Podcasts about stu mcclaren

Welcome to the Woman in PR Show! I'm your host, Talia Beckett Davis, Founder of the Organization of Canadian Women in Public Relations and the Organization of American Women in Public Relations.In today's episode, I'm thrilled to be speaking with Stu McClaren, Founder of the Membership Experience, Co-Founder of the technology platform membership.IO, and author of the game-changing book Predictable Profits: How to Transform Your Business from One-Off Sales to Recurring Revenue with Memberships and Subscriptions.If you've ever wondered how to build a thriving community around your brand or turn your business into a predictable, recurring revenue stream, this episode is for you. Stu's helped countless entrepreneurs unlock the power of memberships—and today, he's sharing his best insights with us.Download the Membership Calculator: https://www.taliadavis.com/TME

Are you tired of the feast-or-famine cycle in your business? Looking for a way to create more stability and predictability in your revenue? In this game-changing episode of the Epic Success Podcast, I'm joined by the KING of memberships, Stu McLaren, to talk about his brand new book, Predictable Profits, and how memberships can transform your business model. Whether you're just getting started as an entrepreneur or you're an established business owner looking to add more stability to your revenue, this episode is a GOLDMINE of practical advice.

This episode is all about community and retention. It doesn't matter who you are, this message is for you! Joining us to explore this super important, universal topic is Shana Lynn, a podcast host, speaker, and consultant with more than ten years of experience in retention. Tuning in, you'll hear all about Shana's college thesis that got her on stages across the country, her experience at Vanderbilt Medical Centre, and being handpicked to work for Stu McClaren. We unpack what it really means to have strong retention systems in place, personal touches in a digital world, and the ongoing nature of the job of selling. We discuss how to structure your cancellation procedure, three things every client should believe at the end of your onboarding process, and four key elements to a thriving membership community. Join us today to hear all this and more!  

Stu McClaren shares how AI is changing the face of digital marketing (& what you can do to keep up) Whether you're apprehensive about AI or you're all about it, one thing is for sure – it's taking the digital marketing world by storm. I won't lie –  there have been a lot of changes in online marketing over the past fourteen years that I've been an entrepreneur, from the rise of SEO to social media. But this, sweet friend, is a really big one — and I want to talk about it! Here to discuss all-things futuristic is Stu McLaren, my work husband who also happens to be the ‘go-to-guy' for all things memberships.  He's worked with tens of thousands of authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, and business owners to transform what they know, love, and do into recurring revenue. And in this episode, he's going to share insights on how the learning industry, specifically, is changing as AI continues to transform the marketing landscape, and how you can make sure your business doesn't get left in the dust. You'll also hear: A tried and true framework that you can use to future-proof your online business Different ways you can take advantage of AI as a content creator How you can prevent your students from getting the dreaded “content complex”  The ‘secret sauce' Peloton has used to maintain a 92% membership retention rate This is a great listen for any business owner, whether you're just getting started or you're a seasoned entrepreneur. So press play right now and enjoy this fun and informative conversation with Stu McLaren. Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts "I love Amy and Online Marketing Made Easy."

In this episode I'm joined by my friend and respected mentor, Stu McClaren, who's sharing his wisdom on why the membership model is the way forward for businesses—especially for creative professionals like us. Get ready to dive into a lively chat about the many perks of memberships, including the stability, accountability, and sense of community they offer for both entrepreneurs and their customers. This episode is brimming with valuable tips and guidance for anyone considering a membership model for their creative venture.

If you are a course creator, run masterminds, have a membership or are looking to create mutually beneficial partnerships, then this interview will be very valuable to you! Rocky Buckley started his career in publishing with Apprentice Hall, but then launched his own business in 1999 after seeing a gap in the market. Rocky Buckley is an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, and the creator of Platinum Path, a program for thought leaders, authors, speakers, consultants, and coaches to reinvent their expertise and shift into a high-priced, lifestyle-friendly business model. He has helped launch 3000 projects and helped create over $100m in revenue for his billion dollar clients.He has also interviewed Pedro Adao, Stu McClaren, Kevin Harrington, Jim Padilla and Brad Blazar in his own private community which you can join in the links down below. We talk about personal branding, creating partnerships and delve deeper into Rocky's strategies for growing an audience through relationship building.Make sure you check out how Rocky would go about creating a course down below.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~This is how Rocky Would Create A Course:1. Create an audience first. (at least 300 people)2. Research your niche, their problems, their goals and validate your course idea with a free or low paid beta version3. Don't make everything perfect at the start, just get started4. Get lots of feedback so you can make lots of improvement5. Collect testimonials - social proof will drive your business forward6. Then create a 5 day personal challenge course like Pedro Adao. 7. You'll build a very high level of authority and trust with your audience and once the challenge comes to an end you will have a community of people that you've build that will be waiting for another offer. 8. Make an offer.Private Facebook Group: http://powerpersonaproject.com/ Website: https://www.platinumpath.co/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rockybuckley Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rocky-buckley/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Talking With Experts Podcast is the podcast for Business Owners, Entrepreneurs, Solopreneurs, Freelancers, CEO's, Coaches and anyone else that wants to become an expert and grow and scale their business. Every week a new guest will gift you at least 3 actionable steps to take your business and life to the next level. You'll hear stories, lessons they've learned along the way, what is working right now, how to create new revenue streams, how to work more efficiently and so much more. Join Chris Cownden on his journey by subscribing, liking, leaving a review and getting your questions answered.Website: https://www.talkingwithexpertspod.com/ep1-10Links: https://linktr.ee/talkingwithexpertsHave Questions You Need Answering: https://forms.gle/LD6QpPGERjdfUXwK7Resources: https://talkingwithexpertspod.com/libraryFull Transcription: https://talkingwithexpertspod.com/ep09Join The Family: https://talkingwithexpertspod.com/communitySee you next week!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This podcast contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. Thanks.Reduce your expenses so you can grow, marketing and scale your business without all the associated costs. Sign up to GrooveFunnels hereIf you want to start your own podcast and use the same platform I use, then sign up to Bcast today. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tracy Childers runs what is arguably one of the largest and best-known membership plugins for WordPress called WishList Member. After starting the business with business partner Stu McClaren, the tool quickly rose to prominence.But, a few years ago the two parted ways on great terms. Stu was just ready for a new challenge, leaving Tracy to continue on in the business. As WordPress has evolved both as a product, and the marketplace has changed over time, Tracy found out (just like we did) that WordPress can be an amazing if not fickle place to make a living.Find out how Tracy has rebuilt WishList Member from the ground up, found the limits of his team, energy and focus - to build a tool that customers love and has transitioned to a sustainable subscription service business.We've been WishList Member customers for years, so if you're looking to push WordPress into advanced membership management, WishList Member is the OG platform you're looking for with fair prices and great support: https://member.wishlistproducts.com/Brought to you by Campaign Refinery

Over the last 10 years in freelancing, I have found that writing in the clients' voice is one of the hardest things to do. It’s hard when it’s a new working relationship, you have to learn everything about them in a quick amount of time and capture their voice so that no one can tell it’s NOT them actually writing their social posts, emails and blogs.    Well this episode should give you confidence!   I’ve invited Justin Blackman, from Pretty Fly Copywriting, to share his startup story about how he began copywriting and niched down to writing brand voice guides.   He’s helped some pretty high level entrepreneurs, like Amy Porterfield, Stu McClaren and Tarzan Kay, training their teams and new writers to mimic their voice.   Thus he’s the brand ventriloquist and has plenty of copywriting tips to share.   Connect with Justin: Download Justin's Brand Voice freebie --> https://prettyflycopy.com/voice and be on the lookout for his 93 ways to punch-up your email sign offs Justin's Write more Personality-er Workshop* this is my partner link, I took the workshop and loved it!  Facebook:@prettyflycopy  Instagram: @prettyflycopy    Learn with me: Gif & Sticker Making Workshop - $17.99 crash course to turn your clients into a gif!   The Quickstart to Facebook Community Management - the unicorn gateway job to digital media work in just 2 hours  The Digital Media VA Crash Course    Connect with Me: The Digital Media VA Lab - a free FB community  Instagram: @emilyreaganpr   Facebook: @emilyreaganpr    >>> Download my Top Ten Most Requested Digital Media Tasks & Services  >>> Take the Quiz to Discover your Digital Dream Job   

There were a lot of big changes in August.  I had a “big” birthday… my 30th!   I have to admit that I was having a hard time with it so Austin and I planned a totally last-minute trip to the Keys to unplug.  We had such a fun time as a family and it made me realize how important rest and recharging is!     In August I also attended Stu McClaren’s online Tribe Live event which is always an amazing experience.  And guess what…. Not only was I able to donate to Stu’s foundation, Village Impact, but I was also able to pay off $100,000 in student loans!    My big lesson learned in August was that it’s essential to look at the future and think about what I want out of my business in the next year, two years, three years, and beyond. Once I have a vision for what I want, then I can put a plan in place for how I will achieve it.    Of course, as always in our income report episodes, we’re going to get into the numbers. We will cover the money that came in and where it went. It’s always my hope that these reports can help you as you look at the numbers in your own business.    My income reports are always a fan favorite, so if you want to take a behind the scenes look at what I learned in the month of August, make sure to tune in to today’s episode!    If you haven’t heard yet, my free training How to Confidently Land Clients as a Facebook and Instagram Ad Manager Without Any Experience Necessary will be live soon! It's going to kick off on October 17th, but we have a ton of free resources and training leading up to it inside the Facebook group. Head to www.confidentadmanager.com to get registered today, and I'll see you inside the Facebook group! Full show notes available at www.servescalesoar.com/59   Additional Resources: Don’t forget to sign up for my free training >> How to Scale to Consistent 10K Months Without Hiring a Team Subscribe to the Podcast Follow Brandi on Instagram Follow Brandi on Facebook

