into the army and I was a helicopter mechanic for 4 years. I was able to take some of those mechanical skills and apply it and look at the engineering of things. I always felt like I could tear stuff down and reverse engineer how it worked. Then I've been able to take some of that reverse engineering skill and apply it to technology. That's what programming has been for me. Honestly I've only had a few actual college level classes in programming. Most everything is all self taught. Steve: You're kidding me? Jaime: No. Steve: Oh my gosh. Jaime: Over 16 years of reverse engineering other stuff that's already working or going in and saying, it's always kind of been on the job. Hey, you need to learn this. Okay great let me go get a reference manual and I'll figure it out. I've just been really blessed to be thrown into just a bunch of different projects in different languages, and different platforms, and used in different frameworks and technologies. Being able to say okay, these things all kind of have similar ways of doing things. If I can take the concept from one and apply it into another then it's going to get me to a solution that much faster- Steve: So, I'm sorry about that. Jaime: Oh no. That's what I've been able to do with ClickFunnels is be able to say, okay I know I can take the concepts I've learned from the backend programming and from the front end programming, I can combine them with this online marketing which I've also been a student of for the last going on 12 years now. Just come up with these creative solutions to these problems that people are having, and problems that I'm having. Steve: It's interesting because I was thinking about that. If you can step back and look at abstractly what you're doing with the funnel. I mean that's got to tie directly into what you did growing up. Jaime: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I've been extremely blessed to have some fantastic opportunities to get experience that a lot of people just don't get. Sometimes I have to remind myself, or I have people tell me this, that because I see what I do as just really easy, but then I'm like anybody could do it. In fact I've said that many, many times, I could train a monkey to do what I do. It's not that hard, it's just once you know the concept it really is pretty easy. It's just for me I've been exposed. I don't feel like I've got any special genius or any special intelligence ability that other people don't have. It's just I've had the great opportunity to be exposed to experiences where I've had to make a project work. It's just experiences that the majority of people don't get an opportunity for. I feel truly blessed to be able to do what I do. Steve: Well I think it's fantastic. For those of you who are listening and don't know, what Jaime does is he'll look at what everyone's doing in ClickFunnels and watch the community and the Facebook page, see where people who don't know how to code are running into these walls. He'll just come out there and, hey here's a free tool that I just built, or drop this piece of code in and now ClickFunnels totally changes. I mean it's amazing. It's incredible what you do. Jaime: Thanks man, thanks. Steve: I mean you're obviously working on CF Pro Tools. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. I also want to ask, before we get into that, I don't know. It's a little weird to bring this up. Tell us about your failures you know. I want to know a little bit more, behind every success story there's always like this struggle I feel like. In marketing we tend to take whatever the best case study that we were able to get and market that only. Or whatever the best results are and market that only. The other 90% are like pure crap or it's just this massive, massive struggle. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about, she the struggle that produces CF Pro Tools. What led you to get there? Jaime: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of meat there to chew on. Steve: Sure, there always is. Anytime anyone talks, oh yeah there's lots of that. Jaime: Oh yeah. Yeah. Like I said I've really been studying online marketing for the last 12 years of so. Really I've had this passion for hey, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I guess that's the thing. I never wanted to be the guy that just had a job and just worked my job and just did my thing. Now every once in a while I look back and say, man I worked in a factory building cars for a while. That was kind of mind numbingly nice. It's like hard work, but every once in a while I'd like to go back and just feel like okay I can just do my job and go home and not have to worry about anything afterwards. Steve: Turn the brain off, yeah. Jaime: Yeah switch off and not be constantly on the clock. Then I remember that no, I hated that gig too. It seems like I always do that in the spring time. Be like, oh it'd be awesome to have an outside job putting on roofs or something like that. Then come August in Indiana when it's 95 and 100% humidity I'm like oh yeah now I remember why I don't do that. I wouldn't last very long. Yeah. I've been studying online marketing for a lot of years. Really felt like okay this is my opportunity this is where I can actually make some thing happen and really take a business, I always thought with minimal effort and the right scale I can just make this huge business and live that internet dream, laptop beach lifestyle. It's 12 years later and I'm still not on the beach, and I'm still not working at my laptop. Yeah. I started, and honestly I've looked at so many things, and I'll say probably the biggest failure I've had in, and a lot of people talk about this but it's so easy to get sucked into, is the shiny object syndrome. That's biggest struggle. I'm finally learning after 12 years of doing this that that's been my biggest downfall, is constantly being attracted and constantly jumping ship and moving to the next thing. I've done pretty much everything you can think of in internet marketing, I've tried it. Starting out with running niche ad sense sites and building those up. I had a little bit of success there. I made a few hundred bucks here and there on different sites. Okay that's great. Then you run into a little struggle and you're like oh that doesn't work and you just dump it, you move onto the next thing. In the process of doing that I actually built out, again using my technology background and as a developer I actually built a product around taking PLR content that I was getting in a monthly membership where you'd get 1,000 articles a month or whatever in different niches for free. Go and build your website around these, throw ad sense on it, you'll make money. Great. I did that and I thought okay, I'm going through and doing this and there's got to be a quicker, better way to build out a network of sites. I figured out a way to take word press, and this is back like word press 2 days, to use word press what was called multi user or word press MU, and use that to build a network of these niche sites, just on different sub domains. I figured out how to do that and I actually was in a community similar to the Facebook group, specific to this product, had about 1,000 members or so. Kind of the same thing I've been able to do with CF Pro Tools, just jump into the community, help out as much as I can, show people what I'm doing and how to use the technology to build these sites up more quickly, and actually build a training program. Like 28 videos on how to use word press, and how to use the network, and how to drive traffic, and how to do all this stuff. Put that together and just poured a ton of time into it. That was probably my first little success where I sold like $1,700 worth of this course. I'm like okay awesome, this is going. Then word press came out and changed their version. I'm like I do not want to go back and re-record 28 videos. Steve: 28 videos, yeah. Jaime: It was like 6 hours worth of video training. That's immense, I'm like no. I'm not going to keep up with this. I just kind of dumped it, moved onto the next thing. I probably could have been successful with that if I would have stuck with it. It got hard, there's surely some other shiny object that's easier to do over here, and jumped ship. I just did that repeatedly for the last 10-12 years. Have learned the hard lesson that that just doesn't work. Anyone of the things that you pick you can be successful at online. There's very few things that if you don't ... There's been plenty of plans laid out that will work if you apply the right leverage. I think you just have to pick one and go with it. For me the latest has bee CF Pro Tools and jumping into a community where we've got, what 20,000 plus active members now inside the ClickFunnels Facebook group. We've got ClickFunnels users I think, I heard recently is right around 20,000 active users of ClickFunnels right now. Steve: Yep. Jaime: It's a huge community, so it's a huge opportunity and that's great. That's where my focus has been. I actually enjoy it. I posted on the group not too long ago that ClickFunnels makes what I do easy, the community makes it fun. I do enjoy it. Steve: Yeah. I completely agree with that. I want to go back just real quick to something you mentioned. You just touched on it, and I'm learning this lesson, I don't know I fee like any of us who do anything entrepreneurial we all have learned this less every 6 months. It comes in a wave. The shiny object syndrome. It's huge. What's funny is in college I 100% had shiny object syndrome but I kept telling my wife, no, no I'm just at an age of exploration. I'm going around all over the place like, yeah I'm doing real estate here, writing e-books there, door to door sales here, I was all over the place. It was good for learning, but after a while you have got to drop an anchor and you have to learn to say no. I'm laughing that you brought this up because like 3 days ago I was Voxing Russell and I was like hey man, someone approached and they're like hey got this cool thing, wondering if you want to jump in on it in your free time. Which is kind of a joke. Russell's like, you know what man as a friend, stop. You have so many cool things going on already. He's like don't, just as a friend you cannot say no anymore. By the way, he's like if you have time to focus on 2 things it means you're probably not doing enough in number 1. You know what I mean? Jaime: Right. Steve: I thought that was fantastic that he said that. I have not really ever had success in something until I became a mono maniac. You really have to obsess over it. It's the only thing you think about. All your time is put towards it. You don't go home and just like veg out on the couch. After a couple months then something will blow up. Anyways. I thought that was really key and wanted to just point that out. I remember when Russell said that I laid on my bed like for a long time. Just was like, man he just defined the last 4 years of my life. Why was I so close to it, I couldn't see it. It's so obvious when you hear it but you look at it you're like man, what can I simplify and cut it. That's usually not the mentality everyone's taking on. It's more of a, what can I be a beast at and take on more, and more, and more. It's actually very much the opposite of how you do things. Jaime: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. You know when somebody starts a conversation with, hey, as a friend. You know that's probably not going to be what you want to hear sometimes. Steve: No, no, no.  