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Episode #41 – Raspberries On The Box Nov 07, 2013

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The post Episode #41 – Raspberries On The Box appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

How a tiny shift in your packaging can dramatically increase your sales.

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Hey everybody! It is rainy here in Boise today. This is the Marketing in Your Car, Podcast. Alright, so my wife had a really cool experience that has some definite marketing benefits, so I want to talk to you guys today. A couple years ago I was at the Tony Robbins event, and he talked about the evils of cow milk. Not really, but he did talk about how he isn’t a really big believer in cow milk, and gave some good compelling arguments why.

I am not saying he is right or wrong, but we decided at that point to try and wean off of milk. We shifted from milk. We initially tried soy milk which was nasty. Then, we tried the rice milk. Then, we fell in love with almond milk. We have been drinking almond milk probably two and a half, three years or so. Took us a little while to get our kids weaned off regular milk. Finally got it. Tried different brands, and finally my kids and my wife and everyone settled in on this one brand, which I think is Blue something.

Anyway, so yesterday my wife went shopping at the grocery store. When she’s there, she walks in and there’s these three dudes in big suits, like tall guys in suits. My wife is shorter anyway. These guys are walking around, and she is going around shopping. She gets back to the milk section, and she is going to buy some almond milk. These three guys are standing right in front of the milk and staring at the milk.

She’s like, how am I going to get in there? She said excuse me, excuse me and squeezes through the guys and goes in and opens it up, and grabs four or five of these big cartons of almond milk, and puts them in her cart. The guys turn around and says, “Excuse me m’am. Do you mind if we ask you a question?” She says, “What?” “How come you bought the Blue Diamond brand as opposed to Silk?” She picks up the Blue Diamond brand, and she shows the picture on the outside and says, “There’s raspberries on the picture on the front of this box.” They said, “What do you mean?” She said, “We tried to buy Silk, but my kids wouldn’t drink it because there’s no raspberries on the box. This one has raspberries, and they thought it looked good, so that’s the one that they will drink.”

The guy said, “Seriously? That’s the reason you bought that over the other one?” She said, “Yeah. The only reason why is because it has raspberries on the box.” The guy says, “It’s a dollar cheaper than Silk.” She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay a dollar more for it. It is the fact it has raspberries on the box.”

He said, “Whatever. I don’t believe you. How about this? I will pay you a dollar for each bottle of Silk you buy or each box of Silk milk you buy right now.” She said, “If I was to do that I would be out 10 bucks because my kids wouldn’t drink this milk, and it would sit in my fridge and go bad.”

He said, “That’s so interesting. We are actually representatives of Silk. We work for Silk, and we are here just trying to figure how to increase sales and placement, and stuff like that. That’s just very interesting. That’s the reason why. It wasn’t because it was cheaper. It was because the picture on the box had raspberries on it.”

I just wanted you guys to think about that, the power of perception. Isn’t it strange that my wife, we buy four or five boxes of almond milk a week, probably spend three or four grand a year on this almond milk. We buy one brand over the other is not because of the cost. It is because of the packaging, what it looks like on the outside. It is just really interesting.

I have seen people who have products who just change the cover of the product, and they see sales change. For example, Matt Furey. He created a product. It was actually the very first product I bought of his. It was called the Martial Art of Wrestling. I bought it, and it was this glossy book, and it looked really nice and exciting. I read it, and loved it and everything.

Five years later when I found out what he was doing, and I was learning about internet marketing and all this stuff I went listened to an interview. He was talking about his first product failure. He said it was this book he created called The Martial Art of Wrestling. He was like, “I spent all this money. It was nice and glossy. It was great, and nobody bought it. I had a huge bedroom filled with thousands of these books that nobody bought.”

It turns out I was the only person that actually bought it. Anyway, he was like, “Later on, I knew the content was amazing. Anyone who did read it, loved it. My next run of it, before the other one ever ran out, I decided to change the packaging, and made it more secretive and underground, and less like a book.

I made the cover black and white, non-glossy. Just paper. Instead of the Martial Art of Wrestling book, The Martial Art of Wrestling. Just made it more secretive and underground, just tweak the packaging dramatically increased sales.

If you have a product you are selling, and it’s not doing well maybe you just have to put some raspberries on the outside of the box. Maybe it’s not so much the product or the marketing or the sales funnel. Maybe it’s just you have to wrap it a little different, and make it so it’s a little more appealing to people.

I spend a lot of time in our businesses, I try to figure out the right hook and the right angle and the right thing. That stuff is very important. I can start working with somebody, and they have a product or business and they are struggling. We come in and not touch anything, just tweak their angle and hook a little bit and blow it up overnight. It is important. Think about that. Think about the raspberries on the outside of your box, what you can tweak and change to make it more appealing to your customers. That is it for the day. I am at the office. I am a little nervous to get out of the car because it is raining. I have a two foot step into the office.

Going to have a good day today, hope you guys will as well. We will talk to you all soon.

You are listening to Marketing in Your Car with Russell Brunson, the best podcast to help you easily launch and grow your own online business. Grab the wheel. Get in gear, and market in your car.

Thank you for reading Episode #41 – Raspberries On The Box, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #40 – The Zombie Entrepreneur Apocalypse Nov 05, 2013

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The post Episode #40 – The Zombie Entrepreneur Apocalypse appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

Lessons in entrepreneurship Russell learned last night while shooting zombies in the head.

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Hey guys and gals! This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Hey guys, so last night I had a chance to do something really fun. My wife and I went to this thing called the “zombie apocalypse.” Actually, it’s called Zombie Acres, where basically [laughter] I’m sure some of you guys, hopefully, have had a chance to do paintballing, which is very fun.

Where you go out in a field, and you have teams, and you shoot each other and try to kill each other, right? So what Zombie Acres was, was kind of like that except for backwards.

Instead of us going and shooting our friends, there’s a whole bunch of zombies attacking us, and we get to shoot them with paintballs, and it was a really fun thing, so we showed up there.

They had this huge bus, the Zombie Acres bus. And we get inside, and the windows are all busted out of the bus, and there’s a paintball gun out of every single window.

And so you go and you sit in the bus, and they drive around this haunted cornfield, and you get to shoot zombies.

The zombies are attacking you and jumping on the bus and coming in the doors and the windows, and you’re just pounding them in the face with paintballs, as fast as you can go.

And anyway, it was like, seriously, one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life. You know, I’ve been to a lot of haunted houses and stuff, and this trumped that by ten times.

So that was kind of what we did last night, it was super fun, and the reason why we did it, one of the guys who lives by me, he actually just started that as a company this year.

And I’m not sure how he got the whole idea behind it or anything, but they put the concept together and they found — first, they were trying to buy a lot, but it was too expensive to buy someplace to do it.

So they partnered with some people, and they found some land to do it at, and they started doing it, and they promoted on Facebook and did a bunch of cool things. And it was just fun watching this little startup growing, and them using Internet marketing and all these things to kind of grow their business.

What was interesting is, I’ve been watching these guys. This was their first season doing it, and last night was actually the last night. So I’m watching them, externally, kind of seeing what they’re doing from the marketing.

And before it launched, they did a big pre-launch through Facebook, just locally here, and they were getting people to guess where it was going to be at, and it’s caused all this hype in pre-launch, which was awesome, and then boom!

They announced where it was going to be at, and then they did their first day, and then from there they posted pictures and videos and got people excited and more people started coming.

And then about half way through the season, they hit an obstacle — and as most entrepreneurs, we know we hit obstacles a lot, right?

Yesterday, I hit like four new obstacles in my business that all are seemingly insurmountable. But we’ll figure out a way to break through them, right?

That’s kind of what happened to them. The city they were doing it is called Meridian, which is right next to Boise, and the Meridian City Council or whatever it was, came down and basically said, hey, you can’t shoot paintballs outdoors in Meridian or whatever.

So they had to basically shut down, and they were shut down for about a week or so, and I felt really bad for them. But I just kind of watched it just to see how… I don’t know. I like seeing how entrepreneurs react.