Reach out to Teresa: TBarnes@HearCommunication.com https://hearcommunication.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/hearteresabarnesrn/https://www.facebook.com/hearcommunication/https://www.instagram.com/teresabarnesrn/https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Advice-Tune-into-Listening/dp/1982209577https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ9TLLKAu7ZxP8lt21f0KswMarket Spending Power: Teenager Hear Less Group  -  $18 Million  to Spend. Plus they are influencersMillennium Hear'r'rificand Terrific Group $40 Billion to SpendBoomers and Beyond Hard of Hearing Market $1.7 trillion to spend      

In Stu speak "Hot Diggity Dog"! The reason my business just had it's best month (thus far!).... I've been holding out on you. Very selective about who I choose to work with, and invest in when it comes to Mentors, and equally as selective about who I choose to recommend to you (as I explain in my longer than normal intro to you in this episode) I'm honored and excited to share and recommend my business coach for the past year with you, Stu McClaren. If you don't yet know Stu, oh you will! And you'll be so glad you do, because Stu, a generous, kind-hearted entrepreneur is the master at helping all industries (especially the Creatives!) build and grow recurring revenue models in their businesses. In our chat today, he is sharing some powerful success stories with you that I know will leave you fired up and thinking about possibilities you may never have thought of before. Be sure to jump in and join Stu for his once a year only Free Tribe Workshop. You'll learn so much. I'll see you there! Click here to join the Workshop You can find all things Marisa and Creative Thursday creativethursday.com creativethursdaycourses.com and on instagram and facebook @creativethursday

At a time when we are craving connection and the ability to connect with others, there's an amazing opportunity in the online world that you may be able to create a business from - membership websites. Memberships right now are thriving, bigtime. In fact, we at SPI are working on one of our own right now, and we wanted to bring Stu McClaren on to talk about this opportunity and even how to validate a membership idea and how to get started today.

Behind the scenes with Stu McClaren, our guest for show 558 where we talked about building a tribe, but today we’re here for our Habits show, following the 7 spokes in the Ziglar Wheel of Life. Some highlights: He’s a soccer fan and is almost always playing on a team or two. Being active with his young kids is a big part of his physical fitness regime. He started eating better for his kid’s sake! He’s big on managing family time amongst the entrepreneurial lifestyle and is a staunch proponent of Rules and Boundaries. Mentally Stu puts a high level of importance on having confidence in ourselves. He believes fear is like a muscle and you must work it out, so he’s routinely looking for things to do that stretch his fear muscle. Financially he loves being an  entrepreneur where you can make an  unlimited amount of money and feels the more money we make the more impact we can have. He and his wife have built 11 schools in Kenya that on average serve 4-700 kids. Personally he just loves creating experiences and celebrating others. Connect with Stu at zigshow.com/tribe and check out his new launch that will help you grow and connect with your tribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stu McClaren is a primary mastermind behind connecting leaders with their audiences. Michael Hyatt has been wildly successful with his Platform University and Stu was his partner in creating it. Stu is about connection. Authentic connection. It’s hard to have a monopoly on any information and knowledge these days, but nothing can replace engagement and relationship. Stu coaches and consults New York Times best-selling authors, top-rated speakers, experts and niche celebrities on how to launch, grow and scale high-profit recurring revenue streams, primarily around profitable and fulfilling membership sites where the point is human connection and relationships. In the show we talk about Stu’s personal journey that brought him such huge success and why he’s now devoted himself in his work to helping people connect, and through that in his personal life, helping some of the least fortunate on earth, he and his wife build schools in Kenya. Stu is also the former founder of the world’s #1 membership platform for WordPress, WishList Member, where he had the chance to serve and support over 60,000+ online communities and membership sites.  Through that experience, he gained a unique insight into the subtle membership nuances that produce massive results. His new endeavor that you’ll hear about in the latter part of the show is TRIBE which you can find at zigshow.com/tribe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the difference between a project manager and an online business manger? How does a virtual assistant fit into the mix? Where do you find team members and what should you ask them in an interview? We cover the answers to these questions and more. This episode is two mini interviews in one podcast! Natalie interviews two experts in team building, Natalie Gingrich and Shelli Warren. Natalie Gingrich owns a project management firm and she breaks down what to expect when hiring a Project Manager. She also explains the differences between project managers, online business managers, and virtual assistants. Shelli Warren of She Connex works with encore career women and today shares her secrets for hiring and building a team. Don't miss her incredible interview questions. Key Takeaways: The differences between a virtual assistant, online business manager, and project manager. How do you know when to hire a virtual assistant, online business manager, or project manager? What to expect to pay for the different roles? How to create a job description. Avoid quick emotional decisions when hiring. Take advantage of association organizations. Should you use a trial period when hiring? Use your intuition. Are you checking references? Your first hire is your most important hire. Interview Questions   What compelled you to answer my ad? What led you to this line of work? Tell me about your most favorite client to work with. Tell me about your current workload. Describe your most frustrating client right now. Connect with: Natalie Gingrich Natalie G.'s Productive Week Freebie Shelli Warren Shelli's Encore Career Women Facebook Group Episodes Mentioned: 257: Building Your Ideal Team with Amanda Bond, Russell Brunson, Stu McClaren and Shane Sams Virtual Assistant Resources: CAVA IVAA Virtual Assist USA This episode is sponsored by AWeber.  Thank you for supporting women entrepreneurs! Find out more and get an all access, 60 Day Free Trial at BizChix.com/Aweber! Want to work 1/1 with Natalie or join one of her masterminds? Click to Learn More.   This episode first appeared on BizChix.com/258.

The next two episodes are designed to help you scale your business and build an ideal team. Hear how four influencers have experienced the highs and lows of growing their business from hiring to employee development and training to letting people go. Previous episodes mentioned are #243 and #255. Please take a moment and share this episode with a friend! Key Takeaways: [1:00] AWeber email marketing tip [3:30] Stu McLaren chats about fear of responsibility and provides three amazing tips to hiring [10:25] Amanda Bond talks about duplicating herself and creating internal trainings [23:00] Shane Sams reveals his tips on letting team members go [27:00] Natalie's final thoughts   Episodes Mentioned: 243: How to Succeed at Online Business with Jocelyn Sams 255: Sales and Marketing Training at Funnel Hacking Live 2017 Want to work 1/1 with Natalie or join one of her masterminds? Click to Learn More.   This content first appeared at BizChix.com/257. Click to get the full show notes and links.

Natalie is back from the Funnel Hacking Live Conference (#FHL2017)  hosted by ClickFunnels and is sharing the top sales and marketing takeaways! She covers her pre-conference prep and the intentions she set ahead of the conference. Her takeaways include teachings from ClickFunnels CEO Russell Brunson, Stu McClaren and closing keynote speaker Tony Robbins! This episode is sponsored by AWeber.  Thank you for supporting women entrepreneurs! Find out more and get an all access, 60 Day Free Trial at BizChix.com/Aweber!       Funnel Hacking Live 2017 Conference in Dallas, TX Connect with other Female Entrepreneurs   Tony Robbins at #FHL2017 Mentioned in this Episode: ClickFunnels Flipped Lifestyle Podcast (Shane and Jocelyn Sams) 8 Minute Millionnaire (Justin and Tara Williams) The Energy Healer Podcast (Tara Williams) Blue Ocean Strategy Book Tony Robbins: Blue Ocean Strategy Episode HBR: Blue Ocean Strategy Episode Opportunity Switching and Opportunity Stacking (Russell Brunson) Interested in coaching with Natalie or joining one of her masterminds? Click to Learn More.

Stu is an online entrepreneur living 45 minutes south of Toronto. He's built companies, sold companies and now advises companies. Stu love's the freedom and opportunity that comes with being an entrepreneur, and believes that as entrepreneurs can leave the most significant impact on the world because of our ability to make money and then channel it to meaningful causes and projects. Check out TRIBE and kick your recurring revenue and membership site income into high gear!

The post Episode #76 – Rework Vs. Remote appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales.... An interesting look on how to build a hundred million dollar company. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late-night “Marketing in Your Car”. Hey, you guys, it is now 1:30 in the morning. I have almost officially been awake for twenty-four hours straight. I woke up yesterday [laughs] or today or whenever it was, at 4:30 in the morning. I came in early and spend three or four hours busting stuff out before everyone showed up. We worked all day, and we pulled mostly an all-nighter. I just started fading about twenty minutes ago. I just dropped Todd off at the hotel, and now I am driving back home to go get some sleep. But as tired as I am right now, I don't think I've ever been this fired up about a project ever in my life. We've created and we've sold a lot of stuff that I'm passionate about – a lot of things that I think are awesome and life-changing and all of those kinds of things, but this is the first time that...Today, I literally spent twelve to fourteen hours just building out funnels and click funnels, and I can't tell you – I can literally do now what used to take me a programmer, a designer, and a webmaster – what it took three people to do, I can do now myself, and in a fraction of the time. I built an entire automated webinar in under an hour, and that's because I was writing all of the copy. I was doing everything – the entire thing, from scratch, and got the whole thing done. We built out membership sites. We built out funnels, and I can't even tell you how excited I am. I think it's going to change our industry. I think it's going to change my personal life. I told everybody, “Even if we never sold this, what we've created would still be worth it, because this will change our business forever.” It just gets me excited and fired up about how we're creating something that is that big. I just started thinking about how in most businesses, I think a lot of the time we sell ourselves short. We think about how to make money or what's cool. How do we solve this problem for people? We create these little things. I've been doing this for a decade now, and this is the first time I feel like we've approached something and gone after something that's bigger than any of us, and the fact that we've executed it as well as we have is just...I can't even tell you how excited I am. It's so cool. So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about is tonight while we were working and talking through things, we kept referencing a guy named Jason Fried. He's a guy who I had a chance to actually interview a little while ago, maybe about two or three years ago now. He owns a company called 37 Signals. You guys have probably heard of him before. Actually they just changed their company name to Base Camp. They're the creators of Base Camp. A while ago they wrote this book called, “REWORK”. In fact, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people in the world, was the one that recommended REWORK to me. We were at Pirate's Cove at my Mastermind meeting, and we were talking about books and stuff, and he said, “Hey, you should read this book, ‘REWORK',” so I went and bought it. It's a really quick read. You could probably read the whole thing in maybe an hour and a half to two hours. It's basically that Jason and the partners, when they were creating Base Camp, wrote a book about their experience with the business, and it was the exact opposite of what everybody else was doing. I remember that I read the entire book, and I remember there were simple,

