By Russell Brunson
Table of Contents
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Unfortunately, too many people in business have taken the concept literally and have decided to run their businesses that way. They think if they build the best product or service, invent the best widget, create the best mastermind, or write the best book, the world will just find it. They think that as long as they build the best product or service, people will just show up to buy it. The reality is they won’t just come.
Unless people know that you exist and you give them a compelling reason to come find you, they aren’t coming. Without good marketing, your ideas will just be that: good ideas. Imagine looking back when you’re 80 years old and feeling like you just dabbled with 20 different great ideas but never really made the impact you desired.
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Traffic Secrets approaches traffic from a completely different direction than anyone has discussed before: less from the tactical, fly-by-night operations and more from the strategic, long-term model that will ensure a consistent flow of people into your funnels. The strategies inside of this book are evergreen and will never change as long as there are humans on this planet to sell to.
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Over the past decade and a half that I’ve been playing this game, I’ve survived (and even thrived) during dozens of Google slaps, the “death” of email marketing, algorithm changes, the rise and fall of tons of social networks, and the fragmentation of online media. The question begs to be asked: Why did we survive when so many other companies have failed?
TWO REASONS WE SURVIVED WHEN OTHERS FAILED
- We understand how to use funnels. With funnels, we can make 5–10 times as much money for each visitor who clicks on our ads, so we survive and thrive when costs go up.
- We have mastered the strategy (not just the tactics) behind getting traffic, and these strategies work on all advertising platforms in the past, present, and future. If you master these strategies, then no slap or snap can affect the lifeblood of your company.
There will be another storm soon, just like there was with Google. It’s happened time and time again, and we know that the greatest predictor of the future is the past.
The tactics behind how to get someone to click on an ad and come to your website literally change daily. In fact, I know people whose full-time jobs are solely dedicated to keeping up to speed with the changes that Facebook makes to its algorithm and Ads Manager.
Those who understand funnels will last much longer because they will make more money from each visitor who clicks on their ads, but this tactic will soon become obsolete. This process is how most people learn to get traffic to their websites and into their funnels, and that’s where the problem comes from. How are you supposed to build your foundation for your company on a slippery slope like that?
The reason I am still here today is because when I started playing this game 15 years ago, there weren’t any traffic courses teaching the latest tactics. The people I studied with didn’t have the internet when they were growing their companies. The people I learned from were some of the old- school, direct response marketing greats like Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham
These guys didn’t have the luxury of Facebook or Google; they learned the strategies of driving traffic before there even was an internet! Instead, they drove traffic with direct mail, radio ads, TV, and newspapers. Moving forward, you have to understand that traffic is people, and people are extremely predictable. The core strategies that I’m going to teach you will outlast and supersede any particular platform, so you can apply them anywhere.
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THE BIG CHALLENGE
Some of you may be shocked or offended that nowhere in this book—a book entirely about traffic—will you see a single image of the Facebook Ads editor or a detailed explanation showing you how to set up your Google Ads campaign. I didn’t put any platform-specific screenshots inside of this book because I wanted this work to remain evergreen for you. Instead, we will be focusing on strategies that don’t change, including:
- Identifying your dream customers
- Finding out where they are already congregating online
- Learning how to “work” your way in
- Understanding how to “buy” your way in
- Creating your own publishing platform
- Building your own distribution lists
All these strategies have one big thing in common: when the storms come, the user interface changes, or the traffic moves, they will still work! They leverage the big media properties (such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram) when they are hot, but also when these platforms change, you can easily move to where the eyeballs go
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Isn’t that unbelievable? They could lock up an entrepreneur for eight years to teach them a skill, but not even spend 10 minutes showing them how to market that skill. To me, it’s the biggest problem with our education system. Some think, My product is so good, I don’t need to pay for traffic.
Still others believe they’re entitled to customers because they feel they built a better product than their competitors. So they wait, all the while thinking, I built it. Why aren’t they coming? Yet after coaching hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, I can tell you that the people who put all their focus on creating something amazing (instead of also focusing on getting people to actually see what they created) are the people that fail.
Waiting for people to come to you is not a strategy. But understanding exactly who your dream customer is, discovering where they’re congregating, and throwing out hooks that will grab their attention to pull them into your funnels (where you can tell them a story and make them an offer) is the strategy. That’s the big secret.
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When they entered the new room, he saw a wall full of pictures of “Alexis,” a fictitious character who represented Sally Beauty Supply’s dream customer. The execs then went on to explain that everyone in the company was trained that when they make any decision about what products to purchase, what colors to use in the stores or their branding, what ads to run, what promotions to create, what their websites looked like, and what music to play in their locations, everything was run through the lens of Alexis’s eyes.