You know, it’s interesting. You go to a store, if the employee behind the counter has a little issue, they just give up, right? But the entrepreneur in a business is always a lot more stubborn and pigheaded, and they figure out ways to get crap done, right?

So I just kind of watched them, and I just assumed that they were going to be done for the season, and then boom! About a week later, they’re back up and running.

And sure enough, he didn’t let that obstacle stop him, and went and they found another place in another city, set up shop over there, partnered with this farm.

That’s a farm called Linder Farms, and they already a ton of people coming for their corn maize and things like that — and they set up shop right out there in the corn maize and kept going and finished through the season.

I just was impressed with their perseverance to kind of break through those sticking points.

And then, last night, again the first time that I had a chance to actually go. I had meant to go throughout the whole season, and things came up and then boom! They got shut down, and then it got re-opened, and just things keep happening, and we never got to make it.

Finally last night, we had a chance to go on the closing night, and we were on the very last bus. And it was awesome because when I was going there, I remember sitting there at first, and I showed up and I saw these two huge buses they had, like school bus style buses.

They’re all painted. The windows had been busted out. They basically had a paintball in every single window, and I was just looking at it.

And then, I saw like the staff that was, you know, doing tickets, and I saw the staff inside the buses, keeping people’s guns loaded and enough ammo, and I saw like all the zombies, and I was like, “there are a lot of costs involved with this little business that they’ve got.”

I was kind of doing the math, and I was, you know, looking at it. It was $30 a seat to be on the bus. Look how many windows there are, you know, and I’m looking.

They were making $600 — $500 to $600 per busload — and I was like, you know, that’s not bad money. But they’ve got a lot of costs, and I’m like, “I wonder how this is doing?

And I was noticing some things, you know, like when we went there. Like it was cold and I think they could have had some profit opportunities, if they would have sold hot chocolate or hand warmers or a bunch of things like that.

At the end, you know, they could take a picture, a lot of little things like that they could come back and really monetize.

But the brilliance came when I got on the thing, so I think it was, like I said, $30 per person to get on the bus, and then they give you 150 paintballs, which I assume 150 paintballs would last a pretty good amount of time.

I found out later, 150 paintballs lasts about three seconds, and so I’m at the brrrp boom! Balls gone! And they’re like, “Hey, if you want more paintballs, you know, the next 100 paintballs is five bucks.”

I’m like, “Yeah! Give me some more paintballs.” Pull out five bucks. Boom! Give me more paintballs. And about 10 seconds later, those are gone. So I paid another five bucks, boom!

Anyway, we ended up spending every penny that was in my wallet in paintballs, and by the end we were completely like… we were still not finished, and I was completely out of money, and I couldn’t buy any more paintballs.

And next to me there was a kid that was, man, probably 14, 15 years old, and he went and bought four refills of paintballs, so he spent an extra $20 on paintballs.

Again, everyone on the bus was doing this, and I started doing the math and that’s when I saw the brilliance of their business model: You’re getting in $30 is basically kind of covering their costs, and then when you’re in the bus, just keep buying more and more paintballs, is where they’re making money.

I mean, off of me they probably made an extra $80. They got us in and made $20, so there’s $100 between two of us, then there are 20 other people on the bus.

I was really impressed to see like how they were monetizing internally with the selling of additional paintballs, and I probably would have spent $200 or more if I wouldn’t have of ran out of cash.

They only take cash when your on the bus. I thought, you know, if they would figure out a way to do more, like a bar tab, where I’m like “another one, another one!” At the end bill me, I mean, I probably would have spent and extra… Goll, who knows, hundreds of dollars? I was having so much fun.

Anyway, it was really, really cool, and I started looking at that business model, and I started thinking like it’s kind of like the razor blade business.

You know, like if you go to the store, you buy razor blades, like the actual thing, the actual shaver thing isn’t that expensive, right? You can get those for like a dollar or two.

A lot of times they just give them away, you know, kind of like the bus ride. Then after you’ve got it, you got to buy razors, and you run a razor for a week or two weeks, and then it starts getting dull, and starts hurting, so boom!

You get a new one, a new one, and these keep replacing these razor blades, and that’s how that business makes a ton of money, and razor blades happen to be expensive.

Just like the printer business, right? They give away printers for free, and they sell ink over and over and over again. And that’s kind of the concept, and I thought it was brilliant, and executed perfectly.

Like I said, a couple things they could do, I think, to extract more money from me and the other customers.

At the end, I wish they’d had a professional photographer for taking pictures of us and the zombies; like that would have been something I would have definitely paid for, and I think most people there would have paid for.

Plus you could have used those pictures on Facebook, to help spread the message even further.

But as a whole, it was a fun night. An awesome to see entrepreneurship thriving and just see some people, who, obviously, went through a lot of trails and headaches to accomplish what they did, but to see them succeed last night.

And like I said, we were the very last bus, the last thing of the season, and afterwards they were out there taking pictures of all the zombies by the bus, and it was just cool — and I was proud of them, to see them succeed with their new little business.

So that’s kind of what I wanted to just talk about today. Just to share a really fun experience that we had here, and then to share some of the outward entrepreneur things that they were able to do to succeed.

I hope that gives you guys some motivation in whatever business you’re in because you’re going to come into all sorts of troubles and issues.

You know, you may not be kicked out of your city because of your business, but you’re probably going to lose your Internet or you’re going to get your autoresponder shut down.

I can’t tell you how many issues I’ve run into in my business every single day, and the entrepreneurs are the ones who figure out ways around it and figure out how to succeed.

And, man, that was a lot of fun! So if any of you guys are in Boise next October time, let me know and I’ll take you guys to Zombie Acres, and we will shoot some zombies and have some fun. It’s a good time.

So with that, I appreciate you guys. I’m at the office now. I’m getting back to work, and I’ll talk to you guys again soon.

Thank you for reading Episode #40 – The Zombie Entrepreneur Apocalypse, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #39 – Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing Nov 04, 2013

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The post Episode #39 – Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

Is it possible to find a happy medium?

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Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to the Marketing In You Car podcast.

Today, I’m not in my Ferrari because it’s freezing! But we’re here and we’re having some fun.

Hey guy and gals! So I appreciate you guys all being here today on the podcast and listening in. We have a very fun and exciting day today happening. It starts off, actually, yesterday. Well, maybe like even a month ago.

A month ago, for those of you who know me, I’m not like a very big video game guy. But I love like the old-school video games, and so I found this Nintendo controller, like one of the original ones, but it’s a USB based one.

So I bought it, and I really didn’t know what to do with it, and then last night with my kids I went and I found how to download an emulator, and I downloaded all of the original games that we used to play.

So I had “Mario 1, 2, 3.” We had “Double-Dribble,” “Contra,” “Milon’s Secret Castle,” “Legacy Of The Wizard,” anyway all the fun games, and we started playing it last night, and I was up till forever playing it.

And it’s Daylight Savings, and so I was actually up even… I was up to like 2:00 or 3:00, technically. I think it was like 1:00 or 2:00 I went to bed, but it was like 2:00 or 3:00 in my brain because of Daylight Savings.

So anyway, that was fun and I’m excited to get back tonight. I have to get home from the office and keep playing. I got to beat some of my old games again. Oh, “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out,” I have that one too.

Anyway, so it’s been a lot of fun. But I want to talk to you guys about what I’ve been thinking about this whole weekend. Because I’m kind of having a big shift, and it goes against everything that I thought I believed about marketing, and I think that I just sold myself on it.

For those who have been following me for any amount of time, you know that I’m kind of like a hard-core like Dad Kennedy style, outbound marketer, right? We’re very aggressive with our emails and our banners and our direct mail and our — everything that we’re doing.

And it works! Okay, like we’ve been very successful with it, but I keep watching like all these newer type companies that are coming out, and watching their huge growth they’re having. And what’s interesting, as I watch what they’re doing, and it’s very… kind of the opposite of what I’m doing.