An interesting look on how to build a hundred million dollar company. ---Transcript--- Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late-night “Marketing in Your Car”. Hey, you guys, it is now 1:30 in the morning. I have almost officially been awake for twenty-four hours straight. I woke up yesterday [laughs] or today or whenever it was, at 4:30 in the morning. I came in early and spend three or four hours busting stuff out before everyone showed up. We worked all day, and we pulled mostly an all-nighter. I just started fading about twenty minutes ago. I just dropped Todd off at the hotel, and now I am driving back home to go get some sleep. But as tired as I am right now, I don't think I've ever been this fired up about a project ever in my life. We've created and we've sold a lot of stuff that I'm passionate about – a lot of things that I think are awesome and life-changing and all of those kinds of things, but this is the first time that…Today, I literally spent twelve to fourteen hours just building out funnels and click funnels, and I can't tell you – I can literally do now what used to take me a programmer, a designer, and a webmaster – what it took three people to do, I can do now myself, and in a fraction of the time. I built an entire automated webinar in under an hour, and that's because I was writing all of the copy. I was doing everything – the entire thing, from scratch, and got the whole thing done. We built out membership sites. We built out funnels, and I can't even tell you how excited I am. I think it's going to change our industry. I think it's going to change my personal life. I told everybody, “Even if we never sold this, what we've created would still be worth it, because this will change our business forever.” It just gets me excited and fired up about how we're creating something that is that big. I just started thinking about how in most businesses, I think a lot of the time we sell ourselves short. We think about how to make money or what's cool. How do we solve this problem for people? We create these little things. I've been doing this for a decade now, and this is the first time I feel like we've approached something and gone after something that's bigger than any of us, and the fact that we've executed it as well as we have is just…I can't even tell you how excited I am. It's so cool. So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about is tonight while we were working and talking through things, we kept referencing a guy named Jason Fried. He's a guy who I had a chance to actually interview a little while ago, maybe about two or three years ago now. He owns a company called 37 Signals. You guys have probably heard of him before. Actually they just changed their company name to Base Camp. They're the creators of Base Camp. A while ago they wrote this book called, “REWORK”. In fact, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people in the world, was the one that recommended REWORK to me. We were at Pirate's Cove at my Mastermind meeting, and we were talking about books and stuff, and he said, “Hey, you should read this book, ‘REWORK',” so I went and bought it. It's a really quick read. You could probably read the whole thing in maybe an hour and a half to two hours. It's basically that Jason and the partners, when they were creating Base Camp, wrote a book about their experience with the business, and it was the exact opposite of what everybody else was doing. I remember that I read the entire book, and I remember there were simple, fast chapters – just one concept at a time, and I remember going through it and thinking that every single mistake that I had made in my business, they addressed in REWORK [laughs] as a thing, and I was like, “Man, I wish we would have done this or that,” and so forth. I've probably read it three or four times over the last five or six years, and like I said, I had a chance to interview Jason on the book. He was a cool guy. I remember the same month, I tried to interview him and also Gary Vaynerchuk. Jason was like, “Yeah, man, I'll do it,” and jumped on the phone. Super low maintenance, it was awesome. Didn't ask for anything, just giving back to the community, and Gary Vaynerchuk [laughs] said that he'd let me interview him if I bought five hundred copies of his book, which was about eight or ten grand or whatever that was. It was like, “Huh,” and anyway, just a really cool guy. But some of the lessons – one of the things they talked about was when they created Base Camp. They were a website design company, and they were trying to do project management software, and there was no good project management software, so they went and they created their own. They created it the way they wanted it. They scratched through an itch, and created this thing that as it turned out, everybody wanted it, and, “Boom.” This launched their whole company. I think they have over a million users right now. I think that's what they said. A million users, paying up to ninety-seven bucks a month, which is crazy. We were talking about Click Funnels. We built Click Funnels to scratch our own itch, to try to speed up our process of launching offers and rolling out funnels. We created it for us, and now I have the privilege of sharing it with others. That's the way I really look at it. It's interesting, but anyway, there're so many good lessons in that book, I can't recommend it enough, you guys. I think the fact that we'd read it – everyone on our team had read it multiple times. I think it's really influenced a lot of our thoughts and our decisions in how we're growing our company. We were looking at, as we started growing Click Funnels, the company's called Etison, E-T-I-S-O-N, we were talking about how to grow it, and we saw that there were two different routes. One route we saw was with a company called, “iContact”, where the owner, Ryan, went and took on funding and did the whole VC thing and brought in money and had millions and millions of dollars of investor money. He grew it that way and they weren't really profitable until he sold out. And man, he sold out. I think they sold for about seventy or eighty million dollars. I've never built a company that way. I don't understand that way, but that's the way he did it, and so for a while, we were looking at it, and we were like, “Wow. Let's build a company like that.” But then you look at the other side, and you look at 37 Signals. You look at the way Jason has built it, and all of the lessons they teach in REWORK about only hiring when it's painful, keeping it small, and that your goal isn't to try to grow. Your goal can be just to serve people and all of these lessons that are counter to what the rest of the world teaches, and I think we made a decision as a team that we wanted to do it this way – the way that the guys in 37 Signals did. That's the way that fits into our lifestyle and what we want to do. Like I say, I can't recommend that book enough. They also came out with another book recently, called “REMOTE”, and what's interesting about REMOTE is, if you guys watch “TED Talks” – I think it's at Ted.com – you search for Jason Fried. He gave a TED Talk about this as well, what the book's all about. He talked about [laughs] – and this week's been a perfect example of it. He talked about how when you need to get work done, where do you go? Nobody says, “I go to the office to get work done.” They say, “Well, I come in earlier. I stay late,” or, “I do it during my lunch hour.” It's interesting how people at work don't get work done [laughs], right? They're talking. They're doing all of this kind of stuff, and he talked about the fact that if you send all of your employees home and have people work remotely, how much more stuff you can get done, because at work, people don't work. They're talking. They're hanging out. All of this other stuff's happening. I remember in the TED Talk, he's talking about, “Would you rather have an employee…?” like everyone's employees are at the office so that they can be focused, but what if your employee was at home watching TV all day while they were working? If they were watching TV, yes, they'd be distracted a little bit, but that's a lot less distracting than the boss coming in, or the secretary, or the water cooler talk, or every single person passing through their desk area that wants to communicate and chat. It was interesting when he put it into that perspective, and the book, REMOTE, is all about that – having everybody start working remotely. As we're building this new company and thinking a lot about these types of things, and the direction we want to move with things, and how to structure things, and how to grow, I really think that the guys that we're looking at and I think that the guys that you should be looking at, as well, is 37 Signals, or Base Camp is their new company name. So definitely get REWORK, get REMOTE. It could be your reading for this weekend. Those books are worth their weight in gold, I can tell you that much for sure. Anyway, you guys, I am home. It's now 1:47 in the morning. I'm going to get some sleep. I'm taking my three-year-old son to the zoo tomorrow morning, which is super exciting. I'm fired up. That's the game plan. Look out you guys. Click Funnel's coming soon. We're going to open our second wave of beta next week, and we're going to roll that for about a month, because we're going on vacation [laughs]. My family and Todd's family, and so when we get back from vacation is when we're going to do the big roll out, but it's all coming soon. All of the pieces are falling together. All right, guys, I am in my garage, so I'm going to check out, and I will talk to you soon.