If it was something that Alexis would love, then the answer was yes. If it wasn’t something she would love, then the answer was always no. They didn’t run a product-centric company; they ran a customer-centric company. Their customer avatar is what drove everything from the products they created to the ads that they ran.
BECOMING OBSESSED WITH YOUR DREAM CUSTOMERS
The first step in this process is to become obsessed with your dream customer. Companies that become obsessed with their products will eventually fail. I was recently talking to my friend Nicholas Bayerle about the fact that most businesses are created from a problem that an entrepreneur had, and their product or service was the result of them figuring out the solution to that problem. “Our mess becomes our message,”
If that’s true, then you need to look back in time to find the point where you were struggling with the same problem your dream customer has now. Then you need to remember what you were feeling when you were in that pain.
If you want to really understand who your dream customers are and where they are congregating online, you need to be able to enter the conversation that is already taking place inside of their mind and see the world the way that they see it. When you truly understand the core pains they are trying to move away from and the core desires and passions they are trying to move toward, it becomes very easy to identify exactly where they exist online.
THE 3 CORE MARKETS/DESIRES
The three desires (in no particular order) are health, wealth, and relationships. When people purchase any product from anyone, they’re hoping to get a certain result in one of these three areas of their lives. So the first question you need to answer is this: Which of these three desires is my future dream customer trying to receive when they buy my product or service? However, sometimes people get stuck on this question for one of two reasons.
Reason #1 — My product fits into more than one of these desires: Many products can be marketed toward getting a result in more than one of these desires, but your marketing message can only focus on one of them. Anytime you try to get your potential customer to believe in two things, your conversions will usually cut in half (most times by 90 percent or more). To target two different desires, you need two different ads leading to two different funnels. Only focus on one desire with each message you put into the market.
Reason #2 — My product doesn’t fit into any of these desires: Most products can fit into multiple categories, even if they may look as if they don’t fit into any category at all, but no matter what, the key is that your marketing message can and must be focused on only one of the 3 Core Desires.
AWAY FROM PAIN/TOWARD PLEASURE
Every human being on this planet is always moving in one of two directions when they make a decision: away from pain or toward pleasure. Moving Away from Pain: The first direction that people can be moving in is away from pain. Let me show you a few examples of moving away from pain for each desire.
Health (moving away from pain) -- I’m overweight and don’t feel comfortable in my clothes., I hate what I see when I look into the mirror.
Wealth (moving away from pain) -- I hate my job and want to fire my boss., I have no money saved, and I’m scared I could lose my job.
Relationships (moving away from pain) -- I’m in a bad relationship and don’t know how to get out., I feel alone and want to feel what love feels like.
I did three things to try to understand the conversation that they were having with themselves each day,
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- I wrote out hundreds of phrases that I used to say to myself when I was trying to solve the problem for myself
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- I looked online in forums, message boards, and groups to see what others are saying when they are trying to get out of pain.
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- I really tried to put myself in their shoes and wrote out what I believed people were thinking.
Moving Toward Pleasure: They don’t have a desire for health, wealth, or relationships because they are unhappy; they have a desire because they are happy and looking for more.
Health (moving toward pleasure) -- I want to get six-pack abs.
Wealth (moving toward pleasure) -- I want to buy my dream house or dream car., I want to grow my company so I can have more impact.
Relationships (moving toward pleasure) -- I want more passion in my relationships., I want to spend more time with my spouse and kids.
while everyone may be trying to accomplish the same goal, the reasons why they’re doing it are almost polar opposites. The more phrases you can find, the more traffic streams you’ll be able to tap into, so make it a continual process to identify and write down the conversations happening inside of your customers’ minds.
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THE SEARCHER AND THE SCROLLER
No longer would people only buy when they needed something; now advertisers had the ability to create desire and sell people stuff that they wanted. This interruption advertising started happening in other types of media such as radio, newspapers, and direct mail. The process was simple: get a captive audience, entertain or educate them, and then, when you have their full attention, interrupt them with your message. You can then grab their attention and create desire for the product or service that you are selling.