In fact, they all kind of call like, what I do and what we focus on, the “outbound marketing,” what they do “inbound marketing.” And I’ve seen infographic about like how outbound marketing, you’re like “spammers” and “the email marketers,” and, you know, all these guys.

And the inbound marketers, the ones who “create good content” and “people come and listen to them,” and bla, bla, bla, and while I don’t completely agree with them, there are some valid, really, really, really good things that I have been getting from them that I enjoy.

I think there’s a blend of the two that you can really find a happy medium, and I think that using, you know, they would call outbound marketing techniques — promote your inbound marketing — is really where the magic is if you can find that sweet spot.

And so, I’ve been looking for the last month or so, for those of you guys who know, we’ve been publishing the DotComSecrets Labs print newsletter for, man, for a long time!

I think it’s been seven years we’ve been publishing a print newsletter. In the last five or six months, it’s been the DotComSecrets Labs Newsletter, and people will have loved the Labs newsletter.

They’ve been going crazy for it. Anyone who gets their hands on it, it’s just like “this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” And the problem is, though, it’s really a hard product to sell. It’s kind of like insurance, right? Like everybody needs insurance, but nobody really wants insurance.

Now if they get it, they’re grateful for it. It’s kind of like this: like we just really have a hard time getting mass appeal, and then about a month ago the girl that’s been doing our newsletter, she’s had her second baby and she just said, “Hey, I don’t have time now to keep dedicating to this.”

And so, I’m kind of at this crossroad, and what do we do? Do we find a new publisher? Do we just cancel it altogether, or what do we do? I kind of have this weekend, what I’m leaning towards, and I may not do it, so don’t hold me accountable to this if I don’t.

But I was like what if — like anyone who gets the newsletter in their hands and sees the split tests and the results and all this stuff, I get — it instantly makes them raving fans.

Mark Call said, “By far, it was the best Internet marketing product he’s ever purchased in his history online.” You know, everybody else that sees it, loves it. Like our Facebook reviews are just raving, from David Frey, from just everybody, right?

And so, I was like, “What if we just stopped selling that and just started giving it away? Like what if I made like a real blog, like people do in the blogging world, and I just every day blogged split test results? It showed cool thing, after cool thing, after cool, after cool thing?”

I’m always just like have a kind of fear. I’m like, “Well, why should I actually give all this stuff away? Like people will pay for it.” But I’m like, what if I did, though? If I give that away, it would create these raving fans who then come back and purchase everything else we have.

That’s been kind of my thought process over the weekend. I’ve got to talk to my guys and see what they think about it. They may think I’m crazy.

But I really think that, you know, one of the big shifts in my business over the last month or so is, bringing in all the social media and bringing in all these things that we haven’t been doing.

And I think that the reason why it’s so powerful is because, first off, it makes you relevant. Second off, it’s really rebuilding our platform.

You know, like I said, we’ve been building our platform for the last 10 years, but the platform shifted. And I’ve got to be honest: I’ve been slower to change over than I probably should have been.

So these are all the things that we’re trying to do to really rebuild our platform from the social media standpoint, and just doing cool stuff to get everybody raving fans where they just spend more time with us, and, in return, hopefully, spend some more money with us.

So that’s the kind of the game plot. I don’t know. We’re excited, and anyway I appreciate you guys listening. I just got to the office. I’ve got a fun-filled day of stuff I’m going to be doing. I’m fired up, excited. I found this company that does infographics.

You know, I’ve got tons of processes that we teach in our company, and I was like whiteboarding out. But I was like wouldn’t that be cool if we have an infographic for each one of them? So like the DotComSecrets X process, we take someone through it. You make an infographic of that.

Our DotComSecrets Local, our Micro-Continuity, our Underachiever, like making infographics of each of these different topics. The people can print them out. You know, put them on the wall, whatever. Pass them around.

Anyway, I’m excited about that too. I’m going to be having them do a DotComSecrets X infographic today, so I’m fired up! I’m excited for today. It’s going to be good.

I hope you guys are excited as well. If you’re liking this podcast, please go to iTunes and let me know. I love reading the reviews. It gets me excited, and other than that, you guys, I will talk to you all again very, very soon.

Thanks, you guys, and this is Russell signing off.

Thank you for reading Episode #39 – Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #38 – It’s Finally Time To Get Social Oct 31, 2013

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The post Episode #38 – It’s Finally Time To Get Social appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

Here are the core reasons why Russell is finally getting involved in social media.

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Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very special Halloween Marketing In Your Car.

Everyone, so this Russell and today is… It just happens to be my favorite holiday, which is Halloween, and a lot of people think, “Halloween is your favorite holiday, Russell?”

But yes, I don’t know why. I just have so many fond memories of getting candy, and smashing pumpkins and everything else fun I did as a kid, and now it’s fun to take my kids out — not smashing pumpkins, I try to teach them respect.

We’re definitely going out and getting candy, making some witches brew, a bunch of other fun stuff, so it’s going to be a fun day today. Anyway, I’m really excited.

So today I want to talk about just the kind of stuff that’s been happening in our business. What’s been interesting is, as we’ve been trying to kind of shift up our business model and change a whole bunch of things, you guys will start seeing a bunch of changes happening over the next two months in our business.

We’ve been, you know, about six months worth of back-work, and doing stuff that no one can really see yet, but you will all be able to see it very, very soon, a whole new re-brand of all of our sites, all of our brands, things like that.

And one of the big pieces that we’re doing is focusing a lot more now on social media, things like that, and it’s interesting because I’ve always fought social media. I’ve never wanted to do… I didn’t want to tweet. I didn’t want to do Facebook.

I didn’t want to do all that kind of stuff, but it’s getting to the point now where I just can’t ignore it anymore, and we’re getting more and more involved. And it’s been interesting like, for any of you guys who are SEO type people or curious about SEO, it’s really interesting how much SEO has been changing.

We used to have full-time teams of people who did SEO, and now we’ve pretty much canceled and let go of all of them.

What we’re finding, and it’s interesting — and I think that this will be the trend, moving forward with SEO — is like it’s having a lot less to do with like backlinking and things like that. It’s having a lot more to do with like the actual social interactions that people are having.

I’ve heard stories and read things that talk about how the new future of SEO is, basically, social media. Where instead of someone going to Google and typing in, you know, “work at home,” instead of finding whoever has gotten the most backlinks, it will look at you and look at your social profile.

See the people who you care about, and then see if any of the people you care about, if they’ve liked something. Or they’ve commented on something, they asked who’s making work at home make money.

And if they have, then boom! That will show up on top, and it’s just interesting that that’s the direction that things are going, where search and social are now becoming one.

So I think that’s why we’re now focusing on that and trying to learn the game and trying to be engaging, and trying to build a Fan Page, and trying to tweet and all these nerdy things that I never wanted to do.

But we’re doing them now, and I think that right now they’re important but soon they’re going to be essential. I mean, look at like back in the day we’re used to go spend a ton of money for a backlink, right?

You get the perfect backlink and almost instantly you can get ranked very, very quickly. Where I think now it’s going to be a lot more like networking, and finding the social influencers in a space.

For example, lets say I’m in… like let’s say I’m in the diabetes market, right? Which we are… and so, you know, and now I want people searching for diabetes to show up.

So what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to go out there and network and find people who are big, prominent names in diabetes, whatever, and get them to comment about me on their social media, on their Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus or LinkedIn or whatever.

But if I get that person to do it, now all those people’s followers, in the future when they start searching for stuff, I’m going to pop up, and so I really think it’s interesting.

It’s moving away from like the technical SEO, you know, to get rankings where it’s X amount of links, and the link quality and the link density and latent SIMATIC index and all these things we used to focus on to try to beat the search engines, right? And now it’s not. Now it’s being social. It’s getting people to talk about you. It’s networking. It’s gone back to like organic business.

It’s really interesting, and so again despite the fact that I’ve been fighting it for years, we’re now jumping in and trying to focus on that because I think that’s going to be the future for all of us.