An interesting look on how to build a hundred million dollar company. ---Transcript--- Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late-night “Marketing in Your Car”. Hey, you guys, it is now 1:30 in the morning. I have almost officially been awake for twenty-four hours straight. I woke up yesterday [laughs] or today or whenever it was, at 4:30 in the morning. I came in early and spend three or four hours busting stuff out before everyone showed up. We worked all day, and we pulled mostly an all-nighter. I just started fading about twenty minutes ago. I just dropped Todd off at the hotel, and now I am driving back home to go get some sleep. But as tired as I am right now, I don’t think I’ve ever been this fired up about a project ever in my life. We’ve created and we’ve sold a lot of stuff that I’m passionate about – a lot of things that I think are awesome and life-changing and all of those kinds of things, but this is the first time that…Today, I literally spent twelve to fourteen hours just building out funnels and click funnels, and I can’t tell you – I can literally do now what used to take me a programmer, a designer, and a webmaster – what it took three people to do, I can do now myself, and in a fraction of the time. I built an entire automated webinar in under an hour, and that’s because I was writing all of the copy. I was doing everything – the entire thing, from scratch, and got the whole thing done. We built out membership sites. We built out funnels, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am. I think it’s going to change our industry. I think it’s going to change my personal life. I told everybody, “Even if we never sold this, what we’ve created would still be worth it, because this will change our business forever.” It just gets me excited and fired up about how we’re creating something that is that big. I just started thinking about how in most businesses, I think a lot of the time we sell ourselves short. We think about how to make money or what’s cool. How do we solve this problem for people? We create these little things. I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and this is the first time I feel like we’ve approached something and gone after something that’s bigger than any of us, and the fact that we’ve executed it as well as we have is just…I can’t even tell you how excited I am. It’s so cool. So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about is tonight while we were working and talking through things, we kept referencing a guy named Jason Fried. He’s a guy who I had a chance to actually interview a little while ago, maybe about two or three years ago now. He owns a company called 37 Signals. You guys have probably heard of him before. Actually they just changed their company name to Base Camp. They’re the creators of Base Camp. A while ago they wrote this book called, “REWORK”. In fact, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people in the world, was the one that recommended REWORK to me. We were at Pirate’s Cove at my Mastermind meeting, and we were talking about books and stuff, and he said, “Hey, you should read this book, ‘REWORK’,” so I went and bought it. It’s a really quick read. You could probably read the whole thing in maybe an hour and a half to two hours. It’s basically that Jason and the partners, when they were creating Base Camp, wrote a book about their experience with the business, and it was the exact opposite of what everybody else was doing. I remember that I read the entire book, and I remember there were simple, fast chapters – just one concept at a time, and I remember going through it and thinking that every single mistake that I had made in my business, they addressed in REWORK [laughs] as a thing, and I was like, “Man, I wish we would have done this or that,” and so forth. I’ve probably read it three or four times over the last five or six years, and like I said, I had a chance to interview Jason on the book. He was a cool guy. I remember the same month, I tried to interview him and also Gary Vaynerchuk. Jason was like, “Yeah, man, I’ll do it,” and jumped on the phone. Super low maintenance, it was awesome. Didn’t ask for anything, just giving back to the community, and Gary Vaynerchuk [laughs] said that he’d let me interview him if I bought five hundred copies of his book, which was about eight or ten grand or whatever that was. It was like, “Huh,” and anyway, just a really cool guy. But some of the lessons – one of the things they talked about was when they created Base Camp. They were a website design company, and they were trying to do project management software, and there was no good project management software, so they went and they created their own. They created it the way they wanted it. They scratched through an itch, and created this thing that as it turned out, everybody wanted it, and, “Boom.” This launched their whole company. I think they have over a million users right now. I think that’s what they said. A million users, paying up to ninety-seven bucks a month, which is crazy. We were talking about Click Funnels. We built Click Funnels to scratch our own itch, to try to speed up our process of launching offers and rolling out funnels. We created it for us, and now I have the privilege of sharing it with others. That’s the way I really look at it. It’s interesting, but anyway, there’re so many good lessons in that book, I can’t recommend it enough, you guys. I think the fact that we’d read it – everyone on our team had read it multiple times. I think it’s really influenced a lot of our thoughts and our decisions in how we’re growing our company. We were looking at, as we started growing Click Funnels, the company’s called Etison, E-T-I-S-O-N, we were talking about how to grow it, and we saw that there were two different routes. One route we saw was with a company called, “iContact”, where the owner, Ryan, went and took on funding and did the whole VC thing and brought in money and had millions and millions of dollars of investor money. He grew it that way and they weren’t really profitable until he sold out. And man, he sold out. I think they sold for about seventy or eighty million dollars. I’ve never built a company that way. I don’t understand that way, but that’s the way he did it, and so for a while, we were looking at it, and we were like, “Wow. Let’s build a company like that.” But then you look at the other side, and you look at 37 Signals. You look at the way Jason has built it, and all of the lessons they teach in REWORK about only hiring when it’s painful, keeping it small, and that your goal isn’t to try to grow. Your goal can be just to serve people and all of these lessons that are counter to what the rest of the world teaches, and I think we made a decision as a team that we wanted to do it this way – the way that the guys in 37 Signals did. That’s the way that fits into our lifestyle and what we want to do. Like I say, I can’t recommend that book enough. They also came out with another book recently, called “REMOTE”, and what’s interesting about REMOTE is, if you guys watch “TED Talks” – I think it’s at Ted.com – you search for Jason Fried. He gave a TED Talk about this as well, what the book’s all about. He talked about [laughs] – and this week’s been a perfect example of it. He talked about how when you need to get work done, where do you go? Nobody says, “I go to the office to get work done.” They say, “Well, I come in earlier. I stay late,” or, “I do it during my lunch hour.” It’s interesting how people at work don’t get work done [laughs], right? They’re talking. They’re doing all of this kind of stuff, and he talked about the fact that if you send all of your employees home and have people work remotely, how much more stuff you can get done, because at work, people don’t work. They’re talking. They’re hanging out. All of this other stuff’s happening. I remember in the TED Talk, he’s talking about, “Would you rather have an employee…?” like everyone’s employees are at the office so that they can be focused, but what if your employee was at home watching TV all day while they were working? If they were watching TV, yes, they’d be distracted a little bit, but that’s a lot less distracting than the boss coming in, or the secretary, or the water cooler talk, or every single person passing through their desk area that wants to communicate and chat. It was interesting when he put it into that perspective, and the book, REMOTE, is all about that – having everybody start working remotely. As we’re building this new company and thinking a lot about these types of things, and the direction we want to move with things, and how to structure things, and how to grow, I really think that the guys that we’re looking at and I think that the guys that you should be looking at, as well, is 37 Signals, or Base Camp is their new company name. So definitely get REWORK, get REMOTE. It could be your reading for this weekend. Those books are worth their weight in gold, I can tell you that much for sure. Anyway, you guys, I am home. It’s now 1:47 in the morning. I’m going to get some sleep. I’m taking my three-year-old son to the zoo tomorrow morning, which is super exciting. I’m fired up. That’s the game plan. Look out you guys. Click Funnel’s coming soon. We’re going to open our second wave of beta next week, and we’re going to roll that for about a month, because we’re going on vacation [laughs]. My family and Todd’s family, and so when we get back from vacation is when we’re going to do the big roll out, but it’s all coming soon. All of the pieces are falling together. All right, guys, I am in my garage, so I’m going to check out, and I will talk to you soon.

The post Episode #45 – Lessons In Starting Over… appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales.... After our latest startup, I realized that almost everything people are teaching online about startups online are DEAD wrong. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing in Your Car. My name is Russell Brunson, and I am excited to be here with you today. Hey everyone. I am actually taking my wife's car on a 25 minute drive to go get some stuff fixed. I have nothing else to do so you guys get to be entertained. I hope that's alright. I am excited for this podcast. I have been thinking a lot. I have known for a little while, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people on Earth, called me out yesterday, and said, “Dude, when are you going to do another podcast?” I just wanted to do this one. This one may be a little longer since I have a little more of a drive. I just wanted to talk to everybody at a different level than normal. Normally I am trying to share different tips and tricks and techniques to take whatever you are doing and make it a little better and make you start thinking different ways. I wanted to talk about what has been happening with some of my businesses over the last little bit. It is interesting. There are so many people that are teaching internet marketing. There's very few people that I really trust anymore. The biggest reason is because, and I outgrew myself in this same category, a lot of times we assume that whatever worked for us, is what is going to work for everyone. I've built my internet marketing business. We have launched product after product and I know a good formula that works. I know that market really well. Over the last year or so, we have been putting out all these different products and different niches. Every time it surprises me how much new stuff I have to learn to make each of those businesses actually work. It is frustrating for me because I know all this stuff. I should be able to make it work right away. It always takes time. It takes more time than I ever think. I've definitely changed the way that I think about business, and the way I teach business because of that. I understand that it's not all cookie cutter. It's not 100%. There's a lot  you have to do, to figure out different markets. We are in the couponing niche. We have been doing well with it. Recently I brought on some of our friends. Initially they were students. They become really good friends. You guys probably heard of them if you have been following me for any amount of me, Xan and Jen Spencer. We have this couponing site, and I didn't have time to focus on it. I love the concept and the idea behind it. They just sold their hair bow site and made a ton of money selling it. They are looking for their next project. We brought them in to come work with us on this one. It has been  interesting watching what they have been doing and how they are getting into the market and understanding what it is, and really trying to figure out that path and what we can do to make it successful. Holy crap. Sorry guys. You are getting this live. I am at an intersection, and the light is red and I am stuck in the middle. Holy cow. That was embarrassing. Let me pause this for one second. That disaster was averted. I was at a green light, and I was turning left and I was half way in the intersection turning left and all of a sudden all the cars stopped. I looked up and we were all stopped turning left. The street we were turning left onto was completely backed up probably about a mile and a half. Then, the light turned red and I was stuck in the middle of the intersection with two cars in front of me in the middle...