It’s interesting to note that when the internet started a few decades ago, it followed a very similar pattern. It began with searches. People had some type of need, usually to get out of some type of pain, and they would immediately go to the search engines looking for a solution to their problems. Later we were all introduced to social media through platforms including Myspace, Facebook, and Instagram; and just like the Bulova ad in 1941, in 2007 Facebook announced the first-ever social interruption advertising with Facebook Ads. People would be online talking to their friends, posting pictures, liking images and videos, and then suddenly, your ad would show up in their Facebook feed. You’d have a small window of time to grab their attention, create a desire for your product or service, and make a special offer.
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WHAT!?! Was he crazy? There was no way that Cael would lose to Bruce ... That’s when it hit me. TheMat.com was our little corner of the internet. All the wrestlers in study hall were congregated on that website talking about wrestling, but we weren’t the only ones. Wrestlers in other colleges across the country, along with high school wrestlers and their parents, were on the website too. All around the world, hundreds of thousands of people were all together in this one spot to talk about the topic that we loved most: wrestling.
Honestly, that is the real power of the internet: it has allowed us to connect with like-minded people in a way that wasn’t possible before. It’s allowed each of us, with our unique and sometimes weird hobbies and interests, to congregate with our people to discuss the things that mean the most to us.
Magic: The Gathering. Before the internet, groups like this were limited in size to how many people they could find that had the same interests and were located geographically near them.
Here are some questions you should be asking yourself at this point:
- What are the top websites that my dream customers already go to?
- What forums or message boards do they participate in?
- What are the Facebook groups they engage in?
- Who are the influencers they follow on Facebook and Instagram?
- What podcasts do they listen to?
- What are the email newsletters they are subscribed to?
- What blogs do they read?
- What channels are they following on YouTube?
- What keywords are they searching for in Google to find information?
These questions will help you to start identifying where your dream customers are hiding. The answers to these questions should be simple, especially if you are your dream customer.
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THE DREAM 100 (ONE TO ONE)
Then one day Chet had an idea. He did some research and discovered that out of those 2,000 advertisers, 167 of them were spending 95 percent of their advertising budgets with his competitors. So he defined those 167 spending all the money in the industry as his best buyers. Then he stopped marketing to everybody else and focused his time and efforts on those 167 advertisers. His strategy included sending out direct mail pieces with lumpy objects in them every two weeks, where he followed up on each package with a phone call. Twice a month he’d mail a package, and twice a month he’d call.
Then, in his fourth month, something changed. He landed his first big account: Xerox. It was the biggest advertising buy ever for the company. By the sixth month, he had landed 28 of the 167 advertisers. And with those 28 advertisers, Chet doubled the sales over the previous year and went from number 15 in the industry to number 1.
Chet said, “The goal of the Dream 100 is to take your ideal buyers from ‘I’ve never heard of this company’ to ‘What is this company I keep hearing about?’ to ‘I think I’ve heard of that company’ to ‘Yes, I’ve heard of that company’ to ‘Yes, I do business with that company.’”
THE DREAM 100 (ONE TO MANY)
Chet Holmes’s Dream 100 for “One to One” selling strategy is powerful when your business model needs a small number of big customers. But for most of us, we’re looking for lots of customers, not just 100. When I was starting out, many of the things I sold weren’t very expensive, so it didn’t make financial sense to send packages and make phone calls to try to sell a $20 product. That’s why Chet’s Dream 100 concept didn’t make sense when I first heard it; I couldn’t see how it applied to my online business.
I made a list and wrote out everywhere that I could think my dream customers might be gathering. On that list I identified:
- 10+ top websites and forums they spent time on
- 15+ active Facebook groups they participated in
- 50+ influencers they followed on Facebook and Instagram
- 30+ podcasts they listened to
- 40+ email newsletters they subscribed to
- 20+ blogs that they actively read
- 20+ YouTube channels they subscribed to
After making the list, I added up how many subscribers, readers, and followers each of those channels had. I was so excited to find out that there were over 30 million of my dream customers on that little list alone, all congregated inside of those 185-plus communities!
I brainstormed ideas, and that’s when the bolt of lightning hit! The Dream 100!
The second part of the Dream 100 strategy (covered in more detail in Secret #4) works even for those who didn’t respond or weren’t willing to promote my book. Advertising platforms like Facebook allow you to target your ads to people with certain interests. For example, Tony Robbins was in my Dream 100, and while he didn’t directly promote my first book,
I still wanted to market to his (at the time) 3.2 million-person audience, as they were my dream customers too. On Facebook, I was able to buy ads that were only shown to his audience, and we were able to sell thousands of copies of my book to his people!
Our launch campaign for my book may have seemed massive from the outside as we sold over 100,000 copies in a very short period of time, but in reality, we just put a concentrated effort to market to the dream customers of 185 people.