And I also look at like when I first got into this business, the way that I grew my business was networking. Like I was out there on the forums, meeting everybody in my industry. I was getting to know them.

I was going to events and meeting them, and I became very, very social, and then somewhere along the line I had kids and a wife and a company and we just stopped being as social, and so…

Oop, I’m pausing because I just drove past a cop in the Ferrari, and he’s looking at me now.

Anyway, we basically, as I said I stopped being as social, and luckily I built a lot of deep connections and relationships, and I had a lot of really good partners.

But if I look at my business now, and I think that nothing is stagnating at all. We’re still growing, but it hasn’t grown as it should because I haven’t been out there networking, and the new place to network is not the events, it’s not the forums — it’s social media. It’s Facebook, and I hadn’t been putting in my time there.

And so, just for you guys, you know, think about the same types of things. This networking stuff that we’re talking about, it’s good from so many standpoints. It’s now good for the social traffic, obviously.

It’s good for future SEO rankings and things like that, and it’s also really good just for finding partners and friends and networking and things like that, and so I just want to stress to you guys that now is the time to get social, if you haven’t yet.

Jump on the bandwagon with me. You know, I fought it for years, but now we’re jumping in and I think that all you guys should, as well.

So, anyway that’s what’s happening for our Halloween today. I’m really excited. I just got to the office. I’ve got my fake biceps. My Halloween costume is these fake biceps, and then a blonde mullet wig. [Laughter] Which is kind of fun.

I had it the other day, and my daughter said that I looked like a muscle woman because my mullet was long and blonde. So anyway, I’m dressing up like a muscleman, with a long mullet, and going to have a fun day today.

So I’m excited. I hope you guys are as well, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Thank you for reading Episode #38 – It’s Finally Time To Get Social, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #37 – Asking The Right Questions Oct 21, 2013