After our latest startup, I realized that almost everything people are teaching online about startups online are DEAD wrong. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing in Your Car. My name is Russell Brunson, and I am excited to be here with you today. Hey everyone. I am actually taking my wife's car on a 25 minute drive to go get some stuff fixed. I have nothing else to do so you guys get to be entertained. I hope that's alright. I am excited for this podcast. I have been thinking a lot. I have known for a little while, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people on Earth, called me out yesterday, and said, “Dude, when are you going to do another podcast?” I just wanted to do this one. This one may be a little longer since I have a little more of a drive. I just wanted to talk to everybody at a different level than normal. Normally I am trying to share different tips and tricks and techniques to take whatever you are doing and make it a little better and make you start thinking different ways. I wanted to talk about what has been happening with some of my businesses over the last little bit. It is interesting. There are so many people that are teaching internet marketing. There's very few people that I really trust anymore. The biggest reason is because, and I outgrew myself in this same category, a lot of times we assume that whatever worked for us, is what is going to work for everyone. I've built my internet marketing business. We have launched product after product and I know a good formula that works. I know that market really well. Over the last year or so, we have been putting out all these different products and different niches. Every time it surprises me how much new stuff I have to learn to make each of those businesses actually work. It is frustrating for me because I know all this stuff. I should be able to make it work right away. It always takes time. It takes more time than I ever think. I've definitely changed the way that I think about business, and the way I teach business because of that. I understand that it's not all cookie cutter. It's not 100%. There's a lot  you have to do, to figure out different markets. We are in the couponing niche. We have been doing well with it. Recently I brought on some of our friends. Initially they were students. They become really good friends. You guys probably heard of them if you have been following me for any amount of me, Xan and Jen Spencer. We have this couponing site, and I didn't have time to focus on it. I love the concept and the idea behind it. They just sold their hair bow site and made a ton of money selling it. They are looking for their next project. We brought them in to come work with us on this one. It has been  interesting watching what they have been doing and how they are getting into the market and understanding what it is, and really trying to figure out that path and what we can do to make it successful. Holy crap. Sorry guys. You are getting this live. I am at an intersection, and the light is red and I am stuck in the middle. Holy cow. That was embarrassing. Let me pause this for one second. That disaster was averted. I was at a green light, and I was turning left and I was half way in the intersection turning left and all of a sudden all the cars stopped. I looked up and we were all stopped turning left. The street we were turning left onto was completely backed up probably about a mile and a half. Then, the light turned red and I was stuck in the middle of the intersection with two cars in front of me in the middle of the intersection and a car behind me in the middle of the intersection. I am back, and I am alive. Things are good. I was talking about how different it is. Same with our supplement. We have been doing really well with our supplement. Almost a year now. It is doing well. It is exciting. It inspires me just how we put out a little business like that, and by traffic and it works. It just keeps working and working. Because of that we decided to put a lot more energy and effort into it. We actually spent time to write a really good sales video. We are going back now and diving back into that business, which is a whole different market. It's interesting to me to start looking at. Obviously I could talk a lot about the differences in the market. That's not the point. The point is that there are differences. Used to be back in the day you could find a niche, put up a product, drive some traffic and make some money. I think those days are a lot different now. You have to understand there is a culture. There's stuff that is happening, and these markets. It's important to find those things. What I want to talk about today is more like the path that I am seeing a lot of commonalities among all the niches that we're in, and a lot of what I am going to be shifting dotcomsecrets over to in the new year. I wanted to throw some of this out to get you guys thinking and you can get some ideas for your business as well. We used to always think that we lead with a product, create a good product, drive some traffic and that's how you lead. I don't think that's the smartest way to lead anymore. I look at that with our weight loss offer. That is what we did. The problem was that we didn't know the market well enough. We created what we thought was the best offer possible. We launched it and it didn't do well. We are going back and doing the stuff we should have done first to really understand the market. I think we will do well this time around. We could have saved almost a year worth of time had we gone this direction the first time. If I, and any business I am in, or getting in like dotcomsecrets, like the relaunch for the entire brand and company and really starting from the beginning where the goal is how much value can you provide. I think that the smartest way to begin in any niche, this is even ecommerce. I am not just talking infoproducts, but anything, is start with value can you give people. The simplest way to do that is blogging. Set up a blog and start sharing really cool stuff. That's the first step. After your blog is set up I think you should start up a fan page. I have been fighting social media forever, but one of the other episodes you saw, you see I am starting to see the value of it. You can set up ads for five or ten dollars a day. It will add people to your page. Just set that up and let it run and get people adding to your fan page and watch this community grow from two people to 10 to 50 to 100 to 500 to1,000. Consistently be doing that. When you are blogging, after you blog, the biggest thing you have to do is how do I promote this blog post now? There's a lot of things you can do to promote it, but the best I think is Facebook. As soon as you make a post, you go to your fan page and boost that post and push it out there. You spend maybe five or ten dollars doing that. The next day you make another blog post. You go to Facebook and post it and boost it. Just following that pattern. At first it will be super slow and aggravating and you probably won't get a lot of traction from it. You will have the ads on there, and people are being added and just consistent. Months from now, three months from now, six months from now you are going to have five, six, ten, fifteen thousand people and it will start growing very quickly from there. It is all about putting this value out first. Then, you start seeing what people are responding to. A little while ago I was watching a video that Jeff Walker put out there. I don't typically watch Jeff's stuff. I like him as a person, but I not particularly interested in product launches. The last thing I want to do is a product launch. I don't look at that anymore. I was watching one of his videos, and one thing he said that really struck out to me, he was talking about how he said that the biggest thing for him is when he first got the publishing thing. He said, “I recommend all you guys just go publish something.” Put stuff out there. It wasn't until I put stuff out there that I saw what people responded to. What things do people like? What things do they share? What things do they talk about? What things do they not care about? What things cause no emotional response what so ever? For example, we know that on our couponing site the last two weeks, we have been posting the model in that market is different. It is how many offers can you get in front of people. We are posting tons over and over, 20, 30 offers a day. Supposed to put those out there. Some of those get nothing. Other ones get some shares, some get tons of shares. This week had something interesting where Jessica posted on her blog this picture of these homemade dryer sheets that she makes. Unfortunately we didn't put it on our Facebook page. We put it on our blog. Somebody came to our blog and saw it. The took the picture, they posted on their Facebook page and luckily they linked back to her site saying, “Check out this picture I found on livingonacoupon.com.” They posted it out there. Within four days that image had been shared 350,000 times. Not liked, shared. 350,000 times. We found out about it from one of her friends. She said, “Look at this sharing your picture.” She saw it, and we missed it. We went back and over that two day period of time, the 350,000 shares, we had 50,000 people that came to our blog per day. Our revenue was over $400 each day, which is awesome. We found out that was what something responded to. They wanted homemade stuff, like how to make homemade dryer sheets. I never would have launched a course on how to make homemade dryer sheets. Now we know that people are interested in that market and that type of a thing. Instantly now we know. That is the thing Jeff was talking about. You need to start publishing something. Until you do, you have no idea what people are going to respond to. If you want to start leading with your sales message first then you spend so much time and energy before you know what people actually want, what they are listening to. I would start with that. Making cool blog posts, put it on Facebook page, boost them. Rinse and repeat over and over again. Have something in place where your fan base is growing, growing through paid ads. You are talking five bucks a day, ten bucks a day maybe to implement that strategy. That's the first step. You are putting this stuff out there. Again, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your blog posts. For simplicity sake that is where I would start at. The second thing I would do, and it makes me laugh. This is my belief now. Six years ago podcasts were brought to my attention, maybe even seven or eight years ago, and I thought they were the dorkiest, nerdiest things in the world and they would never catch on, kind of like RSS feeds, and I was right. Podcasts I was wrong. They are the thing right now. I keep hearing it. It's funny because I used to be a faster adapter of things. Now I am more stubborn. I am an old man now. I am a little more stubborn in adapting things. I didn't want to adapt this for a long time. Recently, one of my friends had a podcast that he wanted me to listen to. I downloaded the podcast app, and I downloaded the podcast and started listening to it, and I got hooked. I suddenly realized that podcasts are the radio of the future. You can subscribe to the people's stuff that you want, and you have a chance to listen to it. One of my friends, Stu, I mentioned him earlier. He was telling me one of his clients who works for him said that each podcast listener is worth more to them than an email subscriber, which is crazy to me, but instead of fighting that, let's go with it, right? Who knows how long email is going to keep working efficiently. Let's have distribution channels…as many as we can. I started thinking more about that. This is a distribution channel, these podcasts. I remember about two years ago I had a guy that wanted to interview me for a radio show. We went down to the radio station, and it was the coolest thing in the world. I felt like Frasier Crane. I had a big microphone. He had a producer. I asked the producer if I could call her Roz. She said no. I felt like Frasier Crane. After I did that, I wanted my own radio show. That was my entire goal for the next 6 months was my own radio show. If I do a radio show locally and it goes good then we could try to pitch it and get syndicated nationally. I had this whole strategy. You got a big, famous radio show. You can sell ads, you can make money, you can push your products, books and make a fortune. For years I kept thinking about that and wanting to do it. After I got the podcast thing, I was like, “This is the radio of the future.” Radio will be dead soon if it's not already. I don't listen to radio. I hook up my podcasts that I want, and I am driving and I listen to them. I think again, that's the direction that we are all going. I have been studying a lot. I am going to keep doing the Marketing in Your Car Podcast because I love it, and it's fun. It is low maintenance for me to fulfill on. I am going to keep doing that. I am also going to launch another podcast underneath the dotcomsecrets brand. It is more of an actual radio show where I have people that I interview and I am sharing things. I have to do my first interview for my first one this coming Tuesday. Mark Joiner is my first mentor and Mark is going to come on and be my first guest so I am kind of excited for that. Because I have been setting podcasts to what people are doing and it's really intriguing. I was listening to the guy who runs the entrepreneur on fire podcast. He basically interviews an entrepreneur every single day, seven days a week. He was sharing some of his stats, and what I didn't get it until he went to this. He said, “I ran the show for free for a long time and got a big following.” Now he gets 10 or 20 or 30 thousand downloads each episode. You basically get paid on CPM so every download, every 1,000 downloads, you make whatever. Ten bucks or thirty bucks. Showing the math, each of my episodes, I have three sponsors. This guy, this guy and this guy. He is paying this. He is paying this. That means, every single day that I do my podcast, because I know I'll get 20,000 downloads because people are subscribed to it and they are waiting for it, because of that, every single day just to do my podcast, I make $1,200 in advertising revenue, $1,200 just by the fact that he is podcasting. I was doing the math, and $1,200 a day times 30 days, I can't do right now in my head, but $1,000 a day times 30 days is 30 grand a month, 30 grand a month, and all he is doing is interviewing awesome people. He launched this less than a year ago. Okay? Start thinking the blog obviously is a great platform. The blog is a great platform to get people who are on Facebook and reading and those types of things, but there is also this huge, untapped market of podcasting. You get these people to download and you are sharing content and ideas. You are building a following and you have your own radio show. People actually pay to sponsor the radio show when you get a following. You start just like we talked about before. You start out by giving content, putting stuff out there and seeing what things people attach to. What concepts, what ideas you share, what things get other people interested. Only way to know that is to publish stuff. Put it out there like Jeff Walker was saying, seeing what gets people to respond. That's the first step, and trying to build your audience like that. I think any market I get in the future, that will be my first two steps before we ever create an offer and see if we can get enough of an audience based on that, then we can go and start getting sponsors for our podcasts and promote products as an affiliate on our blog and get sponsors for our blog. You know over the last three, six, nine months, what people have been responding to, what things they are interested in, what things get shared, what things get passed around. You find out what doesn't. As soon as you know that, now you can go back and create the right offer. The offer than people actually want. The thing they want to give you money for. I think that's the right way to make a business. That's the right way to start a business. Again, because every market is different, you won't know what that is until you are in there. You see the responses. The flip is people will love you because you are giving your best stuff every single day and when you come back and decide to monetize it, there's different relationship level there. They are going to trust you over someone else because they have been listening to, they have been reading you or seeing you on Facebook. You have established yourself as someone who is credible and cares and someone who is trying to provide value in the world. That is what I have for you guys today. I hope that gives you some things to think about. Those are things that I have been thinking about a lot. We are relaunching dotcomsecrets. The podcast, we are also launching, a new blog. A new blog you guys will be shocked. My goal is every blog post is for every post to be more valuable than a $97 product. We are going to change some stuff. It will be good. That is our game plan. I am at the car dealership. I am getting my wife's car fixed. I have to jump off. I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you like it, please come and comment, but also please share it. If you like it, go on your Facebook account and check out Russell's latest podcast. It was awesome. I would appreciate getting it in the hands of more people. That's about all I ask for. Appreciate you guys. Thanks everyone who is listening and paying attention. Good luck with your business and we will talk to you guys all soon.