Jaime: That's what you got to like about guys like Russell that can jump in and tell you what you really need to hear, whether it's what you want to hear or not. That's awesome. It's great advice as well. Yeah. Steve: Do you mind bringing us to a little bit of CF Pro Tools? Jaime: Sure. Steve: I'd like to, feel free to go through it. I was wondering also, I probably should have asked you this before but, I mean everyone here obviously we like to hear the numbers. If you wouldn't mind a few things on that or take us through your funnel and kind of how it works. Jaime: Sure. Steve: If that's all right with you. Jaime: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah it really started out, CF Pro Tools was just, as a I thought through, you know I built out a couple of these custom java scripts. The first one somebody had asked for was the ability to add a checkbox directly onto the buy button. Normally we see this check boxes to say hey I agree to the terms and conditions. What somebody was saying was hey, I added this to my page and it's kind of cutting down on my conversion rate. I'd really like to be able to put this checkbox directly on the buy button, that way they're at least looking at the buy button when they have to check it. Maybe that will help with conversions. Maybe it will be a way to fill the bill of requirement for, you know some processors require that hey if you're going to sign somebody up for a trial subscription you need to have somewhere on the page that identifies that they agree that they're signing up for a trial subscription and they're going to be charged again in 30 days. That really was where the need came from. I thought you know [inaudible 00:19:48] they posted in the Facebook group and said, hey is it possible to do this? I just posted back and said hey it's not possible to do it out of the box but I can certainly add some java script that adds a check box to your button. I dug in the easiest way to do that and make it still flexible with the ClickFunnels editor. You can still edit the button text, you can still edit the subtext which is actually what I used for the checkbox agreement. Basically I just said hey we've got this subtext, I can just pre-pen a checkbox to that event. Or to that text. Then you've got a check box. It's like okay cool that works. It just kind of started there. Then a couple of other things come along. I'm like okay now I've got 2 or 3 of these things. To me, if you've ever used AWeber, and you've heard of Jack Born there's AW pro tools which is AWeber pro tools. I thought you know hey, I kind of like that name. I like the product. I've used AWeber and AW pro tools for a long time. I thought you know that's kind of what I'm working on here, is little pieces that I can add to ClickFunnels that don't come out of the box. When I'm registered, CF Pro Tools. I thought well I'll just throw them in a free membership area and give people access. That way I can kind of keep up to date, add new scripts, I can send out emails, and do all that. Now it's a library of 16 different scripts that are in there for free. I've had over the, well I think I was actually just recording a video early this morning, I think I registered my own account in that membership area March 13th. Just prior to funnel hacking live at the end of March this year. I threw it all together and since then I've had a ton of people say, dude why aren't you charging for this? How much can I pay you for this? All kinds of other things. It was just like, no it's always been my goal, I've heard many, many times. I always attribute this to Frank Kern is probably the person that sticks out the most in my mind as saying, "If you want to help somebody you need to show them how you can help them by actually helping them." I take that as kind of, lead with value. Which complete side note, I was able to register the domain name a couple of days ago, leadwithvalue.com. I thought okay that's what I try and live by. Lead with value, show somebody that I can help them by actually helping them. I thought the best way to do that was to get in front of the community. The best way to get in front of the community is by actually helping them do things. The best way I can do that is just throw some stuff out for free and say, hey I'm going to throw this value out there and there's no strings attached. Just jump in and grab it. It's been hugely successful for me. I always feel like if you go into something and you provide value without any expectation of return, that value is actually going to return to you probably 10 times more than you put into it. Steve: 100%. Jaime: Yeah. That's truly been how this has gone for me. It's been great. After doing this for quite a few months now, just providing as much value as I can. I've finally come up with a few scripts like wow this really is like a major game changer. After building up a pretty good sized library I felt like okay now I actually want to make something work with this, make something happen. I've had enough people say hey I want to pay you, I want to pay you, I want to pay you for this. I fell like you've given me all this value I need to pay you. Please make something available to us as a paid product. I thought well I'll just add on a section to my membership that is a VIP club. Basically where I throw these kind of high value scripts in there. People can sign up and I'll just throw monthly scripts of these high value nature into this membership and let people join in. I rolled out the CF Pro Tools VIP club. Through, the first script I threw in there was my CF cart mode script which basically takes ClickFunnels which as you know out of the box, the order form just supports adding 1 product at a time to your order. You can have 3-4 products listed on your order form, but you have a radio button so you can only select 1 of those products to purchase. I thought well hey again looking at the structure of the code on the front end and seeing that hey I notice how some of these variables are named, and just from my experience on the backend I know that okay if it's named this way it probably means we can send multiple values into it. Steve: At the same time, yeah. Jaime: At the same time. I determined that hey I could probably send multiple products into the cart and have them process the order just fine. I tweaked the front end a little bit to change those radio buttons to check boxes. That was the first iteration. I tested my order and hey, guess what it all worked. I was able to send in multiple products to the cart and have them process in a single order, as a single transaction in ClickFunnel. I was like, awesome. Then I had people ask hey is there any way that I can have a quantity selector? I thought, hmm. I wonder if I could combine the 2. I made the CF cart mode which is the combination of, it works probably best for say you're selling t-shirts. You have 4 different sizes, small, medium, large, extra large, and you want people to be able to order more than 1 at a time. The cart mode gives you the ability to have a drop down selector for quantity. The ability to add each of the products individually. You could say, hey I want 2 smalls, 3 larges, and 4 mediums and ClickFunnels will process that on the back end all perfectly. It adds up totals, sends everything across to your payment processor as your total amount and then your order confirmation page shows each of the shirts that were ordered. It works pretty awesome. Steve: I'm blown away that, I mean I have an account with CF Pro Tools. I logged in there and I just could not believe all the stuff that was in there. When you look at what, you know ClickFunnels is what people want as far as like the structure and the ease and stuff like that. Then there's all these little tweaks and features, and customizations people need based on what their business is, or what industry they're in. Yours is like, it's the other side of that man. It's like if you've got CF Pro Tools and you've got ClickFunnels, there's is literally no other product on the planet that is like it. It's pretty amazing. I like that you said that though about the bait. You decided for a long time to give tremendous value up front for free for a long time. I kind of came to that realization, I don't know it was like 6 months ago also. It was like man, everyone wants me to build these funnels constantly. It's like the thing that everyone asks me to do. I was like, well I may as well toss all the ones that I've built and make them free and put them in a site. That's what salesfunnelbroker.com is. You go in there and you can download the entire website, salesfunnelbroker.com just for free. The amount of doors that's opened up is amazing. It's counterintuitive because people are like, whoa I don't know man. I could charge 5 grand for that easily, and it's true. It's like ugh. That's kind of the realization I've had recently. What people would normally pay for, go ahead and make that free and you become this rock star in their life and [inaudible 00:27:27] like crazy. I'll get all these personal messages. I'm sure that you get them too, like man thanks so much, this is helping me, I've sold more because of this, or whatever it is. Anyways. I'm just saying I completely agree with that. That's fantastic. At what point did you decide to start charging for all of that? Jaime: Yeah that really was just in the last few weeks that I opened up the doors on the VIP club. Really what it came down to is okay, I'm still working I hate to say a full time job but I had kind of committed to a 25 hour a week job. That was, you know it's what I've always done so it's what I knew. It's always kind of that foundation, that safety net but I thought, this is only going to get me so far. I really need to ramp up and scale up my income potential. People are asking for this, let me just throw it out there and see what works. Finally I just flipped a switch in my head and said okay I need to make something out there. I just need to do it. This is the other one of my big failures, and that has been perfection. Always worrying about, well I'm not quite ready to put it out yet because it's not perfect. I really need to perfect my message, my sales letter, my report, my whatever. I'm working on a book here and I need to make sure it's perfect before I can roll it out. One motto that I keep reinforcing in myself and I try and share with everybody that I see having the same problem is, in my opinion perfection is the enemy of progress. Steve: Love it. Jaime: When I'm trying to make things perfect it keeps me from actually putting anything out there that could be successful. I really just, I had written several of these scripts, I had tested several things. CF cart mode was one of them that I built and I tested for myself. I thought okay it's not quite 1,000% ready so I'm just going to hold on to it. I thought, you know what, no. I'm just going to throw it out there. I'm going to put a separate section of my membership up and I'm going to put a sales page up and I'm going to put a buy button on it and I'm going to let people go and buy it. With my goal, within a 24 hour period to go from concept to completion. I did that and I turned on, flipped the switch, and 5 days later I was 5 figures. I was like okay. Now we're onto something. Yeah it was very cool. Very cool. Steve: That. Do you mind sharing with us the funnel a little bit? Or at least the way you bring people through? I mean I've been through it it's fantastic but, squeeze page, order form, whatever. Jaime: Sure. Sure. Absolutely, yeah. Really the first iteration was just to kind of capture the traffic that I already had. I had about 700 members inside the free version of CF Pro Tools. My thought was okay I just need to get in front of those people that already know and love me. I hate to say that in a boastful way but- Steve: It's true though, you're a brand, it's fantastic. Jaime: Yeah. I just kind of want to get in front of those people that are already hot prospects, that already know who I am and already know the value of the scripts. It's a pretty simple process. It's just a video that says, hey I'm Jaime I'm with CF Pro Tools. I'm the creator, this is what I've got for you. I've got a membership area where I'm going to be throwing these high value scripts in a monthly basis. I'm also going to be doing monthly share funnels. I'm also going to be doing some video training. If you want to jump in there's a monthly membership or there's a yearly membership. The funnel is basically that. You're signing up to either pay by the month or pay by the year. I kind of really just throw some spaghetti at the wall as far as price. I put a normal price, in my mind I thought o normal price should be around 67 bucks a month. Then my thought on the yearly price actually came from a guy name Rory Mcnally I did a mastermind session with Trey Lowell and Harold a while back and Rory was there. He shared just this absolutely golden nugget that I will share with you. I give 1,000% credit to Rory because this is just brilliant. He said, in fact he won the prize. Trey did a little contest and there were 16 people or so in the room. Everybody got to give their number 1 tip. The prize was one of those new 360 degree cameras. Steve: Oh sweet. Jaime: Just see people doing all these videos. It's like a $500 camera. He said okay the person gets the number 1 tip gets this $500 camera. Rory won that and his tip was this, if you've got a membership area and you can figure out what your average stick rate is. Say your average stick rate is 4 months. People come in, they sign up, they stay for 4 months in your membership and then they bail. Then really what you want to do is offer a yearly plan at just 1 month more than what their monthly was cost wise. Steve: Oh man. Jaime: You just got an extra month of income out of them that you weren't going to get if you just kept charging monthly and to them when they sign up that seems like a huge bargain. You're getting all the money up front that you can now turn around and reinvest in even more advertising to drive even more traffic to that great deal. It's just the quickest way to scale your business dramatically. I thought, that is absolutely brilliant. Steve: That is brilliant. Jaime: Of course I'm just starting this so I have no idea what my average stick rate is but I thought you know what, I'm going to go on the 4 month premise. I'll just say okay if people were to stick for 4 months then lets charge 5. I just did a hey get 12 months for the price of 5 on my yearly plan. I basically wanted to do right around a 50% discount for the launch. For those people who have been around I want to give them the most value and the most love I can by being huge promoters and supporters of CF Pro Tools. I went with at $37 a month initial price that will go up probably around the first of September. Then $197 which is roughly 5 times the monthly to sign up for the year. I just put it all on a single order form, here's you're 2 payment options. I got a couple of buttons, I actually modeled the funnel