Russell, this may work for you and Rachel when you’re selling books, but I sell something different, so the Dream 100 can’t work for me. It always makes me laugh when people think these concepts will work for every business except their own, when the reality is that this concept works for every business. Period
When people are building a community, they have a real sense of service to that community. We would send them free product and just say, “If you like it, tell people, and if you hate it, tell people that too.” Not trying to steer people’s comments gave us a pretty great recommendation.
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A DIFFERENT DREAM 100 ON EACH PLATFORM
“We can spend a ton of time and money convincing people on these other platforms to move to podcasts, or we can spend that same time and money focusing on the people who are already listening to podcasts. If they find a new show they love, they’ll listen every day!”
That was the big “aha” that set into motion our strategy for building a special Dream 100 list just for our podcast through the other podcasts that our dream listeners were listening to. It also caused us to build out Dream 100 lists for every platform we’ve talked about already.
You see, prior to this big “aha,” we only had one big collective Dream 100 list with people from all the platforms. We hadn’t respected the fact that people like to consume media in their own favorite ways, and while it’s possible to move people from one platform to another, there is much less resistance when you just migrate people to you who are already on the platform that they love.
WHAT ABOUT “BRICK-AND-MORTAR”-TYPE BUSINESSES?
At this point, some of you may be thinking, But Russell, I’m not selling a book or a product online. I’m a local brick-and- mortar business trying to generate local leads online, so this won’t work for me. For all my brick-and-mortar business owners, don’t worry, this strategy still works, even though you will need to look at it a little differently. When building your Dream 100 list, instead of identifying the national influencers or leaders in your niche, you need to identify your local influencers.
For example, if I owned a local juice bar, I would ask myself: Who is my dream customer and where are they already congregating? My dream customer would be someone who is trying to get healthier. To find these dream customers, I would create a list of the local gyms, health food stores, chiropractors, personal trainers, nutritionists, etc., and then start building my Dream 100 from that list.
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CREATING YOUR DREAM 100 LIST
Everything we do from this point forward from paid ads to free traffic to joint ventures will all build from this core foundation of the Dream 100. Yes, it’s simple, but it’s the foundation to everything!
At ClickFunnels, we don’t just leverage the Dream 100 approach for traffic ... we use it for EVERYTHING. How do we pick the market we want to enter? We use the Dream 100 to research different markets and niches, then we narrow in on the ones that suit us best. How do we decide on our blue-ocean strategy? We use the Dream 100 to find the red oceans and carve out our place in the market. How do we create our offers and figure out what’s going to sell? We use the Dream 100 to model offers that are working in our marketplace, which takes out the headache and hassle of “blind guessing.”
THE TWO CORE TYPES OF CONGREGATIONS
Interest-Based Congregations: The first type of congregation is based on interests. In most social networks, after someone joins, the first thing the network tries to do is figure out what things you’re interested in. Facebook is believed to automatically track over 52,000 data points on each user as they are using their platform, which is super annoying as a user but super awesome for us as advertisers.
Search-Based Congregations: When someone goes to Google or any other search platform, they type in a keyword phrase looking for something like: how to lose weight, emergency plumber Boise Idaho, best water filters . As soon as they type a phrase, they enter an existing congregation of people searching for the same thing.
This type of congregation is called a search-based congregation, and searches can occur on Google, Yahoo, or any other search platform. Some popular search platforms at the time of this writing are Quora.com, where people can ask questions on any topic; Pinterest.com, where people search for images; and YouTube.com, where people search for almost everything!
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WHERE DO I START?
At the end of the day, traffic is a numbers game. I want to find 100 (or more) people because even with 100 people, we may only get 5 to 10 of them who are willing to let us get in front of their audience for free. After that, we may only get 10 or so others for whom we’re able to successfully target their audiences on the ad networks, so it’s essential that you cast a wide net. Each of the three markets have an unlimited number of submarkets. For example:
- Wealth → finance, investing, real estate, sales, marketing
- Health → nutrition, strength training, weight loss
- Relationships → marriage advice, dating advice, love
So, for example, if my market is wealth: Wealth → marketing → sales funnels
With that in mind, when I build my Dream 100, I’m not just looking for other people who are selling “sales funnels” stuff. I do add those people, companies, and keywords to my list, but what I’m really looking for is all the other people, companies, and keywords that are within my submarket. They are my warmest traffic and where I focus first.