After our latest startup, I realized that almost everything people are teaching online about startups online are DEAD wrong. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing in Your Car. My name is Russell Brunson, and I am excited to be here with you today. Hey everyone. I am actually taking my wife’s car on a 25 minute drive to go get some stuff fixed. I have nothing else to do so you guys get to be entertained. I hope that’s alright. I am excited for this podcast. I have been thinking a lot. I have known for a little while, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people on Earth, called me out yesterday, and said, “Dude, when are you going to do another podcast?” I just wanted to do this one. This one may be a little longer since I have a little more of a drive. I just wanted to talk to everybody at a different level than normal. Normally I am trying to share different tips and tricks and techniques to take whatever you are doing and make it a little better and make you start thinking different ways. I wanted to talk about what has been happening with some of my businesses over the last little bit. It is interesting. There are so many people that are teaching internet marketing. There’s very few people that I really trust anymore. The biggest reason is because, and I outgrew myself in this same category, a lot of times we assume that whatever worked for us, is what is going to work for everyone. I’ve built my internet marketing business. We have launched product after product and I know a good formula that works. I know that market really well. Over the last year or so, we have been putting out all these different products and different niches. Every time it surprises me how much new stuff I have to learn to make each of those businesses actually work. It is frustrating for me because I know all this stuff. I should be able to make it work right away. It always takes time. It takes more time than I ever think. I’ve definitely changed the way that I think about business, and the way I teach business because of that. I understand that it’s not all cookie cutter. It’s not 100%. There’s a lot  you have to do, to figure out different markets. We are in the couponing niche. We have been doing well with it. Recently I brought on some of our friends. Initially they were students. They become really good friends. You guys probably heard of them if you have been following me for any amount of me, Xan and Jen Spencer. We have this couponing site, and I didn’t have time to focus on it. I love the concept and the idea behind it. They just sold their hair bow site and made a ton of money selling it. They are looking for their next project. We brought them in to come work with us on this one. It has been  interesting watching what they have been doing and how they are getting into the market and understanding what it is, and really trying to figure out that path and what we can do to make it successful. Holy crap. Sorry guys. You are getting this live. I am at an intersection, and the light is red and I am stuck in the middle. Holy cow. That was embarrassing. Let me pause this for one second. That disaster was averted. I was at a green light, and I was turning left and I was half way in the intersection turning left and all of a sudden all the cars stopped. I looked up and we were all stopped turning left. The street we were turning left onto was completely backed up probably about a mile and a half. Then, the light turned red and I was stuck in the middle of the intersection with two cars in front of me in the middle of the intersection and a car behind me in the middle of the intersection. I am back, and I am alive. Things are good. I was talking about how different it is. Same with our supplement. We have been doing really well with our supplement. Almost a year now. It is doing well. It is exciting. It inspires me just how we put out a little business like that, and by traffic and it works. It just keeps working and working. Because of that we decided to put a lot more energy and effort into it. We actually spent time to write a really good sales video. We are going back now and diving back into that business, which is a whole different market. It’s interesting to me to start looking at. Obviously I could talk a lot about the differences in the market. That’s not the point. The point is that there are differences. Used to be back in the day you could find a niche, put up a product, drive some traffic and make some money. I think those days are a lot different now. You have to understand there is a culture. There’s stuff that is happening, and these markets. It’s important to find those things. What I want to talk about today is more like the path that I am seeing a lot of commonalities among all the niches that we’re in, and a lot of what I am going to be shifting dotcomsecrets over to in the new year. I wanted to throw some of this out to get you guys thinking and you can get some ideas for your business as well. We used to always think that we lead with a product, create a good product, drive some traffic and that’s how you lead. I don’t think that’s the smartest way to lead anymore. I look at that with our weight loss offer. That is what we did. The problem was that we didn’t know the market well enough. We created what we thought was the best offer possible. We launched it and it didn’t do well. We are going back and doing the stuff we should have done first to really understand the market. I think we will do well this time around. We could have saved almost a year worth of time had we gone this direction the first time. If I, and any business I am in, or getting in like dotcomsecrets, like the relaunch for the entire brand and company and really starting from the beginning where the goal is how much value can you provide. I think that the smartest way to begin in any niche, this is even ecommerce. I am not just talking infoproducts, but anything, is start with value can you give people. The simplest way to do that is blogging. Set up a blog and start sharing really cool stuff. That’s the first step. After your blog is set up I think you should start up a fan page. I have been fighting social media forever, but one of the other episodes you saw, you see I am starting to see the value of it. You can set up ads for five or ten dollars a day. It will add people to your page. Just set that up and let it run and get people adding to your fan page and watch this community grow from two people to 10 to 50 to 100 to 500 to1,000. Consistently be doing that. When you are blogging, after you blog, the biggest thing you have to do is how do I promote this blog post now? There’s a lot of things you can do to promote it, but the best I think is Facebook. As soon as you make a post, you go to your fan page and boost that post and push it out there. You spend maybe five or ten dollars doing that. The next day you make another blog post. You go to Facebook and post it and boost it. Just following that pattern. At first it will be super slow and aggravating and you probably won’t get a lot of traction from it. You will have the ads on there, and people are being added and just consistent. Months from now, three months from now, six months from now you are going to have five, six, ten, fifteen thousand people and it will start growing very quickly from there. It is all about putting this value out first. Then, you start seeing what people are responding to. A little while ago I was watching a video that Jeff Walker put out there. I don’t typically watch Jeff’s stuff. I like him as a person, but I not particularly interested in product launches. The last thing I want to do is a product launch. I don’t look at that anymore. I was watching one of his videos, and one thing he said that really struck out to me, he was talking about how he said that the biggest thing for him is when he first got the publishing thing. He said, “I recommend all you guys just go publish something.” Put stuff out there. It wasn’t until I put stuff out there that I saw what people responded to. What things do people like? What things do they share? What things do they talk about? What things do they not care about? What things cause no emotional response what so ever? For example, we know that on our couponing site the last two weeks, we have been posting the model in that market is different. It is how many offers can you get in front of people. We are posting tons over and over, 20, 30 offers a day. Supposed to put those out there. Some of those get nothing. Other ones get some shares, some get tons of shares. This week had something interesting where Jessica posted on her blog this picture of these homemade dryer sheets that she makes. Unfortunately we didn’t put it on our Facebook page. We put it on our blog. Somebody came to our blog and saw it. The took the picture, they posted on their Facebook page and luckily they linked back to her site saying, “Check out this picture I found on livingonacoupon.com.” They posted it out there. Within four days that image had been shared 350,000 times. Not liked, shared. 350,000 times. We found out about it from one of her friends. She said, “Look at this sharing your picture.” She saw it, and we missed it. We went back and over that two day period of time, the 350,000 shares, we had 50,000 people that came to our blog per day. Our revenue was over $400 each day, which is awesome. We found out that was what something responded to. They wanted homemade stuff, like how to make homemade dryer sheets. I never would have launched a course on how to make homemade dryer sheets. Now we know that people are interested in that market and that type of a thing. Instantly now we know. That is the thing Jeff was talking about. You need to start publishing something. Until you do, you have no idea what people are going to respond to. If you want to start leading with your sales message first then you spend so much time and energy before you know what people actually want, what they are listening to. I would start with that. Making cool blog posts, put it on Facebook page, boost them. Rinse and repeat over and over again. Have something in place where your fan base is growing, growing through paid ads. You are talking five bucks a day, ten bucks a day maybe to implement that strategy. That’s the first step. You are putting this stuff out there. Again, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your blog posts. For simplicity sake that is where I would start at. The second thing I would do, and it makes me laugh. This is my belief now. Six years ago podcasts were brought to my attention, maybe even seven or eight years ago, and I thought they were the dorkiest, nerdiest things in the world and they would never catch on, kind of like RSS feeds, and I was right. Podcasts I was wrong. They are the thing right now. I keep hearing it. It’s funny because I used to be a faster adapter of things. Now I am more stubborn. I am an old man now. I am a little more stubborn in adapting things. I didn’t want to adapt this for a long time. Recently, one of my friends had a podcast that he wanted me to listen to. I downloaded the podcast app, and I downloaded the podcast and started listening to it, and I got hooked. I suddenly realized that podcasts are the radio of the future. You can subscribe to the people’s stuff that you want, and you have a chance to listen to it. One of my friends, Stu, I mentioned him earlier. He was telling me one of his clients who works for him said that each podcast listener is worth more to them than an email subscriber, which is crazy to me, but instead of fighting that, let’s go with it, right? Who knows how long email is going to keep working efficiently. Let’s have distribution channels…as many as we can. I started thinking more about that. This is a distribution channel, these podcasts. I remember about two years ago I had a guy that wanted to interview me for a radio show. We went down to the radio station, and it was the coolest thing in the world. I felt like Frasier Crane. I had a big microphone. He had a producer. I asked the producer if I could call her Roz. She said no. I felt like Frasier Crane. After I did that, I wanted my own radio show. That was my entire goal for the next 6 months was my own radio show. If I do a radio show locally and it goes good then we could try to pitch it and get syndicated nationally. I had this whole strategy. You got a big, famous radio show. You can sell ads, you can make money, you can push your products, books and make a fortune. For years I kept thinking about that and wanting to do it. After I got the podcast thing, I was like, “This is the radio of the future.” Radio will be dead soon if it’s not already. I don’t listen to radio. I hook up my podcasts that I want, and I am driving and I listen to them. I think again, that’s the direction that we are all going. I have been studying a lot. I am going to keep doing the Marketing in Your Car Podcast because I love it, and it’s fun. It is low maintenance for me to fulfill on. I am going to keep doing that. I am also going to launch another podcast underneath the dotcomsecrets brand. It is more of an actual radio show where I have people that I interview and I am sharing things. I have to do my first interview for my first one this coming Tuesday. Mark Joiner is my first mentor and Mark is going to come on and be my first guest so I am kind of excited for that. Because I have been setting podcasts to what people are doing and it’s really intriguing. I was listening to the guy who runs the entrepreneur on fire podcast. He basically interviews an entrepreneur every single day, seven days a week. He was sharing some of his stats, and what I didn’t get it until he went to this. He said, “I ran the show for free for a long time and got a big following.” Now he gets 10 or 20 or 30 thousand downloads each episode. You basically get paid on CPM so every download, every 1,000 downloads, you make whatever. Ten bucks or thirty bucks. Showing the math, each of my episodes, I have three sponsors. This guy, this guy and this guy. He is paying this. He is paying this. That means, every single day that I do my podcast, because I know I’ll get 20,000 downloads because people are subscribed to it and they are waiting for it, because of that, every single day just to do my podcast, I make $1,200 in advertising revenue, $1,200 just by the fact that he is podcasting. I was doing the math, and $1,200 a day times 30 days, I can’t do right now in my head, but $1,000 a day times 30 days is 30 grand a month, 30 grand a month, and all he is doing is interviewing awesome people. He launched this less than a year ago. Okay? Start thinking the blog obviously is a great platform. The blog is a great platform to get people who are on Facebook and reading and those types of things, but there is also this huge, untapped market of podcasting. You get these people to download and you are sharing content and ideas. You are building a following and you have your own radio show. People actually pay to sponsor the radio show when you get a following. You start just like we talked about before. You start out by giving content, putting stuff out there and seeing what things people attach to. What concepts, what ideas you share, what things get other people interested. Only way to know that is to publish stuff. Put it out there like Jeff Walker was saying, seeing what gets people to respond. That’s the first step, and trying to build your audience like that. I think any market I get in the future, that will be my first two steps before we ever create an offer and see if we can get enough of an audience based on that, then we can go and start getting sponsors for our podcasts and promote products as an affiliate on our blog and get sponsors for our blog. You know over the last three, six, nine months, what people have been responding to, what things they are interested in, what things get shared, what things get passed around. You find out what doesn’t. As soon as you know that, now you can go back and create the right offer. The offer than people actually want. The thing they want to give you money for. I think that’s the right way to make a business. That’s the right way to start a business. Again, because every market is different, you won’t know what that is until you are in there. You see the responses. The flip is people will love you because you are giving your best stuff every single day and when you come back and decide to monetize it, there’s different relationship level there. They are going to trust you over someone else because they have been listening to, they have been reading you or seeing you on Facebook. You have established yourself as someone who is credible and cares and someone who is trying to provide value in the world. That is what I have for you guys today. I hope that gives you some things to think about. Those are things that I have been thinking about a lot. We are relaunching dotcomsecrets. The podcast, we are also launching, a new blog. A new blog you guys will be shocked. My goal is every blog post is for every post to be more valuable than a $97 product. We are going to change some stuff. It will be good. That is our game plan. I am at the car dealership. I am getting my wife’s car fixed. I have to jump off. I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you like it, please come and comment, but also please share it. If you like it, go on your Facebook account and check out Russell’s latest podcast. It was awesome. I would appreciate getting it in the hands of more people. That’s about all I ask for. Appreciate you guys. Thanks everyone who is listening and paying attention. Good luck with your business and we will talk to you guys all soon.