university- Steve: Oh sweet. Jaime: The funnel [inaudible 00:33:43] .com funnel. That's what I used there. It worked perfectly. I threw that out there and right away had people start signing up, which was great. The one thing is that I did figure out is that, and I actually have changed the price now a little bit for the yearly plan, was because I was getting everybody into the 197 a year. Which was great to come up with a big launch, but as you're running a membership you kind of want to have a little monthly recurring, right? Steve: Yeah you want the continuity there, yeah. Jaime: Exactly. I thought I'm not getting any continuity here. I literally had like 95% of my sales were for the 197 for the year. I thought, well I've got to be able to support admin stuff in each month so I probably ought to make it a little less enticing to go with the yearly. I bumped that price up to 247. That's kind of balanced things out a little bit more. Whereas I'm getting new sign ups no, I'm getting a little better mix of the monthly versus the yearly. Steve: Man that's amazing. Okay. That's fantastic. I've been thinking of that, we have this thing above the door. Actually I can basically see it right now. The ready, fire, aim you know? Jaime: Yeah. Steve: I think that's so cool. You've just done that. You just put it out there, see what happens, and then tweak as you go. People get so stuck doing the other way around, just waiting, and waiting, waiting. Jaime: Yeah. That's huge. I need to get one of those and put it above my door, above my desk as I'm looking at the wall each day with the computer and everything. Yeah. It makes such a huge difference. I mean you're going to get a result. Tony Robbins talks about this, and I've learned over the years that there are no mistakes. There are no failures. There's only results. That result may not be what you want, but it's giving you a result. It's a lesson you can learn from it. Throw it out there and see what you're result is. You just have to have that sensory acuity, to use one of Tony Robbins' words, that sensory acuity to know is this a result I was looking for? If not, what kind of difference can I take out of this that I can make a tweak and maybe move in the right direction. A little 2 degree changes, expand it out and make a huge difference. Just making little shifts, and make little changes, and keep at it. Eventually you'll find the success you just have to get started. Yeah. It's been very cool and I back into that, just to jump back into the funnel a little bit. I did [inaudible 00:36:05] I got the VIP club. Which a lot of people have been signing up for, I was converting about 10%. Which is really what I was looking for. My goal was to get 10% of my existing free members signed up into the paid membership. That's about where we ended up at. I fell like, okay I hit that target. Really that's just a number that I pulled out that I said I feel like I'll bee successful if I could get 10% of people that took something for free to actually pay for a little bit more. Steve: Now are you currently driving traffic as well? Are you buying adds for this? Jaime: I am not. I have not done any traffic generation other than sending emails out to the existing list. Steve: That's amazing. 5 figures, internal launch, and you just crafted it as you went. Jaime: Yeah. Steve: That's awesome. That's awesome. Jaime: Yeah. I was very happy with it. Then the other layer of it is I thought okay, I've got the monthly membership on the front end. I need to have something to offer on the backend. I want to be able to work with people on a little more personal level. What I did was I'm going to create the Platinum club. Everybody wants to be a VIP and everybody wants to feel important. The Platinum club is again another level of exclusivity. I learned this from Russell, everybody wants, well people will pay extra just to feel a little more special. My goal is always to provide more value. The way I can do that is with the Platinum club we offer monthly group coaching calls. Where I'll get on the phone I'm guessing, we haven't actually done the first one yet. It'll be probably coming up in the next week or so. 2, 3, 4 hours. However long it takes to go through, address the training. I'll be doing training on technical topics, and how to use ClickFunnels, and how to integrate different things. We'll be doing these on a monthly basis and go through all that. Answer any questions that come up during that process, and then also do some coaching. Then also do hot seats where if I've got a member that has a funnel that they're working on that they want to review, we'll pick somebody from the group and we'll go through their funnel and help from a technical perspective as well as just a conversion and just strategy perspective so that everybody can benefit. Everybody always learns from seeing somebody else going through the process. Steve: Oh yeah. Jaime: That's a great way to provide some value. Then I'll also be doing some much more in depth training videos on how I work. I've been completely blessed to work with some of the biggest names in the ClickFunnels world at least. I've worked with Liz Benny, I've worked with Trey Lowell, I've worked with Dean Holland, I've worked with Joel Erway. I've worked with all these people so to be able to see what all they're working on, and kind of be involved in that process, and to help them with different aspects of their funnels. It brings great experience. If I can take and share some of that experience with other people, then I would love to be able to do that. This is, the Platinum club's kind of my way to be able to do that. Steve: That's fantastic. I mean that's exciting. It's fun too like when ... I don't know I just feel like there's energy and movement and momentum is such a huge part of this. Cannot wait to launch forever. That's fantastic. Well hey. Okay. I take notes like crazy. I've got a full page of notes going. Jaime: Awesome. Steve: Just to kind of recap. You said some cool stuff. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Jaime: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steve: That's huge. There's not failures, only results which is so big. Oh that's such a huge lesson. I mean you think about the mental I don't know, I call it mental shelf space. It's like how much your brain can kind of handle at once. I mean think about how much mental shelf space these people dedicate towards making sure they don't fail. Jaime: Right. Steve: It's very, very freeing to realize there aren't any. Anyways people will pay more just to feel special. I 100% see that all the time. Yeah. I'm pretty sure, because I sell my own funnels also like in the ClickFunnels marketplace, and all over. I think a lot of people don't even use the things that they're buying. They just want to feel like they've made progress. Anyways. Jaime: Yep. Steve: That's fantastic. Jaime: Yeah, that's the other thing too. This honestly, I'm guilty of this myself. I definitely know that people do this, a lot of people do this. It's probably the majority of people do this is, they go into something and they have an itch. They need to scratch that itch. As soon as somebody buys your product, they have scratched that itch. A lot of people will never consume your product because just the fact of purchasing it made them progress towards scratching that itch. That was just all they needed. That's what, get that shiny object syndrome because if we don't actually completely get rid of the itch, we just scratch it for a little bit, it's going to come back. Then we figure well this thing that I just kind of scratched the surface with, it kind of got rid of the irritation for a little bit. Now it's back. I'm going to have to try something else and maybe that will finally get rid of the problem. It usually doesn't because we didn't fully scratch it. People will do that. They'll buy your product and not consume it. It's just part of human nature. Steve: Yeah, yeah. Which isn't always a bad thing. Jaime: No. I mean absolutely not. It served well. As long as you do a good job and do it ethically and actually deliver something that could fulfill their need if they actually followed it, then you've done your job. That's another reason why you don't have to worry about being perfect with everything. You just have to get it out there. You've got a lot more chance of helping people actually be successful if you release something versus sitting and working on it constantly. Steve: Well I'm looking at this huge page of notes. I know you just kind of gave it, but I guess what kind of advice would you give here as we end? As you get started, I mean I'm looking at, you have quite the journey. You have quite the story going on here. This is awesome. Jaime: Yeah. yeah. Honestly the biggest advice is just, stick with it. Here's a little story I've shared before. I love this story. This story actually, I heard originally from Joel Osteen. I just thought it was brilliant and just a huge indicator. To me it attaches perfectly to internet marketing. That is, that there was a psychology study done with some apes. These scientists build this enclosed facility and in the center of this enclosed facility they've got this pole. At the top of this pole they've got this big bunch of bananas. Then they put in these 3 monkeys I think. They put in these 3 monkeys into this enclosure and of course monkeys love bananas. This first monkey runs and scurries up the top of the pole to grab this bunch of bananas. As soon as he got to the top the scientist, through the top of the enclosure, squirted him with a hose. He got doused with this bunch of water. Man he shoots back down the pole, never got the bananas. Gets to the bottom, then he's afraid to go back up the pole. Then the next monkey does the same thing. He's like hey I'm going to go up and get these bananas. He runs up to the top of the pole to grab these bananas and they dump this bucket of water on him. Again he gets doused with the water and back down the pole he goes. He's like, I'm not going back up, scared to even get near the pole now. The third monkey starts to make his way up the pole and the other 2 monkeys grab him and pull him down. Steve: Interesting. Jaime: They do this and they think, okay well let's take one of the monkeys out and we'll put a new monkey in. Now they've got a new third monkey. Again this monkey sees this pole, sees the bananas, goes and tries to go up. The other 2 monkeys grab him and pull him down. Then they thought well okay. Let's pull one of the monkeys out, put a new one back in. They do the same thing and this happens again. They do this again, and again, and again to the point where now none of the monkeys that are in the enclosure have ever been doused with the water. For whatever reason it's become inherent that you cannot be successful at getting these bananas and they all will pull each other down. Now nobody will even try to go up and get the bananas. I see that as kind of internet marketing. You get in it sometimes and you will get excited and jazzed about something. You'll go and talk to your friends, or you'll talk to your family, or talk to somebody else online. They'll say ah, that's never going to work. You don't even need to try. I knew a guy that got into that and he failed. You need to just stay down. People are going to pull you down when you think you've got something, you're going to be successful at. You're always going to have people around you that will pull you down, but if you persist, don't let the doubters, don't let the haters pull you down and keep you from being successful. I did that for a long, long time. You talked to people and they said, oh yeah that's crazy. That's a scam. You cannot make money online. It's just not possible. We see all over the world people that are being successful on the things we want to be successful with it. It's absolutely possible. You just have to stick to it. You have to pick the thin, the vehicle you think that's going to give you the success, and stick to it, and do that. You can be successful. That's one of the big things. Don't let the haters drag you down. You can make it to the top and you can grab your banana too. Steve: That's fantastic man, what a great story. I appreciate that. Jaime: No problem. Steve: Man I don't even want to say anything else because I don't want to ruin it. There's a glow right now. The room I'm in is actually a little brighter. Jaime: Awesome. Steve: Hey where should people go to check out your stuff? Jaime: CFProTools.com is just the quickest way, you can get signed up, get into the free membership area there. Once you're inside there's great buttons if you want to get upgraded. If you're not already in the ClickFunnels Facebook group, jump in there. I'm in there all the time so jump in and connect with me there. I'd love to connect with everybody. Steve: Mr. Jaime Smith you have dropped tons of gold and I appreciate that so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Jaime: Awesome man I appreciate it Stephen. Steve: Awesome. Okay I'll talk to you later. Jaime: Take care. Steve: Bye. Jaime: Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answer on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live "HeySteve!" show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.