My goal is to provide my Dream 100’s followers with my new opportunity. I can usually build my Dream 100 from this list pretty easily. But if you’re struggling to identify all the niches within your submarket, just ask yourself this question: What other vehicles are people trying to use to (insert result they desire) with (insert your submarket here)?
In the WEALTH core market with a real estate submarket, I’d ask: “What other vehicles are people trying to use to make money inside the real estate submarket?” The answers to these questions would include: house flipping, short sales, and wholesaling.
In the HEALTH core market with a weight-loss submarket, I’d ask: “What other vehicles are people trying to use to get six-pack abs inside the weight loss submarket?” The answers to these questions would include: Keto diet, vegan diet, meatatarian diet, and bodybuilding.
In the RELATIONSHIPS core market with a parenting submarket, I’d ask: “What other vehicles are people trying to use to have a better relationship with their kids inside the parenting submarket?” The answers to these questions would include: homeschooling, baby sign language, after-school sporting programs, and drama.
Each of these answers is a niche within a submarket with dozens of influencers, companies, and keywords that you can target! Your submarket is where you should focus all of your Dream 100 efforts initially because this is your warmest traffic.
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The framework that Natalie used to get over 120,000 people to buy her book Abs, Core, and Pelvic Floor is called Hook, Story, Offer.
The hook is the image and the headline that Jessica saw as she was scrolling through her feed. It hooked her and stopped her just long enough to get her attention. It then asked Jessica to click on a link, which gave Natalie a moment to tell her story, build a relationship with Jessica, and explain the perceived value of the offer she would be making. Finally, Natalie made her an irresistible offer that would help Jessica to get out of pain and move toward pleasure. This Hook, Story, Offer framework is the pattern that you’ll see over and over again in most ads and funnels online.
HOOK, STORY, OFFER
It’s the core foundation for how we sell anything online. It’s how we diagnose what’s not working in every funnel that we set up. If an ad isn’t working, it’s always because of the hook, the story, or the offer. If a funnel isn’t converting, it’s always because of the hook, the story, or the offer. It really is that simple and probably the most important framework that I am teaching you to master.
Hook: Now that we know exactly where our dream customers are congregating, our job is to throw hooks to them to see if we can grab their attention. The hook is the thing that grabs someone’s attention so you can tell them a story. You see thousands of hooks every day. Every email subject line is a hook, trying to grab your attention for just a moment so you’ll read that email. Every post, picture, and video you see in your feed on Facebook is a hook that is trying to get you to engage so they can tell you a story and then make you an offer. Every picture on Instagram, thumbnail on YouTube, and headline on a blog is a hook designed to grab your attention.
Anything that grabs someone’s attention is a hook, and the better you get at creating it and throwing it into your Dream 100’s congregations, the more attention you will get. What hooks can I throw out that will cause them to stop scrolling and listen long enough to hear my story? Pay attention the next time you’re scrolling to what hooks grab your attention. Why did you stop? Why did you click play? What did the hook say, and how did it make you feel? Answering these questions will help you to become amazing at developing hooks.
Story: After the hook grabs their attention, you now have a small window to connect with them through story. There are two core goals from that story that you are about to tell them.
- The story will increase the value of the offer that you are about to make. By telling the right story (or “epiphany bridge” stories, mentioned in Expert Secrets), you can show the perceived value of what you’re selling and the story will create a desire for them to buy now.
- The story will build a connection with you as the Attractive Character and your brand. Even if someone doesn’t buy something today, if they connect with you, they will become your follower, and then your customer, and eventually your raving fan. Your stories will help them to build a relationship with your brand.
Offer: The hook gets your customers’ attention, the story creates desire, and the last step of every message, post, email, and video is the offer. The offer doesn’t always mean asking people to buy something amazing, although this is my favorite type of offer. The offer could be as small as telling them if they “like this post” or “comment on my video” or “subscribe to my podcast” or “join my list,” you’ll give them a special thing in exchange. The better the offer is, the more likely someone is to do the thing that you actually want them to do. If people aren’t doing what you want them to do (joining your list, clicking your ads, or buying your stuff), the simplest way to fix it is often to increase the offer.
The same thing is true with your ads. If you hook someone, tell them a story, and make them an offer and they still don’t buy, it’s likely that the offer isn’t good enough for them. You may need to tell a better story to increase the perceived value of the offer, or maybe you may need to make a better offer. Add more bonuses, increase how much they get, make it sexier
If any of your traffic campaigns aren’t working, it’s always the hook, the story, or the offer. And if you want to solve all these problems, create better hooks, tell better stories, and make better offers.