The post Episode #35 – SAAS Smackdown P1 appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales.... What I learned when launching our first real SAAS program. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I'm actually not driving to the office today. I'm driving to a hotel to pick up our programmer. He is a stud. Some of you guys may know him. He is in town for the next couple of weeks working on some cool projects, so I am going to grab him from the hotel. I have kind of a little longer drive today, so I thought I would do a podcast and talk to you about what we are doing right now, because it's exciting. Just to get the wheels in your head turning if you are doing any software as a service products, SAAS (software as a service). This is kind of an interesting time in the internet world. When I first got online, the thing to create were these little .exe files, desktop-based. I remember Armen Morne things like E-cover Generator, Header Generator, Sales Letter Generator, all these different products. When I first got online, I saw all the things that Armen was doing, and I was like, “I want to do software too.” I did Zip Brander and Form Fortunes and all these other little software programs. Back then, the cool thing to do was create these little downloadable software programs to download and run on a computer. That's what we did. People would pay for it one time and we would end at that point. I remember the very first software as a service we ever had was called Digital Repo Man. It was this really cool product where basically if you had an ebook or some product that you were selling, you would use Digital Repo Man to lock it down. Then you could give it to your customers and when your customers wanted a refund you could turn their license key off so they couldn't give it to other people. It was a cool thing. For whatever reason, it didn't sell that well. I think it's one of those things where it's a prevention versus a cure. People don't really want to buy a prevention. They want to buy a cure. They wanted to buy something for after someone steals their book so they can go out there and beat up the customer that did it, but they're not willing to pay money to lock it down ahead of time. Anyway, it didn't do that well, but it was the first time I had sold software as a service, where people log into a members area, they pay you monthly. It was kind of cool. My favorite thing was that if I made an update to the software, it automatically made the update for everyone. Whereas with Zip Brander when I made an update I had to contact all my customers, give them something to download a new version. 90 percent of our support questions were because people hadn't downloaded the newest version. It was kind of a nightmare. Software as a service became really big for a while, and we started doing some things in it, but I never really paid a lot of attention to it. Then a little while later WordPress came out and we started building three or four different WordPress plugins and themes and stuff like that, because the WordPress is so big. I've got a friend who is probably listening to this podcast, Stu McClaren and he runs a site called WishlistMember where they sell membership plugins for WordPress. They're doing awesome. They're making an insane amount of money with it. I was talking to him back when we were in Kenya and he told me one of the biggest issues with it is that their support is kind of a nightmare. Everyone has different servers and different hosting and ...