Steve: Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.   Speaker 4: (music starts) Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. (music ends)   Steve: All right you guys. Hey, I am super excited. Today I've got two very special, kind of unique guests on the podcast. As you guys know, a lot of times, I record my own thoughts on things that Russell and I are doing to make marketing awesome, but I like to go and interview other people as well. Today I've got on the show with me, it's Dallin Greenberg and Kristian Cotta. These guys have a pretty awesome unique way for building funnels. Anyways, I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining me.   Dallin: Appreciate it.   Kristian: What up.   Steve: Hey. I actually was thinking about it and Dallin, I don't even remember how we actually met. It wasn't that long ago, was it?   Dallin: Ah, no, not very. Just a couple weeks.   Steve: Just a couple weeks ago.   Kristian: I think Dallin met you the way that him and I kind of joke about he's the black box back alley hacker. He does all the ...   Dallin: If there's someone I want to meet, I find a way.   Kristian: He's the unconventional guy. You won't find his practices in a book or a manual.   Steve: Crap, that makes me a little nervous.   Dallin: Yeah, don't mess ... I told Kristian the other day ...   Kristian: Not black hat, black box.   Steve: Yeah. We can call it whatever we want, right? No, just kidding.   Kristian: Yeah.   Steve: Well, hey thanks for-   Dallin: I told Kristian, the other ... Oh, I'm sorry.   Steve: No, no, you get a say. Thanks for letting me wake you up at the butt crack of dawn and still being willing to share some cool stuff.   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: How did you guys start meeting or working with each other?   Kristian: I'll let Dallin take that one.   Dallin: Yeah. I was working on a kind of unique project. We had a guy up in Scottsdale that owns a software. He's the developer. It's a software that does algorithmic stock trading and he was stuck with his marketing. He's a big guy. He's got a lot of stuff going, but anyway, we were trying to help him get some plans going.     I had actually watched Kristian on Periscope. I'd met a lot of guys on Periscope and one day I noticed Kristian was actually in Chandler, which is only a few miles away from me. Like I said, if I see someone, I'm going to find a way to meet him, so I'll comment in his Periscope a few times and little by little, end up getting his contact info. Day later we're in a Starbucks together talking about a plan that we can do, well I was more impressed with Kristian, what he was doing. My partner that I was working on with this marketing plan for this software developer, we were on kind of different pages. I have a background in sales and Kristian's dynamic was a little more my still, so my partner ended up leaving and I ended up asking Kristian, "Hey, is there anything on the side that you're working on or that I think we can do together?"   Steve: Mmm.   Dallin: Badda bing badda boom. We've ... I feel like it's the perfect love story. We've been hanging out pretty much ever since.   Steve: As long as he says the same thing, I guess that is true, right?   Dallin: Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: Yeah, no. The funny thing, Steve, about Dallin is I'd been with ClickFunnels, I was one of the first 50 people that signed up for the beta version of ClickFunnels.   Steve: Wow. You're from the dark ages, Man, that's awesome.   Kristian: Dude. Yeah. We were just talking yesterday because we literally I mean the crazy part ... I'd been so resistant to start using Actionetics.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Until I had to transfer from Infusionsoft to AWeber, AWeber to ActiveCampaign and we're trying to do something and it's like, "Dude, why don't we just use Actionetics?" It's all in here." I'm like, "Fine." We're switching everything over and I needed ... I'd been doing funnels and learning about ... like when I first signed up for ClickFunnels, I didn't know what a funnel was. I wasn't even sure what Russell had explained to me. It just sounded so cool and I was like, "Dude, I'm going to figure this thing out because what he's talking about and the numbers, I'm like, "That's what I need to be doing. That's it." I been doing this for two and a half years, which is kind of a long time in funnel years.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah, it is.   Kristian: It's not really that long of a time in regular terms, but I got on Periscope and started kind of talking about my business. At the time, I was trying to grow this fitness, be an online fitness guy.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I'd used funnels to grow an email list of 3,500 people and I got on to Periscope and nobody cared about the fitness. They wanted to know how I was growing my email list and how I was doing my, how was I doing this business.   Steve: Interesting.   Kristian: Then I kind of became one of the funnel guys on Periscope and was a speaker at the Periscope Summit. I got this notoriety on Periscope for, they call me the King of Funnels. I'm like, "No, guys. I know some really big funnel guys on Periscope." They're like, "No, King of Funnels."   Steve: Wow.   Kristian: It's been like two and a half years of this little journey of learning funnels where it's been ... I'll tell you the three guys I credit everything to are Russell, Todd Brown and [Lo Silva 00:06:09].   Steve: Mmm.   Kristian: I actually had just finished the PCP coaching program with Todd Brown and those guys. Dallin, when he came to me was like, "Dude, this stuff you're talking about is awesome." I said, "Well, let's, I need a guy that gets it. That is driven and ... " that was Dallin. Now we've got this little, little agency we're trying to scale.   Steve: That's awesome, because good partners are hard to find. I remember I started doing this back in college. My buddy and I were driving traffic for Paul Mitchell and we were doing all this stuff. I ended up firing, going through nine different partners. It's cool that you guys found each other, you know what I mean? That's pretty rare just right there.   Kristian: Yeah. If you go back and talk about Dallin's ... there's a couple of key things that I was looking for, because I have an entire course. You love Periscope. I saw some of your Periscopes on YouTube and ...   Steve: Dang it. Man, those were the new days for me.   Kristian: Yeah. I was a speaker at the Periscope Summit in January.   Steve: Cool. Wow.   Kristian: Dallin's helped me develop this program and it's something that we've rolled out in beta and we're going to roll out as a digital product. It's called the Live Video Funnel. I've been working with Todd Brown and the guys at MFA on the entire sequence and the packaging and all that kind of stuff. They're calling Kurt [Malley 00:08:00] speaking at Marketing Funnel Automation Live in October and one of the things they're saying is that the biggest opportunity of 2017 is, they call it the Facebook Live Funnel, but I'm going to let you guys in on a little note. Facebook Live and Periscope don't work the same way. Even though they're both live video, they're different, so Dallin ... I needed somebody to help me with that aspect. I couldn't ... to be honest, you know this Steven,   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I couldn't do all that, every single thing, every single aspect of a funnel.   Steve: No.   Kristian: The script writing, the copy writing, the editing, the videos for the VSL's, the strategy, the email marketing sequences, all the social media.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: What I'm really good, compliments what Dallin's really good at, like I said, his ability to get in on Facebook and recruit people. He has this really strong sense about building a team, which is one of those things that ... we both get along with people, but Dallin's good at that recruitment process. When you want to build and scale something and you need the right people, you need somebody like that.   Steve: That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's hard to find that stuff. Dallin, you and I, we were talking a little bit about some of the trials you guys went through. Obviously individually you do, but you guys met each other, what have you guys been working on and I guess what was the ... What are some of the issues you guys have run on, I guess, getting to where you are. You know what I mean?     Unspoken stories, you know that where none of us put in our marketing hardly ever unless it's part of our sales letter. "I was in the dumps, but now I'm flying high." These are like, really what kind of issues did you guys run into what you're doing now? What are you doing now, first of all?   Dallin: Well, the majority of our issues actually are from more individual sides. We're actually doing really good with our projects together.   Steve: Mmm.   Dallin: Your typical issues you run in together are testing. That's what funnels are, right, it's testing, testing, testing, testing. There's always that down side until you ... it's just a numbers game, right, until you find something that works. As far as the personal side, because I believe that this kind of runs, this is the fire that's on the inside, the Y factor from what I call it, right. My background's in sales, so I did door-to-door for years. I think, Steven, you've mentioned that you flirted with that a little bit but, I was really good at it.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah. That's like, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's one of the best educations I've ever had.   Dallin: Yeah. Yeah.   Steve: I've got a marketing degree and I don't know what I learned from it. You know?   Dallin: Well, that's actually just what I was going to say. I was going to school for business and marketing and be honest, my classes were super redundant. I hated them. I was like, "Man, this is for years I've been planning on doing this and ... " Anyway I got into sales and I did pretty good at it. I just kept going. I ended up doing more recruiting and for six, seven years going out on the summers and taking a team out and helping manage and recruit and sell.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: You learn so much from just talking to people, the sale cycle, funnels, a different type of funnel, right?   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: Learning how to build value to the point where it doesn't matter what you ask for money, because they love it so much that they're going to buy. It taught me a lot. Well, long story short, I made my transition. I was doing alarms and home automation. I made my transition with this solar boom.   Steve: Mmm.   Dallin: Solar's on fire and fortunately for us, we live in Arizona, one of the sunniest places in the world. Solar was hot, but a lot of stuff was happening politically. A lot of the utilities are trying to shut down solar here just because of different costs. It's a mess. They succeeded and actually the utility ... There's two main utilities in Arizona. They succeeded shutting down solar where I live.     In order for me to get work, I'd have to go an hour a day just to prospect clients, let alone keep my pipelines, my relationships, my contracts, everything going, because they're longer projects. It was really funny because I was really bummed because I was really excited about this transition. It was a huge jump for me because we were so comfortable with what we were doing, making awesome money and it was kind of just this really big leap of faith. Well, last April, fast forward a little bit, last April, our little girl, our daughter, she was four years old. She got diagnosed with leukemia.   Steve: Oh man.   Dallin: When that happened, we literally were going to leave for another summer, two days after she was diagnosed. It was crazy. Everything was just happening and days and days and days sitting in the hospital. I had always wanted to do something online my whole life, but I didn't want to ... I didn't know exactly what was happening. I didn't know where I wanted to put my foot in. I didn't want to mess with inventory and selling one off things. I wanted to do something on a big level. I just didn't know how to do it.     