Show notes

The post Episode #37 – Asking The Right Questions appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales.... The question that Russell asked that helped him raise an extra $500,000 in extra cash by the end of the year. ——————————————————————————— Hey everybody! This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to today’s Marketing In Your Car podcast. Hey guys, so we just finished a two-day mastermind here in Boise. I just actually drove my brother, who’s our audio-video guy, back to the airport. He’s flying back home, and I’m driving back, to go hang out with my kids and my wife and stuff, and so I’ve got probably 15 minutes or so in the car. I just wanted to talk to you guys about some cool stuff I’ve been thinking about. And what I want to talk about is probably one of the most important things that I think any of us could ever think about. It’s had a really profound impact on me the last like week, so I’m excited to talk about it. So earlier this week — my wife and I have been planning on building a house for a while. We’ve been looking at a lot of stuff, and we finally found some land we like and everything. And then just like last minute, I think it was on Tuesday, we saw this house. It looked really cool. So we’re like, “Oh let’s just call the realtor and go check it out.” So we go check out the house and it’s amazing! It’s 11,000 square feet, it’s on five acres, it has everything we could dream of in a house. Plus like the yard is amazing. There’s a swimming pool, there’s a hot tub, there’s like a full orchard worth of trees. Like seriously, the coolest house like I think I’ve ever seen, and so I want it really bad, right? And the only problem is, to buy a house that size, we had to have a down payment of $500,000 to be able to move forward on the house, and I don’t care who you are, a half a million bucks is a lot of money, right? So I’m like, “Well, how can I?” Anyway, so I started to just… like my wife is like, “I want this house. I want this house.” I’m like, “We can’t really afford it.” But I was like, “Don’t worry. I’ll start thinking about it, and I’ll figure out a way that we can get it.” And so, all of a sudden I started asking some interesting questions. The question I asked was: “How can I make a half a million dollars in extra cash before the end of the year? So the next two and a half months, and typically if someone says something like that, you’re like, “You’re crazy. There’s no way you can make a half million dollars in two and a half months extra on top of what you’re doing.” I was like “there’s got to be a way,” so I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and my wife’s like, “Don’t talk about something like that. It’s not good.” You know, she thinks it’s like you. What I’m going to do is illegal or something, that she’s just kind of funny like that. She doesn’t like when I plot and scheme ideas, so I’m like, “No, there’s got to be a way that we can do that.” So, I went back home and went back to the office, and we’re all working and I kind of told those guys, “You know, I love the house. I want to move in.” And Brent and John share an office with me, and I kind of asked them, “You know, like how can I make an extra half a million dollars this year?” And they kind of just like are working and kind of commenting, and they’re not paying attention. Finally, I was like, “Guys! Stop what you’re doing, like this is actually really an important thing. We need to be asking ourselves questions like this more often. Like how can we make an extra million dollars or half a million dollars cash in the next like two months?” And so, they kind of put everything down and started focusing, and we started asking questions. We started kind of evolving this thing, and within about 45 minutes we created a very realistic, concrete plan that I honestly think we could execute to make a half million dollars in the next two months, and we got it done. And then I kind of stopped, and said, “You guys, we need to ask ourselves questions like this more often.” I was like, “You know, an hour ago, we were working on these projects, and we never asked the question how can we make an extra half a million dollars. We just… we’re were just working on our thing.” And I started thinking like, if we look at a squeeze page, and we say, “How can we improve the conversion on the squeeze page?” and we ask that question, we’ll figure out a way to make it better. If we do a sales letter, how can we make this better? If we ask that question, we’ll figure out a way to make it better, and what I was thinking is like when you ask the right questions, the right things will come. If you ask big questions, you’ll be able to figure out the solutions to big things. So kind of an example of what we were figuring out for our $100,000 offer, or to make a half million dollars, I was like: “You know, we do a product launch and try to sell a $1,000 product, and sell 500 of them, I’m like, ‘Oh, that sounds like so much work!’ I was like, ‘We could do this… We could do this…’” And all of a sudden I was like, “What if we… What if we created a $100,000 package and just sold five of them?” and like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. What can we sell for $100,000?” I’m like, “Well, think about this… Like we launched this call center. We launched this little mini call center in our office. We’ve got two sales people. We hardly generate any leads. It’s very few leads, very targeted. And right now, with two sales people, we’re averaging, not quite, but pretty close to $100,000 a week in sales. And I was like, “Think about this. If we found five people who have a business, but they don’t have this little like mini call center thing that we just built, and it could literally make them $100,000 a week. “What if we come in and say, ‘Hey, pay us $100,000, and I will come to your office, and my team will come and build out the whole thing. We’ll train sales people for you. We’ll get the whole thing done, and you will leave with a business that can make you $100.000 a week. “Would you pay me $100,000 if I gave you business that made you $100,000 a week?” Everyone was like, “Yeah! I would. That’s a no-brainer. Of course I would.” You know, obviously, it was just like, yeah, it’s a good deal. But I’m like, but still the same thing is I’m kind of scared. Like if you’re going to write a check for $100.000, there’s so much risk in that so much fear. And like, is that actually going to work or not work? I was like, “Well, what if we did this. What if we came back and said: “Hey, give us $100.000, but don’t give it to us, put it in an escrow account. And we’ll look at it, and then we’ll come in, and we’ll build this entire thing for you for free. “We’ll set it up. We’ll launch it. We’ll run it, and we’ll watch it, and we’ll help make sure it works, and we will wait until it’s made $100,000. “And as soon as it’s made $100.000 in gross profits, then that $100,000 that you put escrow will be released to me, and then you’ll have a business that you can keep running to make $100,000 a week.” I was like, who would say no to that? Like as long as you have the ability to put $100,000 in escrow, who would not do that? Like I’m going to make you $100,000 before you ever give me any of the money, and so it starts being like that. I’m like this is actually really good. Like this is something I would have paid for in a heartbeat, and it’s got to be the right business, the right company, right? But if it’s the right fit, we could literally come in and in less than a week we could build this whole thing out for somebody, and have a new asset hooked to their business and make them $100,000 a week. And so, I started getting excited. So I was talking to some guy, and this guy, I kind of mentioned it to him. And he was like, “Dude, I know tons of people who would go for that.” So he started calling some people, and we got two or three people lined up that may do it. Then by mastermind group, when I kind of pitch it, and soon as I do everyone’s going crazy, and one person is like… they’re like: “We’re not on spot yet. We can’t do it, but I know somebody who would be very interested, who wants to do it,” so then we got one potential client. Then Daegan told me, he’s like, “There’s a guy who was talking to me two weeks ago, who said, ‘All I want is the call center. I want somebody to come and set the whole thing up for me, and I’d pay anything — any amount to do it.’” Boom! We got a lead right there, and then the guy in the room also said he wanted us to do it for him. So within two days of me just asking that question, of how I can make a half a million dollars in a month, I’ve already got six people, potentially, who are able and interested in giving me $100,000, for me to come set this thing up for them, and I was just like, how cool is that? And it’s just interesting like, most of us — the difference between successful people and not successful people is successful people ask the right questions — and I’m really kind of ashamed of myself. I haven’t been asking better questions lately. My questions lately have been stupid. They’ve been like… they haven’t been big enough questions, you know, and so I’m going to start every single morning, waking up, and like asking a big question or multiple big questions, and then using that throughout the day, try to answer those questions. Because my question is like how can I get my work done today, or how can I whatever, nothing good is going to happen. If my question is like how can I make an extra million dollars, how can I change more people’s lives, how can I double the size of my list? Like if I ask questions like that, then suddenly my focus goes there. And as Tony Robbins says, “Where focus goes, energy flows,” and we just started to start picking the right questions. And if you pick the right questions, you’ll start growing correctly. I think we focus too much on trivial things that don’t really matter, as opposed to picking the right questions to help us grow our business the right way. It’s kind of funny… and then later that night in the mastermind — seriously I need to learn to take my own advice sometimes. But we were at dinner, and I was talking about how the Ferrari, we would probably do a contest and give away the Ferrari, and do a fun kind of thing like that. I was talking about that, and one of my friends, who works for ClickBank said, “Hey, you should have ClickBank. Use part of ClickBank to give away your Ferrari.” And I’m like, “Well, there’s no way they’re going to do that.” He’s like, “Why not?” and I’m like, and I told him all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. He’s like, “Dude, you’re just not asking the right question.” I’m like, “There’s no way that will ever work.” And he kept like making fun of me. He’s like, “You just ask. Ask a better question! Like you’re asking the wrong question.” And I kept telling him, I was like — his name is BJ. I’m like, “BJ, this… ClickBank would never in a million years go for this. Like it’s a mute point. Doesn’t even, like it’s not worth even discussing. And he kept saying, “Dude, you’re the one who talked about, say, ask a better question,” and I was just kind of upset and annoyed with him, so I kind of ignored him. Anyway, the next day we’re sitting in the mastermind meeting, and all these discussions are happening, and then after talking to BJ, and all of a sudden boom! It hit me. A way that we could partner with ClickBank on the Ferrari launch, and I said, “BJ, like I just answered the question.” I said, “Because you forced that question into my head, annoyingly, it was in there and my brain figured out an answer.” And within a day we had the answer to this thing that, potentially, can make me insane amounts of money — an actual quarter million dollars a month — because I had that question forced into my head. If I would have asked the question, I probably could of figured it out a lot quicker. So I just want you guys to all just start thinking about the quality of the questions you’re asking, and how often you’re asking them. I teach a Sunday school class today, and I teach the 15 and 16-year-old kids, and so today in class I was just talking about this concept about questions, and I was like, “What are your goals and your dreams and your desires?” And they kind of were telling me things they’re trying to accomplish, what they’re doing, and so what we did is we took a minute. I had everyone pause for just a minute, and I actually timed it. I said, “I’m going to give you a minute right now. I want you to pick one big goal or one big question to be your focus for this week, and then I want you to come back next week and report back to me what happened, because you focused on that question for an entire week.” And so, we paused, and then had everyone sit there and think for a little bit, like what would be their question, and I didn’t have them tell me what they were because I don’t want to… You know, since with people that age, they’re embarrassed to show their real desires and their dreams, what their questions are, so I didn’t ask them to share it with us. But I gave them a full minute to think about it, and I ask them, “Do you all have your question?” And I said, “Okay, I want you guys to go home tonight, think about a question, and when you wake up in the morning, I want that question to be the first thing on your mind. “And throughout the day, I want you to be thinking about that question, and then tomorrow, the next day, I want you to wake up in the morning and for an entire week I want you to focus on that question.” And I said, “For most of you guys, I promise you, by day one or day two, this big, huge question that you didn’t think was even possible to answer, you’ll be able to answer, and it won’t take you a whole week.” I was like my “how am I going to make a half a million dollars extra in the next two months,” which — it’s a big order that I was asking my brain to come up with — but sure enough, within hours, we had the answer, okay? The question of how can I get ClickBank to completely promote my launch to all their affiliate base is a big question! Not even logical! And within a day we had the answer. Okay, so just start thinking big, thinking way bigger than you’ve ever thought before, and figure out that question that you never thought you’d ask and you probably shouldn’t ask. If somebody knew you were going to ask it of yourself, they would make fun of you, and tell you it’s not possible. Or tell you that things like that don’t happen to people like you. And if you do that, I promise you cool stuff is going to happen. And I think about the Ferrari… I’m like when the Ferrari contest came out, at first I looked at it and I was like, “I imagine a lot of people competing. “I’m not going to win,” and then the second I looked at it, I said: “Huh! How can I win this?” and as soon as I did that, it opened up my brains to a pathway, and suddenly a month later we won a Ferrari, okay? If you’ve ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he talked about the difference between financially rich people and financially poor people. He said, “Poor people say, ‘I can’t afford that,’ and rich people say, ‘How can I afford that?’” Just a change in the question, how do you position it differently, how do you do it so that your mind doesn’t say, “Oh good! I’ll think about this” and relax, but instead, you put your mind in a state where it’s got to think, and got to figure it out. And our minds, our subconscious minds, are so much smarter than we give them credit for. We just don’t ask because we’re so lazy, and it doesn’t want us to ask. It wants us just to hang out and watch T.V. But if you turn the T.V. off, ask the question, then ask the question and keep asking and keep asking it, you’ll be shocked at how fast the answers will come. I’m convinced of that. I’ve seen it twice this week, with seemingly impossible goals and dreams, coming ab…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode #36 – Software As A Service 2 – Pain Of Disconnect Oct 10, 2013

Show notes

The post Episode #36 – Software As A Service 2 – Pain Of Disconnect appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

Russell is driving home a 2 AM in the morning and sharing some of the insights they got building out their new SAAS products. Russell also shares with you what it’s like being a super hot girl!

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Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to an exciting edition of the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

It is actually 2:00 in the morning. I just dropped off Todd at the hotel. Todd is our developer. You guys heard about him in the last episode, and I’m in the Ferrari driving home at 2:00 in the morning. It is freezing cold! And the top’s down, and I just passed a cop.

But the top will remain down because we’re driving a Ferrari. You don’t put a top up. I don’t care if it’s two in the morning, if it’s freezing cold, that’s how we roll and run the Ferrari.

So in the last episode, I was talking about developing software is a service type product, and what’s been fun is basically the last two weeks Todd has been here in town.

We’ve been developing a brand new product, and I’m super fired up about it because I think it’s going to change the way that people do marketing. I know it’s going to change the way I do things.

It’s going to make it where, basically, I can do all the marketing by myself without any webmasters, developers or anything, which is exciting. So anyway, I’m excited for it. But I’m more excited just to talk more about you guys, about software as a service.

And we talked about it last time, just some of the benefits of it. But the reality is like it’s been interesting is we’ve developed this product.

You know, in the past when we developed products, we tried to give it so many features and so many things that it’s just overwhelming to customers and to us to support it, and to create.

And we’ve really been following this model just like making a strip-down, bare bones, as simple and as easy as possible, and as we’ve done that it’s just making a tool that I think people will use and stick with long-term.