What I learned when launching our first real SAAS program. ---Transcript--- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I'm actually not driving to the office today. I'm driving to a hotel to pick up our programmer. He is a stud. Some of you guys may know him. He is in town for the next couple of weeks working on some cool projects, so I am going to grab him from the hotel. I have kind of a little longer drive today, so I thought I would do a podcast and talk to you about what we are doing right now, because it's exciting. Just to get the wheels in your head turning if you are doing any software as a service products, SAAS (software as a service). This is kind of an interesting time in the internet world. When I first got online, the thing to create were these little .exe files, desktop-based. I remember Armen Morne things like E-cover Generator, Header Generator, Sales Letter Generator, all these different products. When I first got online, I saw all the things that Armen was doing, and I was like, “I want to do software too.” I did Zip Brander and Form Fortunes and all these other little software programs. Back then, the cool thing to do was create these little downloadable software programs to download and run on a computer. That's what we did. People would pay for it one time and we would end at that point. I remember the very first software as a service we ever had was called Digital Repo Man. It was this really cool product where basically if you had an ebook or some product that you were selling, you would use Digital Repo Man to lock it down. Then you could give it to your customers and when your customers wanted a refund you could turn their license key off so they couldn't give it to other people. It was a cool thing. For whatever reason, it didn't sell that well. I think it's one of those things where it's a prevention versus a cure. People don't really want to buy a prevention. They want to buy a cure. They wanted to buy something for after someone steals their book so they can go out there and beat up the customer that did it, but they're not willing to pay money to lock it down ahead of time. Anyway, it didn't do that well, but it was the first time I had sold software as a service, where people log into a members area, they pay you monthly. It was kind of cool. My favorite thing was that if I made an update to the software, it automatically made the update for everyone. Whereas with Zip Brander when I made an update I had to contact all my customers, give them something to download a new version. 90 percent of our support questions were because people hadn't downloaded the newest version. It was kind of a nightmare. Software as a service became really big for a while, and we started doing some things in it, but I never really paid a lot of attention to it. Then a little while later WordPress came out and we started building three or four different WordPress plugins and themes and stuff like that, because the WordPress is so big. I've got a friend who is probably listening to this podcast, Stu McClaren and he runs a site called WishlistMember where they sell membership plugins for WordPress. They're doing awesome. They're making an insane amount of money with it. I was talking to him back when we were in Kenya and he told me one of the biggest issues with it is that their support is kind of a nightmare. Everyone has different servers and different hosting and different version of WordPress, all these different things that can happen with WordPress. Then if you make an update, everyone with your software has to go download the update. In January this year, we kind of mapped out this idea for a really cool plugin, and that's what we were going to do. Then we found someone who had something kind of similar and they went and looked at it. The service we had created is a really cool thing that will go and backup your entire website. It's this really cool thing, but it's kind of hard to explain. It's awesome. The company saw they had something similar and they built a WordPress plugin. They had it for about six months and then they took it down. We contacted them and said, “Why did you guys take down the WordPress plugin?” They were like, “Our software doesn't need the WordPress plugin. We just used it to get into the WordPress community. But it's a nightmare. We have to support a billion different website. It got so support-intensive that we just couldn't do it anymore. Now we're back to our normal software as a service thing.” I was like, “Isn't that interesting?” A company like that had huge VC money and they couldn't even support a WordPress plugin. Again, this year we were planning on building this WordPress thing out and we finally decided not to go that direction. We've been focusing on three software project simultaneously, which probably isn't the right way to do it, but they all go hand-in-hand so we did it that way. One is a shopping cart that we are calling Backpack. One is an analytics and follow-up tool called Actionytics. Then one is this really cool front-end website creator, and we don't have a name for it yet. Hopefully we'll think of a name soon. After these programs are finished, we'll be excited to start rolling them out. My focus for next year is 100 percent this new software company and these three products we have. I think the potential is really big with it. That's kind of the direction that we're focusing on. As we're developing software programs, for any of you guys who are thinking about developing software, I wanted to give you some tips and tricks and ideas to think about that we have found helpful and might be useful for you guys if that's the way you're going. By the way, if it's not the way you're going, you should look at it. If you get one really good software program, it will feed you for the rest of your life. One of the big things is the first version of our landing page creator was actually an automated webinar site. It was called ClickFusion.com. I loved that domain name, I love the logo, I love everything. We built this automated webinar software which I think is the best out there by far. I think the problem is we have way too many features. We can do anything for everyone. Because of that, no one ever adopted it. It was too much stuff. A little while ago I read a book called Rework by 37 Signals. Of all my marketing books, it's probably the one I've read the most times. Stu, who I was talking about earlier, actually recommended it at Pirate's Cove. Rework is a book written by the owner of 37 Signals, and they have Base Camp and a lot of other products like that. They're all software as a service kind of things, and they were talking about their methodologies to create software. One of the big takeaways I had is that they draw out their feature list, and they cut it in half. Then they cut it in half again and again, and they try to make the most bare-bones, simple thing as possible. When customers come and ask for features, they say no. If people are looking for this or that, they tell them to go try their competitor. They basically say they try to keep things so simple and easy that you really can't mess it up. It's a different mindset. Most software people I know look at software like Bill Gates and they want every feature in the world like Microsoft Word with a billion features that no one knows how to use except the bold, italics and underline. I just kind of thought about that from our side. Let's make things that are simple, easy, that everyone can use. As we've rebuilt this new automated webinar/landing page/funnel generator, this time around we've built it way differently, where it's stripped-down, bare bones. It does one or two core things really well, and that's it. It's turning out amazing. I'm excited to start marketing, because I think people are going to really jump on it, because of how easy it is to use. That's kind of what I'm doing right now. I'm at the hotel, going to grab Todd right now. I may do part two of this tomorrow or even tonight. I want you guys thinking about first off, creating some software, but second, creating it very simply, very easy. If you're thinking about that at all, I would go read Rework by Jason Fred. You should read that no matter what. Every mistake I've made in business, when I read that book I was like, “Crap, I made that mistake and that mistake.” I found tons of them. That's about it for today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I will talk to you all either later today on part two of this one, or tomorrow. Thanks everyone.

What I learned when launching our first real SAAS program. ---Transcript--- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I’m actually not driving to the office today. I’m driving to a hotel to pick up our programmer. He is a stud. Some of you guys may know him. He is in town for the next couple of weeks working on some cool projects, so I am going to grab him from the hotel. I have kind of a little longer drive today, so I thought I would do a podcast and talk to you about what we are doing right now, because it’s exciting. Just to get the wheels in your head turning if you are doing any software as a service products, SAAS (software as a service). This is kind of an interesting time in the internet world. When I first got online, the thing to create were these little .exe files, desktop-based. I remember Armen Morne things like E-cover Generator, Header Generator, Sales Letter Generator, all these different products. When I first got online, I saw all the things that Armen was doing, and I was like, “I want to do software too.” I did Zip Brander and Form Fortunes and all these other little software programs. Back then, the cool thing to do was create these little downloadable software programs to download and run on a computer. That’s what we did. People would pay for it one time and we would end at that point. I remember the very first software as a service we ever had was called Digital Repo Man. It was this really cool product where basically if you had an ebook or some product that you were selling, you would use Digital Repo Man to lock it down. Then you could give it to your customers and when your customers wanted a refund you could turn their license key off so they couldn’t give it to other people. It was a cool thing. For whatever reason, it didn’t sell that well. I think it’s one of those things where it’s a prevention versus a cure. People don’t really want to buy a prevention. They want to buy a cure. They wanted to buy something for after someone steals their book so they can go out there and beat up the customer that did it, but they’re not willing to pay money to lock it down ahead of time. Anyway, it didn’t do that well, but it was the first time I had sold software as a service, where people log into a members area, they pay you monthly. It was kind of cool. My favorite thing was that if I made an update to the software, it automatically made the update for everyone. Whereas with Zip Brander when I made an update I had to contact all my customers, give them something to download a new version. 90 percent of our support questions were because people hadn’t downloaded the newest version. It was kind of a nightmare. Software as a service became really big for a while, and we started doing some things in it, but I never really paid a lot of attention to it. Then a little while later WordPress came out and we started building three or four different WordPress plugins and themes and stuff like that, because the WordPress is so big. I’ve got a friend who is probably listening to this podcast, Stu McClaren and he runs a site called WishlistMember where they sell membership plugins for WordPress. They’re doing awesome. They’re making an insane amount of money with it. I was talking to him back when we were in Kenya and he told me one of the biggest issues with it is that their support is kind of a nightmare. Everyone has different servers and different hosting and different version of WordPress, all these different things that can happen with WordPress. Then if you make an update, everyone with your software has to go download the update. In January this year, we kind of mapped out this idea for a really cool plugin, and that’s what we were going to do. Then we found someone who had something kind of similar and they went and looked at it. The service we had created is a really cool thing that will go and backup your entire website. It’s this really cool thing, but it’s kind of hard to explain. It’s awesome. The company saw they had something similar and they built a WordPress plugin. They had it for about six months and then they took it down. We contacted them and said, “Why did you guys take down the WordPress plugin?” They were like, “Our software doesn’t need the WordPress plugin. We just used it to get into the WordPress community. But it’s a nightmare. We have to support a billion different website. It got so support-intensive that we just couldn’t do it anymore. Now we’re back to our normal software as a service thing.” I was like, “Isn’t that interesting?” A company like that had huge VC money and they couldn’t even support a WordPress plugin. Again, this year we were planning on building this WordPress thing out and we finally decided not to go that direction. We’ve been focusing on three software project simultaneously, which probably isn’t the right way to do it, but they all go hand-in-hand so we did it that way. One is a shopping cart that we are calling Backpack. One is an analytics and follow-up tool called Actionytics. Then one is this really cool front-end website creator, and we don’t have a name for it yet. Hopefully we’ll think of a name soon. After these programs are finished, we’ll be excited to start rolling them out. My focus for next year is 100 percent this new software company and these three products we have. I think the potential is really big with it. That’s kind of the direction that we’re focusing on. As we’re developing software programs, for any of you guys who are thinking about developing software, I wanted to give you some tips and tricks and ideas to think about that we have found helpful and might be useful for you guys if that’s the way you’re going. By the way, if it’s not the way you’re going, you should look at it. If you get one really good software program, it will feed you for the rest of your life. One of the big things is the first version of our landing page creator was actually an automated webinar site. It was called ClickFusion.com. I loved that domain name, I love the logo, I love everything. We built this automated webinar software which I think is the best out there by far. I think the problem is we have way too many features. We can do anything for everyone. Because of that, no one ever adopted it. It was too much stuff. A little while ago I read a book called Rework by 37 Signals. Of all my marketing books, it’s probably the one I’ve read the most times. Stu, who I was talking about earlier, actually recommended it at Pirate’s Cove. Rework is a book written by the owner of 37 Signals, and they have Base Camp and a lot of other products like that. They’re all software as a service kind of things, and they were talking about their methodologies to create software. One of the big takeaways I had is that they draw out their feature list, and they cut it in half. Then they cut it in half again and again, and they try to make the most bare-bones, simple thing as possible. When customers come and ask for features, they say no. If people are looking for this or that, they tell them to go try their competitor. They basically say they try to keep things so simple and easy that you really can’t mess it up. It’s a different mindset. Most software people I know look at software like Bill Gates and they want every feature in the world like Microsoft Word with a billion features that no one knows how to use except the bold, italics and underline. I just kind of thought about that from our side. Let’s make things that are simple, easy, that everyone can use. As we’ve rebuilt this new automated webinar/landing page/funnel generator, this time around we’ve built it way differently, where it’s stripped-down, bare bones. It does one or two core things really well, and that’s it. It’s turning out amazing. I’m excited to start marketing, because I think people are going to really jump on it, because of how easy it is to use. That’s kind of what I’m doing right now. I’m at the hotel, going to grab Todd right now. I may do part two of this tomorrow or even tonight. I want you guys thinking about first off, creating some software, but second, creating it very simply, very easy. If you’re thinking about that at all, I would go read Rework by Jason Fred. You should read that no matter what. Every mistake I’ve made in business, when I read that book I was like, “Crap, I made that mistake and that mistake.” I found tons of them. That’s about it for today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I will talk to you all either later today on part two of this one, or tomorrow. Thanks everyone.