In the hospital you got a lot of time to yourself and so I'd study these things. I'd start looking at different processes. I'd find patterns. I would sign up for everyone's email list, not because I cared about their product. I wanted to see their system. I wanted to study the funnel. I wanted to study the email sequences and I started seeing the patterns.     That's when I kind of got into a lot of this other stuff with Periscope and live stream. I was like, "Man, this is the future. I get it." I think every guy that's doing any sort of digital marketing has a day where they, it kind of clicks and they say, "Holy smokes. I can really ... This is powerful. This is how you can reach a lot of people." What everyone wants to do is have a voice and do something.     I ended up switching my major, going to school for persuasion and negotiations were my sayings. I was a business communication major and I had that emphasis in persuasion and negotiation. Looking back on everything now, it was just perfect. Everything kind of worked out really, really good. I was kind of like, my little side, so we really hit this kind of rock bottom where it was like ... financially we took a massive hit because I wasn't able to go out, drive an hour and do all this kind of stuff. This last year-   Steve: Yeah. You needed to be home. Yeah.   Dallin: This last year has really been an investment of my time and I just kind of feel like I went back to school. I feel like I'm getting way more out of this school than four years of collegiate, right?   Steve: Easily. Man, how's your daughter now? If you don't mind me asking.   Dallin: She's awesome. She's in a maintenance phase right now, got another year left of treatments, but she's ... hair's back and muscles coming back and went back to school. She's in a really, really good spot right now. Appreciate it.   Kristian: She's strong too. You should see her.   Steve: Really?   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: That's amazing.   Dallin: It's from everything that she went through. She got down to, had to relearn to walk, lost all her muscles. She was a little skin and bones and now she's this little muscle ball.   Kristian: Now she's a beast.   Dallin: She's awesome.   Steve: I appreciate you guys sharing that kind of stuff. I mean it's ... because most of the ... I've never interviewed anyone on this who hasn't gone through something crazy, you know. It's not like the path is always clear, either. Usually it isn't.   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: There's a lot of times I wake up and come here, I'm like, "I don't even know. I know I got to work on something, but I don't know what." It's like going through this hazy fog, so I appreciate that. Then there's all the personal side and all the things going on. Yeah, I first started getting into this stuff, little bit similar with door-to-door sales. I started looking around going, "What the heck?" We're driving out and there's all these billboards everywhere. I was like, "People call these things ready to buy." I'm knocking on people's doors all day long and they're not wanting to buy it when they wake up. I've got to go convince people who weren't planning on spend money. Like, "How do I do this?" I start putting ads everywhere and that's how I started getting phone sales and stuff. I was like, "There's something to this." Anyways, I-   Dallin: See, that's funny because I was kind of the same person. All the other managers are, "Dallin, stop trying to reinvent the wheel. It works."   Steve: DS, yeah.   Dallin: DS, this. I'm like, "No, guys. There is a better way." My motto in everything in life is there is always a better way. I don't care what you say and what's working. Something can be tweaked and something can be done to scale.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.   Kristian: Which is funny, because Russell always says, "You can tell the pioneers because they're lying face down with arrows in their back."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I guess in this case, it wasn't really pioneering. You were trying to find the people laying face down.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah.   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: Side stepping all the other people who were already face down because they knocked 400 doors that day, right?   Dallin: Yeah, seriously.   Steve: What are you guys working on right now though? You guys mentioned that there's some awesome things going on. What's your current funnel, if you don't mind talking about that? [inaudible 00:18:19] sounds like, maybe ...   Kristian: Dallin said like perfect timing. I feel like it has been. We joke about being a startup because ultimately we are, to the point that we're even in the process of creating our business plans and our SOP's and all that kind of stuff, so that we can talk to some investors. We have some investors that we're talking to in order to really have the capital that we think we need to be able to scale this thing quickly, instead of Facebook ads tested at $10 a day for 50 weeks.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: Yeah. The whole reason I got into learning funnels was, you guys talked about door-to-door sales and I have 15 years of commercial real estate experience. I worked with clients like L.A. Fitness and McDonald's. I represented McDonald's for the state of Arizona and Burger King and Taco Bell, so pretty big name companies.     There's a lot of guys that would be happy with that, but the problem I had was that I kept looking at the deal size of what I was doing. It was constantly kind of like this feast or famine situation where you either had a huge check or you had nothing. Literally, nothing. It kind of got to the point where I was like, "Man, there's a better way to do this." Very similar. You guys hear the consistent theme here? There's a better way.     That was kind of the first step of me saying, "I'm going to figure out how to streamline this" so that it wasn't even so much ... I just kept seeing all the guys that were buying the properties doing all these big deals. They weren't even in real estate. They had these other businesses that were generating cash flow and here I am putting these deals together that are making, Dallin and I had this exact conversation, making these guys over a million dollars and they're like, "Oh hey, thanks. Here's 40 grand."   Steve: Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: What's wrong with this equation? I'm the one that did the whole thing, the financials and all that. I just didn't have the money. That was the start of it.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Then you add on top of it that we got into a network marketing company and did really well, but we got stuck right under about 10 grand a month for like 18 months. It turned into another full time job where I was 40, 50 hours a week at every Starbucks from east to west meeting people. I'm like, "This is not working."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Those two combined, I was like, "If I get online, I can figure out how to do both of these. I don't have to pick because I can leverage myself."   Steve: That is kind of the funny thing I learned about ... because I got into an MOM. I went and did exactly what my upline was saying. Got 13 people my first move.   Kristian: Oh, wait, your [inaudible 00:21:42] not duplicatable.   Steve: No. Not at all.   Kristian: I don't care. If I find enough of the right people, it won't have to be.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah. My first month, I recruited 13 leeches. Man, they wouldn't do a dang thing unless I was like pushing them in the back with a cattle prod. I was like, "Ah. There's got to be a better way to do this." That's why I took it online and did a lot better. I definitely relate with that.   Kristian: Yeah. The crazy part about this is, like Dallin was saying, he's, shoot, some of the advanced strategies ... Dallin's has this like ... he understands and can see what the outcome is that we're trying to do. He gets it. He gets the whole flow and process of this, of how funnels work. He's been studying them. I just think for a big part, he just needed to connect certain pieces and be able to see what's going on behind the scenes that you can't see online.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We talk about ... the hardest part about knowing how to do funnels is focusing because when you understand it and it clicks and you realize what you can do, it's like .... Someone starts talking you're like, "Oh my God. I know how to make money with that. Oh my God."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: It's like entrepreneurial ADD exacerbated.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Forget entrepreneurial ADD. This is like an entrepreneurial ADD addiction.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: That's the issue, so we've had to get very focused on okay what's the quickest and most pressing thing at the moment that we can make money with, so that we can reach our long term goals. Like I said, Lo Silva is one of the guys that I credit a lot of what I learned from. There's three little things that I take from them and that's think big, start small, scale fast.   Steve: Interesting. Think big, start small, scale fast.   Kristian: Yeah, that's kind of our little mantra.   Dallin: Yeah. That leads into basically what we're doing now. Our whole plan without getting too much into detail is we have a very, very big picture. Just like a funnel, we have our personal value ladder. Our big picture is more in investments, real estate, things like that. Those are our high tickets. Right.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: For the time being, we need to make sure that we couple that with clients, so we have our lead gen system, our agency that's doing multiple things, SCO work and funnels, and social media strategies and management and that way it can help us scale. Our agency essentially fronts the bills and I guess the best way to put it is we want everything that we do to be self-sufficient. If we build something, the entire goal-   Steve: Keep it in hands.   Dallin: Well, yes and no. The entire thing is for that project to sustain itself, so you understand once you get going with your Facebook marketing and such, it gets to the point where you reinvest X amount back into it. Then it lives, it breaths on it's own kind of. It just needs to be monitored, right.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: If we have this solid balance between us of we have clients coming to us for done-for-you services, that's awesome. That's cash. That keeps us busy. That keeps workers of ours busy. Then in the meantime, if we can couple that with 40, 50% of our other time for in-house projects, because Kristian and I already have entrepreneurial ADD, we're always thinking of ideas. We always have something going on or a lot of times a client that comes in has something that sparks an idea.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: We'll, like you said, we'll keep them in-house and then we funnel them. We get them to the point where they self-sustain and all of a sudden, we have our house projects, our client projects and it's just a very healthy business model. You don't see a lot of very sustainable and scalable models. You know what I mean?   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: Especially, because I've been with very, very, very big companies with these companies I've sold for and you find ... one of the things I like to do is study patterns and development. I'm really into the business development side of things. You look at the ones that have made it, that have succeeded and that are scaled to the massive, massive billion dollar companies and that's kind of what they do. They make sure they have kind of that happy medium, that solid balance in all these different areas and factors and that's kind of what we're trying to do.     