One of the cool concepts we talked a lot about tonight, that I think I want to kind of focus this on with you guys is, when you’re creating, if you decide to create your own software — if and when you’re creating your own software.

One of the biggest keys in the long-term success of your program, whatever you’re creating, is if you can create something that has pain and disconnect.

And it makes me laugh… I’ve been doing membership sites now for, man, seven or eight years. We’ve made millions of dollars off membership sites. But one of the constant dilemmas we have is there’s always this constant churn and burn. We’re always just adding people into the funnel.

I just passed another cop, so I might go onto the side street here. Anyway, it’s a constant burn and churn when you have a typical membership site because content is good, but it’s not essential.

Like when somebody — you know, their credit card comes up, and they’re looking at their bills — like when they look at like “Oh, it’s a membership site. I enjoy it. But, hey, you know, it’s… I don’t have to have it.”

So it’s creating something that if somebody wanted to cancel, there’s huge pain and disconnect. And that’s really what — you know, not that we’re trying to develop things that cause pain, that would hurt our client’s business.

But is something that is so valuable and so useful that if they ever canceled it, would be very painful. So, you know, if for some reason their credit card failed, they’re just going to think, “Oh my credit card failed, no big deal.”

If their credit card failed, within two minutes they would call you because they’re using your service so much that they have to have it to function. And that’s the kind of product that you’ve really got to create, and I think that’s really the big secret.

I really think that next year, with this product rolling out, I think we could do $10-million pretty easily next year. And it’s just because we’ve created something that’s so powerful and so useful that the pain and disconnect is just so much, and so I really want you guys thinking about that.

Like if you do decide to develop a software program, like what kind of product or service can we create that ties our customers in so deeply that they just love it so much that they can’t cancel?

It’s kind of like our supplement. Our supplement has been interesting because I think it’s kind of the case with any supplement you have. There is a percentage of people who it doesn’t work for, and there’s a percentage of people who it works great for.

And that’s how it is right now. If we have people, we have clients who are literally calling us saying:

“My bottle is empty, and my new next shipment hasn’t come in! I will pay you whatever it costs to overnight this thing. And make sure that I have that bottle here tomorrow because I don’t want to go through a single day without this in my system.”

We get those kinds of calls all the time, which is awesome and exciting. And so, again, it’s pain and disconnect. If those clients stop having our supplement, they’re in so much pain that they can’t function, and so they don’t want to go without it.

And I think that, you know, in the past in the Internet marketing world, what people have taught and talked about it is just, you know, “create something that’s good and people will stick on it.”

But I think you’ve really got to create something that has such a big pain and disconnect that they can’t leave you. They won’t leave you because it’s so important.

And that’s the kind of businesses we’re really trying to focus on, and I think you actually should be focusing on as well, and so, I just want to kind of throw that out there because that’s what we’re talking about right now, and it’s been a lot of fun.

The other thing that we are kind of playing with that I think is interesting that I want to throw out just an idea for you guys is:

If you do have a membership site or something that doesn’t have that big, huge pain and disconnect, you know, one thing that we’ve been looking at a lot recently is like, what’s our average customer value?

You know, and we did this before on our membership sites. You know, the average customer stays for one month or three months or six months or whatever it is.

When you find that number out, it’s very important to kind of just start focusing on that. Say, “okay, our average customer is staying for just three months at a time, you know, or six months at a time, whatever that is, if you know what that dollar amount is.

We’re going to be instituting one of our membership sites coming up next month, and I’m really excited for is… We’re going to give people the ability to buy out their membership site.

So if we know the average person stays for three months, that means that month number two or two and a half, we’re going to start a campaign basically saying:

“Hey, you’ve been a member for two months. So far, I hope you’re really enjoying the site. What we want to do is, we want to offer you the ability to buy out your contract.

“So basically, for an extra $100 or $200 or whatever it is, you can get a lifetime access to the site. So longer do you have to pay us $97 a month, just pay $200 and boom! You get lifetime access.”

And suddenly for anyone who takes that, we just basically increased, you know, we took that person from the average two to three months, to six or eight or twelve months of revenue.

Anyway, it’s a cool concept I’m really excited for, and I can share stats and results, as we get deeper into it and kind of see what happens.

But just think that. Think about what’s your average stick rate, and right before that average stick rate, give people the ability to buy out a membership at a discount.

Or people who cancel give them the ability to buy out the membership at a discount. Same kind of thing that, you know, they’re probably just tired of seeing the monthly payments. They probably still like what you have, so you said:

“Hey, you know, you may not like paying $97 a month. But for how about $200, we’ll give you lifetime access. You never have to pay again.”

And just some fun things to start looking at, just different ways to look at your numbers when you’re doing reoccurring revenue, continuity, and things like that. So anyway, I hope these are just a couple fun ideas.

Again, you know, I am so tired right now. We’ve been going like, literally the last two weeks that Todd has been here, we been going late nights like this almost every single night.

I’m pretty sure my wife is ready to kill me, but sometimes that’s what you do as an entrepreneur. You burn the midnight oil to create something really cool that will pay you for the rest of your life.

And so that’s what we’ve been doing and just having that kind of fun, so my brain is kind of all over the place. I just wanted to share with you guys some interesting ideas while I’m driving home, so it’s been a lot of fun.

I’ve also had a lot of people email me, asking what it’s like driving the Ferrari, now that I’ve been in Boise driving it for the last week or so. It’s been interesting.

Like the first day we had it and parked at the office, we probably had four or five different sets of people who came to the office, parked, came to the door and asked like, “Who’s Ferrari is that? Who’s Ferrari is that?”

Like it wasn’t just someone driving by, like they actually came into our office, and asked to see and ask me questions about it. This one kid that drove by, and the guy got so excited he called all his friends.

We had this group of like all these teenaged boys outside our office just checking out the car, and they literally sat outside for over an hour, taking pictures and just looking at it. I thought it was the funniest thing!

And then, the other thing that’s been interesting is I kind of know what it feels like now to be a really super hot girl. Like, literally, when I’m driving down the street, I have guys driving — be honking their horns, waving, yelling catcalls at me.

I had people like, pulling into parking lots and asking me questions, like I’ve never felt that. I’ve never had the opportunity to be a super, smoking hot girl, but I could imagine that’s probably what it’s like for them.

Like they get approached, they have people yelling at them; here people are just like staring. Literally, I can watch as I drive down the road and almost every guy has this like really weird like whiplash, you know, where they’re following the car.

And so, I can kind of empathize now with super hot girls, and I feel bad for them sometimes because that would be really, really hard and annoying. At first it’s kind of cool and flattering, but after a while it would be annoying.

So anyway, I’m still in the stage where I like being the super hot girl, and I’m enjoying everyone yelling at me in my car. But I’m sure it will go away, and we keep talking about, you know, what are we going to do with it?

Obviously, I don’t think I want to drive a Ferrari the rest of my life. I would like to, but… You know, winning a Ferrari is cool, but I think we told you guys in one of the other episodes, it’s just the tax liability is like…

Basically, Joel, he won. You know, he gave me the car so he wrote it off on his taxes as a $130,000 loss. We basically incurred a $130,000 gift, and so I had to pay taxes on $130-grand. Which in my tax bracket is like $60-grand or something crazy like that, so by winning the car I’ve got to pay $60-grand, plus I’ve got to pay sales tax. I’ve got pay like another eight or nine grand as soon as I register it, which I’m doing tomorrow.

It’s kind of just an expensive machine, so I think after like the thrill of driving, it wears off. We’re going to do a contest and give it away. We talked about selling it, but selling it…

Let’s say I sold it for $130- $150-grand, you know, after paying taxes I still would make $70- $80-grand. Whereas, if I did a contest, and if I execute it correctly, we could make a lot more than that.

So we’re actually going to, using the Ferrari in a contest, to give away our new software we’re launching. So who knows! We’ll see. Time will tell. It’ll be a lot of fun.