One of the projects we're working on right now is a political campaign funnel. This is just one that's easy to scale and we're just pretty much hacking it and taking advantage events which one of the things coupling social media with funnels is current events, man. That's, they kill. If you can find something trending and good and that has ... that you can milk for a long time, you better believe we're going to find a way to make, pinch money out of it, right.   Steve: Yeah. Isn't it the-   Dallin: I'll let Kristian talk about that.   Steve: The political campaign funnel, is that the one you downloaded I think from Sales Funnel Broker?   Kristian: Ah, no.   Steve: Maybe that was you, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. There's some guy, he downloaded it and came back and he's like, "This is the coolest thing ever." I was like, "Just the share [funnel 00:27:53] free one I got from someone else. Glad you like it."   Kristian: Yeah, no. I got the idea from actually from Funnel ... I got part of the idea from Funnel U. To be honest, as much as we know about funnels, something clicked when I watched Russell's video inside the membership site for the political bridge funnel, where it was like, "I see it." It was that coupled with the, the funnel stacking I got that whole idea of moving them from a front end funnel to a webinar funnel to a high ticket and how you stack those.   Steve: Sure.   Kristian: Bridging and when all the sudden the bridging made sense to me, I said, "Oh my God." Just like what Dallin was talking about here. Ultimately our goal is to, take the same amount of time to do all this work to go and work with somebody and do a commercial real estate transaction, where we're an investor or we're buying the property and people are investing with us, as it does to sell a t-shirt. Just time is time, it's just the size of the value and how you frame your mind around it. We are in the process of growing our agency. The whole point of it is to, if you think of construction companies, really good construction companies constantly have work that's in place to keep their employees working, so that they have the best team, right.   Steve: Mmm. Yeah.   Kristian: That's what they're always talking about is we just have to keep work so we can keep these guys busy. It's not about keeping them busy, but we also want to have the team in place because ultimately when we have our ideas, we can get them shipped quicker.   Steve: Yeah. I've been approached by a few people lately and they're like, "I got these awesome guys. I absolutely love them." He's like, "What work do you have? I just don't want them to go anywhere else." He's like, "I don't care what it is. I just got to bill."   Dallin: That's exactly what it is.   Steve: Yeah, interesting.   Kristian: Yeah. That's the idea, but to get back to what we're doing right now is I got the idea of how Russell explained the political bridge and my dad had ordered 100 t-shirts from my best friend. My best friend did all the screen printing for the Super Bowl in Santa Clara.   Steve: Jeez.   Kristian: He's got one of the largest screen printing companies on the west coast, based here in Phoenix. He has a company very similar to what Trey Lewellen started with Teespring.   Steve: Interesting.   Kristian: He's set in and he came to us and said, "Hey, why don't you partner with me and just handle the marketing on this." He's talked to me about doing some marketing for them for different aspects of their company. Now we're working together and the whole idea came up I said, "Well, you know what? I think I can do it." Before I was hesitant because I was like, "Well, I'm in the digital media space. I'm selling digital products." That was big hangup was I've got to sell to these entrepreneurs.     Then when this political bridge funnel that Russell talked about when he talked about how you move people from this list to this list, I went, "Oh my God. I can build a list in anything. I can just bridge them." It was a combination of that video inside of Funnel U and my participation in Todd Brown's PCP, Partnership Coaching Program, where they were really working on educational based marketing, and script and copy writing. The confidence level in my own ability to write copy had shifted to where now MFA is outsourcing some of their done-for-you client work to Dallin and I and having me write copy and script for their video sales letters.   Steve: What?   Kristian: Yeah.   Dallin: That's real, man.   Kristian: That tells you the ...   Dallin: We scale fast. Remember that third principle. We scale fast.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I wrote all those down. That's amazing. What's funny is that people don't realize that it literally is the exact same amount of work to do a small company as a big one.     My buddy, I mean as far as building a funnel and things like that, my buddy and I were building an [inaudible 00:32:11]. It was the first funnel I ever built with ClickFunnels and it was a smartphone insurance company and we were ... we got out of that for a lot of reasons, but it was interesting though because I was building it. We put it all out. That's actually when I got into ClickFunnels and it was right after ClickFunnels left beta. I was like, "Hey, I'm going to build this whole thing out before my ClickFunnels trial runs out." I'd never built one and I just killed myself for the next little while. We got it out.     Then this guy approaches me in Florida. He's like, "I need a funnel for some of my ..." He was selling water ionizers or something. I was like, "Oh man. This is a big company. They're already making a couple million a year." I was blown away. I was like, wait, this is the same exact amount of work as it was for the small little startup. Anyways, I thought that was interesting you said that.   Kristian: Yeah. That's what we talk about is that it's easier to work with those bigger companies. They get it.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: You work with the smaller companies and they're worried about how much money it's going to cost them. The reality is that the more we put ourselves in a position to work with guys like you and Russell and guys like Todd and Lou Coselino and David Perriera and all them at MFA, they're saying, "Man, why are you, how come you're not charging double and triple?"   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Dallin and I are sitting here like seriously if they're willing to pay us to write scripts for, to outsource their ad copy to us for some of their client work, what's that say? I mean, we're literally working with, doing work for the guys that are considered the best in the industry.   Steve: That's ... Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: It's just a mindset shift is what it is. That has made it a little easier to have a conversation with someone and say, "You know what? We can take on this project. Here's how much it is."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: They're like, sticker shock. Well, sticker shock. You can go and just have someone build the pages for you, but it's not going to convert. I know that for a fact because copy os what converts, right.   Steve: You know Tyler Jorgensen?   Kristian: You know what, it sounds familiar. I think I-   Steve: He said the same thing to me. He's like, "You charge 10 grand to build a custom funnel?" I was like, "Yeah." He's like, "Why not 15?" I was like, "I don't know. I'd never thought about that before." I thought 10 was kind of the mark. He's like, "No, no, no, no. I'd do 15, 20, 25." I was like, "You've got to be kidding." That is is just a mindset shift. You'll get better people to build for anyways, whatever it is.   Kristian: The big thing for us-   Dallin: True and at the same time ...   Kristian: Yeah, I don't know.   Dallin: You there?   Kristian: Yeah, you cut-   Steve: Kind of lost you there.   Kristian: The big thing for us is really to build a team, Steve, and to have that team in place and be able to have people that focus on all the different areas of the funnels, so that they get really, really good at that. They don't have to know the whole process because that's what I've spent the last two and a half years doing, right.   Steve: Wow.   Kristian: They can be part of this and be part of building something and helping these clients and really enjoy what they're doing. Then, like I said, when we have these ideas we can ship them. I know you want to know and your audience probably wants to know what it is that we're doing, which is what got you in. I mentioned my friend, Bryant. He's got this company like Teespring. He's got everything in place to roll this out. We had this idea for how to start doing that. We took advantage of knowing that the campaigns going on right now. I mentioned to you I think my dad bought like 100 Trump t-shirts from him. I was like, "Those are really cool shirts." My dad's like, "Yeah, man You should do this funnel stuff and figure out how to sell these to everyone. Look how crazy everyone is about Trump. Trump's going to kill it." At the time, it was still in the Republican Primaries. I'm like, "Well, I don't want to go build a funnel."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: "Then trump doesn't win the primaries." But as he started pulling away I'm like, "Oh, let's start testing some stuff." We tested one funnel and surprisingly the Facebook campaign got a lot of clicks, but there wasn't a lot of opt-ins and conversions on the funnel. What it did and I think this is one of the biggest skill sets that people who are elite develop versus people that are frustrated and saying this isn't working for me is understanding the information that they're getting and what to do with it. You might not have a winning campaign or a funnel that's making money, but to understand what kind of info you're getting and how to use that to do the next thing is that whole testing process is what separates those that are killing it from those that are getting killed. That first funnel that we did, didn't make money. Not at all.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I mean it lost $1,200. I went to Dallin and I said, "Dude, this is awesome." He's like, "Huh?" I said, "Look at the retargeting list that we got." Then we went and we tweaked this and I said, "What if we change the front end," and at that time Mike Pence had just been named Trump's VP. I'm like, "Who the hell is Mike Pence? I never heard of this guy before." I started asking people, they're like, "No." Unless you're from Indiana, you don't know who Mike Pence is. I go, "Should Trump have picked Mike Pence? Isn't there someone else." I'm like, "Boom. Is there a vice presidential debate in the Republican Party?"   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We created a little mini survey around is Mike Pence the right one. First of all, you've got all these people that love Trump and they're hardcore republicans and now you're creating an internal debate. Everyone wants to voice their opinion, but they don't want to be judged.   Steve: Yeah. People get pretty intense about that for sure.   Kristian: Yeah. We created a mini survey.   Dallin: Oh yeah.   Kristian: We created a mini survey and we had this retargeting list from the first time and we started running ads. I didn't expect and I don't think Dallin either, that it was going to do as well as it did, but I mean, we had in less than 12 hours, we had 500 email opt-ins.   Steve: What? Oh my gosh.   Kristian: I was like, "Oh my God." I'm like, "Holy crap." I'm like, "What the hell's going on?" Of course the first goal is to try and get the funnel to break even. What we had to do was we were getting so much information so quickly that we really had to be on our toes and make adjustments and modifications. What we figured out through the first week of testing this is there's so much activity on this funnel. Just to give you the stats, after what was Dallin, really 6 days of running the ads, we got 2,600 email subscribers?   Dallin: Five and a half, yeah.   Kristian: Yeah. Five and a half days, we got 2,600 email subscribers.   Steve: Wow.   Kristian: K, the funnels not at break even, but here's what I want whoever's listening and whoever wants to take this information understand is the testing process. We figured out between two front end offers-   Steve: Which one was the winner.   Kristian: Which one's working better.   Steve: Yeah. Which one's the awesome one. Yeah.   Kristian: It's still not winning. Our free plus shipping is not, it's not helping us break even. The reason for that is because we're getting so many opt-ins. On a normal free plus shipping, you're not getting as many people clicking on the ads, right.   Steve: Right.   Kristian: Well, we're getting 5, 6 times the amount of people subscribing to the email-   Steve: Would you, in that scenario, would you ever try and get even less people. It'd be counter-intuitive maybe, but I would just start tweaking the free plus shipping, I guess.   Kristian: No. No. Well, no. We can't-   Dallin: The strategy-   Kristian: Yeah. We can't really tweak it because it's not like we're going to offer anything cheaper than free plus shipping. When you start looking at all the different things we can offer, there's not a lot of options, but here's what Dallin and I have figured out is that we think we've created a new funnel. It's not really new in the sense of what you and I and Russell and all these other guys think of.   Steve: True.   Kristian: In terms of Russel and [Daygin Smith 00:41:29] coming up with the black box funnel, right.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: It's just soft offer funnel, a front end soft offer. We think that we've come up with what we call a backdoor funnel.   Steve: Interesting.   Kristian: You get so many people on your email list. You get as many people to take the first offer and you get as many people to take your upsell as possible to figure out how close to break even you can get. If you look at 2,600 people, we go back and look at the numbers, only about 115 of those 2,600 ever saw the offer.   Steve: Huh.   Kristian: Now we have an opportunity to present those people with the offer again. Well, how do you do that in a way that's going to get a lot of people to open the e-     All right. Want me to ...We cut off here at the point of high dramas. As I was mentioning, we got so many email subscribers and such a lower number based on the email subscribers because we didn't expect to have that many, that we still weren't at break even, but we have a ton of people that we can show an offer to. It's a little different obviously because our price points ... We're doing apparel and things like that.   Steve: It's like delaying the offer almost on purpose, right. I mean this is ... awesome.   Kristian: Yeah. Remember, we started this whole thing with a survey, right, something that people were very passionate about, so a lot of polarity in there. They want their opinion-     They also want to know what everyone else thinks, where they fall in line here. We thought, "Oh my God. Somebody that votes, that voices their opinion, takes the time to put a vote in wants to know what the results are." We created a results page that shows them the results and has a special offer that all those people haven't seen. When we send it in the email and we tell them here's the results of the survey, the open rates are and the click through rates are sky high.   Steve: How long are you waiting to actually send them this results page?   Kristian: A couple of days, so-   Steve: Oh really. Wow.   Kristian: Yeah. I mentioned Actionetics. The whole reason that we started doing this is because we wanted to ... since we're having people take a survey and we're offering them this gift, we want to make sure we get as many people that take us up on that gift for taking the time to vote. We have a few of those triggers built in there, "Hey, don't forget to grab your free gift. We noticed you took the time, maybe something happened. Go back here and grab your gift." Then we make sure that everybody sees the results page a couple of days later.   Steve: A couple of days. That definitely is a different style for sure. You don't think that hurts conversions at all?   Kristian: No, I mean. It's a survey, right?   Steve: Sure.   Kristian: The point of high drama and the suspense and all that. We're still testing it, again, like I mentioned earlier that the biggest thing I think that separates those that are successful and those that aren't is to understand the type of information that you get.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We may found out that we need to send the results sooner, but we don't know. We've got to test.   Steve: It's interesting positioning too of you saying, "Hey. It look's like. Thanks for taking it. Here's your results. I don't know if missed this, but just jump back and get that." That's interesting. Like they missed it. They missed the gift.   Kristian: Yeah. Yeah. "You forgot to grab your gift." That's our first step and then in the email that comes after they've taken the survey, "Hey, we're in the process of tallying up the results. We'll send them to you as they're updated."   Steve: Interesting. It keeps the loop open, basically.   Kristian: Hmm-hmm(affirmative). Exactly. Exactly.   Steve: Man, that's awesome. Well, hey is there a URL that we can go check that out on? I don't want to pollute or dilute any of your stats, so if not that's fine, but ...   Kristian: Yeah. We're just running ads to this right now.   Steve: Good.   Kristian: We're in the process of, like I said, this was just an idea that my dad came up with. I've got to give him credit for the initial idea, but now it's turned into kind of a new business entity, right.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We're growing this email list and the concepts that Russell talks about the how to bridge funnels and lists and things like that. We're starting to build a list now in that republican, conservative, survivalist category. We're going to take it a step further and build out a home page and start doing some different stuff with it.   Steve: That's interesting. You're going to go through and who's going to keep opening all the emails over and over again, looking at all the stats of all the people around. These are the hyper active political caring people. You know what I mean? That's awesome. That's a really clever way to segment out those people. That's fantastic.   Kristian: Yeah. Yeah. You never know where your next business entity is going to come from.   Steve: Interesting. Gosh, well, hey, I know we've been on quite a while. Thanks for dropping all the bombs of gold you guys did. I don't know what happened to Dallin, but ...   Kristian: Yeah. He just texted, said thank you. He's trying to get back on, but I know we've got to take the kids to school and stuff, so-   Steve: Awesome. Well, hey man, I appreciate it. Thank you so much and this was awesome.   Kristian: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Steve. Love meeting new people that are doing the same thing as us and glad that we can reach more people that are trying to learn how this works and kind of help them understand the process and that if they just stick at it and keep testing. That's really the big thing I think is testing and learning is how you get better at it.   Steve: You're kind of a scientist going through this, for sure. Going in an industry you know will make money obviously, but whatever you're doing specifically, you might almost always be the first. The think big, start small and scale fast. That's huge.   Kristian: Yeah. If anyone wants to connect with us, Dallin and I are both on Facebook. We mentioned Periscope. I do a lot of broadcasting on there with what I call the Live Stream Marketing Funnel Show. We're rolling, if people are interested in learning how to use live video, we've got that coming out. Yeah. Connect with us on social media. Kristian Cotta and Dallin Greenberg.   Steve: Okay, yeah. Then you've got the Health Success Podcast. Guys, go check him out at Health Success Podcast as well as he said Live Stream Marketing?   Kristian: Well. Yeah. Just go to KristianCotta.com. It'll take you right there.   Steve: Cool. Awesome.   Kristian: Kristian with a K.   Steve: Kristian with a K. Cotta, right?   Dallin: I'm in.   Kristian: Kristian with a K. Cotta. Dallin's in here. He just got back in.   Dallin: Dude, I don't know what happened. I was getting all excited what Kristian was saying and then just cut off.   Kristian: It's the point of high drama, that's what we were talking about.   Dallin: I know. It was. That's what I told Amy. Is it over?   Steve: It is now.   Kristian: Yeah. We're just wrapping it up.   Steve: Awesome.   Dallin: Sorry.   Steve: It's good. Hey, thanks guys so much.   Kristian: All right. Take care, Steve.   Dallin: See you man.   Steve: All right. Bye-bye.   Speaker 4: (music starts) Thank for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live Hey Steve Show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question. (music ends)

How to Buy Anything for Half Price Jack Butala: How to Buy Anything for Half Price. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here from Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land show. Today Jill and I talk about how to buy anything for half price. Well what the heck does that have to do with real estate? I'll tell you. Jill, great show today. Before we start, let's take a question posted from SuccessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill: Cool. All right. Brent from Dallas asks: "I'm a brand new real estate investor. I'm in the very beginning stages of starting my real estate investing business, and I was curious if anyone had advice on where I should start from step one. Should I start marketing the motivated sellers without a business entity, or get a business structure first? Feel free to add any tips for now. I'm just starting out. Thanks." Steve: Hey, I'll answer that in a second. If you have a question, or you want to be on our show, please call 800-725-8816. Great question. I think a lot of people have it. I'm sure a ton of listeners have the exact same question. Where do you start? So this is what you do. Marketing certainly is not where you start. You always start with education on anything that you want to accomplish, in my opinion. You want to start with free education. You don't want to plow a bunch of money into something that you're really not going to follow through on. If you're interested in real estate do two things: Get our fee eBook at LandAcademy.com, that will get you in a system, give you some exercises, some hands-on stuff; and get yourself a username at BiggerPockets.com. Jill and I have no affiliation, but it's a huge community of very experienced and completely brand, spanking new real estate investors of all different types: apartments, land, houses, the whole thing. Start utilizing those two free resources, that's step one. We'll talk about marketing and all that stuff, eventually, and business structure. A lot of people say, "Hey, I need to start an LLC before I do anything." Leave that down the road. Get educated. You might not like real estate at all. Maybe you would rather open a website eventually, and sell stuff that you by from China. I don't know, but find out for free. Jill: I love the things you just pull out of mid air. Like, whatever. Maybe you want to sell sunglasses in a kiosk at the mall. What the heck? Remember when we talked about that a long time ago? Steve: Selling sunglasses? Jill: We did. Oh gosh. Steve: That was for the kids. Jill: Oh, all right. But we- Steve: Yeah. One of the kids had an idea to do that. Jill: Yeah. Because you and I, sometimes before we started ... I hope it's okay I'm jumping in ahead here. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Right. Before we started Land Academy because our land business was rolling and it was going so smooth, you and I were like, "Well what should we do now?" Steve: We were bored. Yeah, "What are we're going to do?" Jill: That's exactly it. We started looking around at all kinds of crazy things like, "Gee, I wonder how much that makes." It's like driving for dollars, but driving for businesses, like, "Gee, what's a good business to ..." You know? Walking through the mall going, "Oh, I could do that. Look at the return they get." Steve: You know what I do sometimes late at night on the Internet? I look for dry cleaners for sale. I'm just fascinated with that business. I don't mean a dry cleaner plant. Next time you walk into the dry cleaner. If it's one of those that have an actual ... They don't clean the clothes. They just have one of those big,