Anyway I just got home, you guys. I’m ready to crash and go to bed. I hope you guys are having a great day, having a fun time being an entrepreneur.

Think about some of these cool things I’m sharing with you. Hopefully, you guys implement it in whatever your business you’re in, and I will talk to y’all again soon.

Thanks so much, you guys!

Thank you for reading Episode #36 – Software As A Service 2 – Pain Of Disconnect, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #35 – SAAS Smackdown P1 Oct 03, 2013

Show notes

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.

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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.

Thank you for reading Episode #35 – SAAS Smackdown P1, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #34 – Teleseminars Are Back Oct 02, 2013

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The post Episode #34 – Teleseminars Are Back appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

There’s no school like the old school. Start using the old marketing methods that still work.

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This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

I am doing something exciting today. I am promoting a teleseminar. The last time I did a teleseminar was years ago. It’s been so long since I’ve done a teleseminar. Let me tell you why I decided to do a teleseminar instead of a webinar.

I’m lazy. I don’t know about you guys, but webinars take a lot of work to create and design and get the slides and all this kind of stuff. While I could do that, I don’t have enough time. I’m too busy right now to go and create another webinar.

I was thinking, “How do I do this a lot easier?” and I thought of teleseminars.

It was funny to me, and maybe this is just me, but I think a lot of us do this. We find something that works really well, and for some reason we stop doing it. I made my very first million online by doing teleseminars. Every single week I was doing teleseminars.

When I started creating the registration page for this teleseminar, I was looking at my old hard drive that had all my old websites and stuff on it. I found one that had every single one of my old teleseminars. I started looking at all these pages.

I remember seeing a teleseminar page with Marlon Sanders, Matt Basac, Vince James, all these people I used to do teleseminars with. We made so much money doing teleseminars, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult as doing a webinar.

We would get on a teleseminar, we’d start talking and hanging out and at the end of it we would sell something and we always did awesome with it. It makes me laugh because I haven’t done a teleseminar in years and years and years.

It’s this tool, a profitable tool that we have that we never use. I don’t know if you’re like me, but if you are, I want to challenge you guys to do a teleseminar for your list. Again, the prep time is about a thousandth of a percent what it takes to do a webinar.

Just see what happens. I’m doing one this Friday. My plan is, now that I’m back from winning the Ferrari and everything, is I want to just do a breakdown with my list going over the seven or eight steps of what they need to do in the next 30 days.

I’m going to show them that blueprint. At the end of it, I’m going to have an application for them where they can apply for our coaching program. It will be fun, it will be no stress, we’ll hang out, we’ll have a good time and I’m excited for it.

I want to throw that out there as another marketing tool for you guys to bring back into your arsenal. If you haven’t been doing them for years like me, we should try them out.

We talk about pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are huge. If we are doing webinars every single time, webinar, webinar, webinar, after a while our audience starts realizing there is going to be another webinar and this is how the process works.

You’ve got to interrupt the pattern every once in a while. That’s why I’m excited for teleseminars. I’m not positive, but I’m guessing that you’ll see me doing a lot more teleseminars over the next few months, just because it’s going to be fun to mix it up a little bit.

When everyone else is zigging, we’re going to zag. Same thing as right now: everyone is doing email and social media and we’re going old-school with direct mail and telephone.

Just have some fun mixing up your marketing messages, hitting people with different media, different ways. I think you’ll be surprised at the results. I know I’m excited for this, excited to see the results. Maybe I’ll share with you guys on a future podcast.

My recommendation for today is to start thinking about the telephone, start thinking about teleseminars. The service we use is www.InstantTeleseminars.com. It’s a really simple, easy system to use to do a teleseminar.

They probably have a trial, so go test one out, make a bunch of money with it and then pay the first month’s bill. That’s about all I’ve got today. I’m actually not heading to the office. I’m heading to the gym right now. This is Russell Brunson and I will talk to you guys all again soon.

Thank you for reading Episode #34 – Teleseminars Are Back, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #33 – Russell Wins A Ferrari Oct 01, 2013

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The post Episode #33 – Russell Wins A Ferrari appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

Hear Russell’s story about their drive in the Ferrari from Las Vegas back home to Boise.

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Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to a very special episode of the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. Today I am driving in my brand new Ferrari.

Well, it’s not brand new, but it’s brand new to me. I don’t know if you can hear that. Can you hear that? That is the engine. It is very loud.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you guys the story of the Ferrari, because we’re having a lot of fun. Give me one second and we’ll get started.

This will be less content and more entertainment; because I thought it was a fun weekend. We won this Ferrari in the Pure Leverage contest, which was pretty cool.

I’m driving and everyone is staring at me. It’s kind of fun. At the event, they called us onstage at the last day and said, “We’re taking a break. You can take a break if you want to, but we’re going to go down and give Russell a Ferrari.”

They took me and my wife outside and we had about 250 people following us down the hall, out into the lobby, out in front of the hotel. Then Joel who gave us the Ferrari pulled it up next to everybody, revved the engine.

Then we got in and literally our car got surrounded by 250 people, all with cameras and iPads and iPhones. It felt like paparazzi, like I was someone famous or something like that.

Then we got in the car and took off and sped around the corner just to kind of hide. When we got around the corner, it was just this dead-end parking lot, but they told us to wait until the crowd came back in. We sat there just waiting for the crowd to come back in.

When we got back, sure enough, there were some lingerers who came over and ambushed us and wanted pictures. It was kind of crazy. That was what we did that night. Then we took it to the valet and they parked it.

The next day we decided we were going to drive home, all the way from Las Vegas to Boise in it. We came back to the valet and they brought the car back to us.

It was funny because this sweet car pulls up and everybody is waiting to see who it’s for, and it’s my wife and I. I look like a little kid with my backpack, and we walk over, jump in and take off.

I’m not much of a car person, so I don’t really know how to drive a car like this. It’s kind of different. We’re driving away from Vegas and we need gas, so we pull into this gas station outside of Vegas.

As soon as we pull in, we get swarmed by people from in front, behind, all of them coming around taking pictures of the car and asking if they can look at the engine. I even had a guy ask me for money, which was really exciting.

It was kind of creepy though. We weren’t ready or used to that attention. After we filled up with gas, then all these people are swarming us. We were trying to start the car and leave.

The way you put it in reverse is weird. I was trying to put it in reverse to back up because there was a car in front of us filling up with gas and it wouldn’t go in reverse for anything I would try. I was like, “What in the world?”

Then another car pulls up behind us and we’re stuck here with all these people taking pictures, cars in front of us, cars in back of us and I can’t reverse the car. I start the car and then it dies. I’m like, “This is a nightmare.”

Finally, the car in front of us started pulling forward so we started the car again and took off. We were kind of at a truck stop, so we were stuck behind all these trucks. We got out the owner’s manual and spent 30 minutes reading and trying to figure out how to put the car in reverse, how to put the top back up and all these things.

We finally figured out how to learn it. We jumped on the freeway and started driving. Three times, people would speed up next to us and take pictures of us while we were driving. It was kind of crazy.

We brought a Go-Pro camera and mounted it to the front of the car, so we’ve filmed the entire drive home. On our way home, we were going through Utah. I grew up in Utah, so we stopped in St. George and saw my sister and her family and took them all on rides. Then we stopped and took all my cousins on a ride.

We ended up stopping eight times in two days and gave everyone rides in the car and everything. It was fun. It was a long drive, though. It took us pretty much two days to get home.

Then when we got home, it was raining in Boise, so we got home in the rain. Then we picked up my kids and took each of them, one at a time, for a ride. We found this little place behind our house where there are no cars, and I took it there and I just floored it.

We took off and my youngest kept saying, “Daddy, I want to go in the racecar.” That’s what we’ve been doing and it’s been a ton of fun.

Anyway, there’s not much content today. I just wanted to tell you guys a story about the Ferrari. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m at the office now and I’m having a guy come to detail it today. We’ll get it all detailed up and I’ll have a nice car to drive around town, so that will be fun.