How to Buy Anything for Half Price Jack Butala: How to Buy Anything for Half Price. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve: Jack Butala here from Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land show. Today Jill and I talk about how to buy anything for half price. Well what the heck does that have to do with real estate? I'll tell you. Jill, great show today. Before we start, let's take a question posted from SuccessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill: Cool. All right. Brent from Dallas asks: "I'm a brand new real estate investor. I'm in the very beginning stages of starting my real estate investing business, and I was curious if anyone had advice on where I should start from step one. Should I start marketing the motivated sellers without a business entity, or get a business structure first? Feel free to add any tips for now. I'm just starting out. Thanks." Steve: Hey, I'll answer that in a second. If you have a question, or you want to be on our show, please call 800-725-8816. Great question. I think a lot of people have it. I'm sure a ton of listeners have the exact same question. Where do you start? So this is what you do. Marketing certainly is not where you start. You always start with education on anything that you want to accomplish, in my opinion. You want to start with free education. You don't want to plow a bunch of money into something that you're really not going to follow through on. If you're interested in real estate do two things: Get our fee eBook at LandAcademy.com, that will get you in a system, give you some exercises, some hands-on stuff; and get yourself a username at BiggerPockets.com. Jill and I have no affiliation, but it's a huge community of very experienced and completely brand, spanking new real estate investors of all different types: apartments, land, houses, the whole thing. Start utilizing those two free resources, that's step one. We'll talk about marketing and all that stuff, eventually, and business structure. A lot of people say, "Hey, I need to start an LLC before I do anything." Leave that down the road. Get educated. You might not like real estate at all. Maybe you would rather open a website eventually, and sell stuff that you by from China. I don't know, but find out for free. Jill: I love the things you just pull out of mid air. Like, whatever. Maybe you want to sell sunglasses in a kiosk at the mall. What the heck? Remember when we talked about that a long time ago? Steve: Selling sunglasses? Jill: We did. Oh gosh. Steve: That was for the kids. Jill: Oh, all right. But we- Steve: Yeah. One of the kids had an idea to do that. Jill: Yeah. Because you and I, sometimes before we started ... I hope it's okay I'm jumping in ahead here. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Right. Before we started Land Academy because our land business was rolling and it was going so smooth, you and I were like, "Well what should we do now?" Steve: We were bored. Yeah, "What are we're going to do?" Jill: That's exactly it. We started looking around at all kinds of crazy things like, "Gee, I wonder how much that makes." It's like driving for dollars, but driving for businesses, like, "Gee, what's a good business to ..." You know? Walking through the mall going, "Oh, I could do that. Look at the return they get." Steve: You know what I do sometimes late at night on the Internet? I look for dry cleaners for sale. I'm just fascinated with that business. I don't mean a dry cleaner plant. Next time you walk into the dry cleaner. If it's one of those that have an actual ... They don't clean the clothes. They just have one of those big,

Couples Therapy Here We Come (CFFL 0070) Jack Butala: Couples Therapy Here We Come. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening. Steve:                   Hey, Jack Butala here for Land Academy. Welcome to our cash flow from land show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about our relationship, not because I want to at all, but people keep asking us about it, so I am going to use the show to answer some questions in the hopes that they discontinue. Jill:                          I would like to know, first of all, this title cracks me up. Couples therapy, here we come. That was great. Who's asking? I don't get those questions. Steve:                   Really? Jill:                          Well, I shouldn't say that. I do get some, but no one asks me out right, they kind of dance around it and then I don't acknowledge it. Steve:                   That's what I'm talking about. You've probably had a lot of practice at that by now. Jill:                          I am very good at that. Steve:                   No, I write these titles and if you've ever listened to this show, I write the titles and they have nothing to do with the show at all. The title is just designed to get the to click the play button or listen button. Jill:                          I really don't want to have to get into all this. Steve:                   I'm just joking. Jill:                          Oh my gosh. You are the best person I have ever worked with ever. Steve:                   What? Jill:                          No, I mean that. Steve:                   You're trying to get out of going to therapy by being nice. Jill:                          Totally, just kidding. There's no therapy in our future. Steve:                   I know, there's no therapy. This show was actually ... Well, go ahead and keep complimenting me. Jill:                          Here's how I take this show, I take this show as just funny play on words/talking about working with a partner, a business partner, and not the pros and cons, but the ups and downs and why a business partner keeps you in line sometimes, well at least for me, and reminds me the things that I'm good at, the things that I'm not good at, what to focus on sometimes, what to outsource, let it go, and so I look at it about things like that. Steve:                   I think there's been a lot of points along the way, we kind of hit on this last week, it stuck with me for some reason, I don't even think you remember saying it, but when there are rough times, we've been so lucky, there's been so few. When there's rough times, you just have to kind of sit there and say "This is just a little thing." We're all going in the same direction and we'll work it out. That's always the case. I think there's few systematic things that we've put in place in the last few months that really, really make this really click and work. Having separate offices works for me, taking separate cars to work to our office, a lot of things like that just keep us a little more separate and professional when we're here than in the social part of our life. Jill:                          Exactly. Steve:                   Sometimes Jill falls asleep during a podcast. Jill:                          Oh, that happens. Steve:                   She is right now. Jill:                          Jill loses interest very quickly. That's a whole other one, that's a funny topic about- Steve:                   I can tell when you're bored with something right away, I mean immediately. Jill:                          You can see my eyes gloss over? Steve:                   Just yeah, you're thinking about something else, that actually just happened.

UPDATED LINK! Fats! #003 The good the bad and the ugly. Follow up question from Sue in Ohio. -- Thank You Sue! We talk about Grazing all day long Michelle recommends breaking your caloric intake up: 30% at breakfast 40% at lunch 30% at dinner and having carbs, fat and protein at every meal. When should I get my fats in? Consider it fuel for your body. When do you need to fuel up? Before you go out, or after you get back? Fuel-up in the morning instead of using caffeine! Steve tried out some soy meat alternatives. Morning Star Farms Light Life Smart Ground Yves Boca Burger Kudos to Steve for giving them a shot. Soy used as a replacement for meat greatly reduces your fat intake. Fat supplies energy to your body in a compact form. You NEED fats in moderation to feel and be well. Americans get plenty of fat, the problem is they're not choosing the good ones. Question from Amber -- Greets Michelle and not Steve "Hey!" Wants to know about good fats and bad fats. Thanks for the question Amber! Mono-unsaturated and Poly-unsaturated fats - GOOD FATS! - We talk about the health benefits of the good fats for balancing your HDL and LDL. Memory tool: Happy and Lousy. Over the Counter Cholesterol Test Kit Saturated Fats - BAD FATS - Found mostly in animal sources. These fats are required for normal health but should be used in moderation as they tend to raise your LDL or Lousy Cholesterol Trans-Fat - THE UGLY FATS - Cheaper, longer shelf life, but at the cost of your health. Question from GH -- Thank you GH! GH wants to know about Trans-fat and how to know if it's in the food products we buy. Study after study shows that trans-fats can mutate cells in your body, which could lead to cancer. New laws will be forcing manufacturers to display the amount of trans fats in the nutrition facts panel on the package starting in 2006. Check the list of ingredients for trans fats. Some foods that don't typically have labels may have trans-fats. They have long shelf lives and and may be available in convenience stores because they're cheaper to produce, display for sale and stock than more perishable products. In-n-out burger cooks their fries in cotton-seed oil which is trans-fat free. (CA, AZ, NV area fast food chain) Special mention to some trans-fat all-stars: Donuts and Stick Margarine. So instead of using these trans-fatty products just use real butter, just remember to use it in moderation. You don't need butter. Good fat sources to include with moderation: Walnuts, Almonds, Peanuts - Dry roasted or Raw, unsalted, and no coatings or coverings. 1 ounce is plenty. Olive Oil and Canola Oil. Look for extra virgin. Choose these over other fats. Still exercise moderation, you don't NEED these fats, but they are far better than the alternatives. Try the Misto to help you minimize the amount of oil you're using to cook with. Try Fish, good for protein, and some have those great Omega III fatty acids. Salmon, Cod, Sardines, Tuna. Remember it matters how you cook them. Avocado - good for fat content - not so hot with calories. Omega III fatty acids are great for heart health. We talk Flax and Michelle recommends flax meal. Flax Meal should be stored in its original package, and kept in the refrigerator. Fat-Reduced Products to help you reduce the Bad and eliminate the Ugly out of your dietary fat intake. We recommend the SmartBeat Mayo, and Butter Spray. Steve likes the ICBINB Spray. Big recommendation for Walden Farms Brand products! Try the marshmallow dip! Fat free dairy. Milk, Yogurt, Cottage Cheese, Sour Cream. You may not be able to switch from full-fat to no-fat products overnight, but you can work them in slowly. Soon they will be your preference, and you'll be cutting out a lot of fat. Remember that we'd like you to replace the foods you normally eat with these lower fat or better fat foods. It does you no good to simply add these foods. Michelle mentions the Golden Circle Eggs which contain Omega III's. And then we wrap up with more tips on Trans-Fats - Restaurants use them to reduce costs and Convenience food items. IN THE NEWS: Slate - 40th birthday of the 7-11 Slurpee Reno Gazette Journal - Hagen Daz vs The Slurpee Try the Crystal Light or Diet Pepsi Slurpee for huge calorie savings.