Anyway, that’s about it. I hope you have a great day today. This contest was interesting. Even though everyone was competing for it, there were a lot of people who had no chance. Why should they even try to win a Ferrari? Why should they even try to win it?

I just say, for you guys, think about 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was in the exact same situation you guys are in. I was looking at these contests and I never had a shot to win them, but I tried. By trying, I learned different things. I learned that if I give bonuses, more people will buy.

If I do webinars, more people will buy. I tried to figure out different ways to sell stuff. To win the Ferrari I had to basically do a blend of most of those things. We gave away bonuses, we did webinars, we did teleseminars. We did all sorts of things to do this.

It’s taken me 10 years to get to a point where I can win a prize like this. For some of you guys, I would start now. Look for contests that are happening online in your market. I guarantee most markets have some kind of online contest happening. Go enter and try to win them and see what happens.

We had a chance in Vegas to hang out with my buddy Dave Gardner. Dave is an interesting guy. He came to Kenya with us last year. He won a prize that we were doing to take one of our students to Kenya. He won that.

I was reading this book he wrote, and he was talking about how he won that prize and he won three or four prizes. I’m like, “How do you win all these prizes?”

He said, “I just enter them and do my best.”

A lot of people don’t enter because they don’t think they can win, so they don’t, whereas someone like Dave tries a lot of them and he wins a lot of them.

I guess that’s my motivation for today: go out there and try. You never know what’s going to happen a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Heck, one of you guys might win this Ferrari when I give it away in a year or so. Who knows?

Thanks, you guys. I will talk to you all tomorrow.

Thank you for reading Episode #33 – Russell Wins A Ferrari, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

Episode #32 – No Success Can Compensate For Failure In The Home Sep 25, 2013

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The post Episode #32 – No Success Can Compensate For Failure In The Home appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales....

Most entrepreneurs get into business to create the perfect lifestyle, but within a year or so have created nothing more than an over-worked, underpaid job. How to structure the lifestyle of your dreams while you are building your business.

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This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, guys and gals, this is Russell. Today is an exciting day. I am actually heading to Vegas to go pick up my Ferrari that I won, which is pretty exciting. Then we’re going to jump in the car and drive it all the way home.

I’m not sure if I told you guys this or not, but I had a really cool idea. I went and bought a Go-Pro camera. I’m going to mount the camera on the dashboard of the Ferrari looking out and I’m going to record the whole trip driving home.

After I get home, I’ll take the footage of that and make a time lapse video of the footage and use it as a background of a sales video. I thought that was kind of fun.

It’s interesting. I’m about to go do this really cool, exciting business thing. I actually went and dropped my three-year-old at pre-school. All that’s going through my head right now is a quote from a religious leader named David O. McKay.

He said, “No success can compensate for failure of the home.”

Today I want to talk about that, how important our families are. I’m as guilty as anyone, but we get in this business initially because we’re like, “If we do this, we’re going to have time freedom and we’re going to have money and we’re going to do all these things.”

We get into that with that goal. But what happens at first? We quickly find out that being entrepreneurs is not quite as easy as we thought it was going to be when we get signed up, which is a good thing. If it was super easy, then everyone would do it, right?

We go from doing the typical thing where people are working 8 hours a day to working 20 hours a day. The goal is, “After I make it, I’ll cut my hours back to a 4-hour work week or whatever.”

That’s kind of what our goal is. The problem is, there are a lot reasons, but I think we get addicted to the business. You get significance out of it. You get love and connection. All these needs you have are being met by your business.

Because of that, it starts growing, you start having success, and after a while you realize, I like this and I’m having a good time. I’ve been spending 20 hours a day building this business up to this point and I really enjoy it, I’m going to keep on doing it.

The next thing you know, one year turns into two, two turns into three and eventually it’s been 10 years and you’re just killing yourself over this business. The reason why you got in, to be able to have the time freedom and to be able to spend more time with your kids, what you get is the exact opposite of that.

You get basically a glorified job where you’re working more hours. You’re probably making more money, but not having the freedom that you got in this business for. I’ve been really recently thinking about that.

I was listening to this really cool course that I found on eBay. It’s actually J. Abraham, Chet Holmes and Jake Carter Livingston. They put this product together called Gorilla vs Gorilla. I found the cassette tapes on eBay. I couldn’t find the actual product anywhere, but I found the cassette tapes.

I was super excited because I love new marketing courses. All three of those guys are awesome. I was listening to it and Jake Carter Livingston said something interesting.

He said all of us get into a business thinking, “After I do this, I’m going to start working four days a week. After I do this, then I’m going to do this.”

He said the problem is we’re creating habits. Whatever habit you create right now, that habit is going to stick with you even after you’re successful. If you make a habit of working 20 hours a day, you’re going to continue to work 20 hours a day.

When I listened to that tape set, after I went and found a tape player to listen to it, it made me think about myself. What are the habits that I’m in? I realized that for probably five years I’ve been saying that myself: “I’m going to do this after this happens,” but that thing never comes.

I kind of made a conscious decision a little while ago. I said, “I’m going to start crafting my day the way I want it to be when I feel like I’ve achieved whatever dream I’m chasing.” I want to do that now because I want to create that habit.

I readjusted some of my life, and it’s bene really cool. You can probably tell my voice sounds kind of funny. It’s because part of it is I realized I missed my wrestling. It’s hard. There’s no one who really wants to wrestle a 33-year-old dude. It’s hard to find any wrestling partners.

But it turns out everyone in the world wants to be a cage fighter, so everyone wants to do Jujitsu and grappling and stuff like that. I was like, “This will be fun. I’ll find someone who’s really good and I’m going to start adding Jujitsu into my weekly routine.”

I hired a black belt and twice a week I go in and I get beat on by a black belt. I’m learning Jujitsu from him. That’s why my voice is so scratchy today. He brought in some other dudes to roll with me. I’m not a slouch. I was a top 15 in the country wrestler in college. I took second in the country in high school.

I can hold my own, but this new sport may be similar to wrestling, but it’s not the same. He brought in some brown belts who have been doing it for 15 years and we rolled yesterday. I did all right, considering all things. I hung with them well, but as a whole I got beat bad.

I jammed my ring finger and it’s swelling up to the size of a watermelon. I can’t fit my wedding ring on right now. I got chocked out probably eight or nine times. Typically you do a carotid artery choke, a blood choke. Those aren’t that bad. It cuts the blood off from your brain and everything goes dark and you pass out, or you tap out.

But he caught me on three front chokes, which are more like windpipe chokes, which cuts the oxygen off, and it thrashed my voice. It’s kind of crazy since I’m going to be speaking tomorrow at a seminar with 1,000 people. Hopefully my voice will last.

I made it a part of my day. I said, “When I’ve arrived and I’m happy with where I’m at, that’s what I want to do. I want to be wrestling and doing Jujitsu and lifting weights.” So I crafted my day to kind of do those things.

I said, “I want to spend more time with my kids,” so I changed the time I come home every night. I changed what I do when I get home. I started changing up my life to be what I want to be when I get to wherever I’m going.

I would encourage that for you guys. That quote from David O. McKay is powerful: “No success can compensate for failure of the home.”

I truly believe that. For all of you guys, I want you to take that to heart. Start today to create the lifestyle you want, because it’s going to be a habit, whatever you do.

Don’t get caught in the whole 20-hour workdays that most entrepreneurs do. Obviously, there are times you need to do that, especially when you’re first growing and first building, but really make sure that you structure your time and structure your life so it will be the way you want it to be when you get there.

Otherwise, you’ll get so addicted to this journey, because it’s fun, this whole entrepreneurial journey. If you get addicted to it, you’ll miss out on what it was you were actually going for to begin with.

That’s it for today. I’m going home, I’m packing up my bags and I’m about to jump out and head for the airport. All I have for you guys is remember, “No success can compensate for failure in the home.”

Thanks so much. This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Thank you for reading Episode #32 – No Success Can Compensate For Failure In The Home, originally published at DotComSecrets.com Blog.

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