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STEP #1—DIG YOUR WELL BEFORE YOU’RE THIRSTY
Now you have your Dream 100, and they have your dream customers. The next question you should be asking yourself is the same question I asked myself: “How do I get my message in front of their audiences?” The first key to the Dream 100 is that you need to dig your well before you’re thirsty. The most common mistake that entrepreneurs make when they start their Dream 100 is to wait to start building relationships with those people until their product is ready. I immediately start digging my well.
First, I subscribe to everything that my Dream 100 are publishing. If they’re on your Dream 100, they probably publish on at least one, if not many, different platforms. do your homework so that when your moment comes with your Dream 100 person, you’re prepared to talk about them. Ask them questions about their life, things they post, and topics they care about. I also watch what my Dream 100 are publishing because, in the future, I might be creating ads for these same people.
Usually, when I tell people to subscribe to everything, they kind of freak out because they don’t want to join over 100 people’s email lists, subscribe to over 100 podcasts, or follow over 100 influencers on Instagram. After all, it would take several hours a day to manage that, right? But the truth is it actually won’t. For the email newsletters, I create a new email address that is set up specifically for my Dream 100 campaign, and I use that new email address to join everyone’s list. I make a filter that pushes each person’s emails instantly into a folder so my inbox stays clean.
I also only use my social apps (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) for two purposes: to produce and publish content, and to spy on my Dream 100. I don’t use them to be “social,” because this is the fastest way to ruin your life. Okay, not really, but seriously ... from this point forward, you should never look at yourself as a “consumer” of social media but as a “producer” of it.
After subscribing to my Dream 100’s content, I try to buy some of their products. This allows me to see their funnels and what they’re selling on their backend and get a good idea of what they are doing. We call this process “funnel hacking,”
The third and last thing I do is look for ways that I can serve my Dream 100. Remember, right now I’m not asking them to do anything for me. I’m digging my well before I’m thirsty to see what I can offer them. One of the best things I can do to help someone after buying their product or listening to their podcast or reading their blog is to talk about it socially. I may make a post on my Facebook wall or on my Instagram stories talking about an awesome podcast I heard or product I bought, telling other people that they should go buy it while tagging my Dream 100 person in the post. I’ve found that this is one of the easiest things I do to get someone’s attention and provide value to them, but it could be anything from sending them a gift to creating videos or images that they could use for their own marketing.
This process may seem like a lot of work—and it is—but it’s the foundation for your entire company. Not only is it the foundation for getting traffic, it’s also the best way to figure out your place in the market’s ecosystem. What value do you have that you can provide to this market that is different? I started doing this through four very strategic phases:
Phase #1 (Day 1–14): I started the process of following my Dream 100 by subscribing and listening to the content they were pushing out. During my twice-a-day, 15-minute social media binges, I would watch what each of my Dream 100 were doing, and then I would look for things that resonated with me. I would quickly comment on what they were publishing, sharing what I thought was special, and looking for ways I could serve them.
Phase #2 (Day 15–30): I would then contact my Dream 100 (via email, direct message, etc.) and open up a dialogue. My goal was never to pitch them anything during this time.
- Red Flag #1: Don’t send a templated message. So many times I see the copy/paste emails that have been sent to 500 other “influencers” that day, and these messages don’t get a response. Write each person a personal message or don’t send anything at all.
- Red Flag #2: Don’t tell me your story yet. There will be a day and time that your Dream 100 will care about your story, but it’s not with the first message. You telling them your story is them serving you, and you have not built up the reciprocity yet. Serve first, or they will never have a chance to serve you later. Treat them right, and one good relationship can be worth millions of dollars to you.
- Green Light #1: This isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen your face. Make sure that they’ve seen your face actively participating in meaningful ways in the discussions they create, so when they see you pop in their inbox or as a direct message, they recognize you. During this phase you are selling you to the Dream 100, not your product. If they don’t like you, they’ll never want to know more about your product.
- Green Light #2: They tell me how great I am. I know that sounds shallow, but come on, there’s a reason we’re doing this. I remember the people who tell me how what I’m doing has impacted them.
- Green Light #3: They’ve done their homework. They know who I am and what I care about, so when we do talk, they ask me about stuff that’s important to me.
- Green Light #4: They don’t ask for anything now. Just don’t do it. Trust me. If you ask too early, the answer will always be no. There will be a time, but that time is not now.
Phase #3 (Day 31–60): Make your Dream 100 your fan. I never ask someone to promote something for me if they haven’t experienced it. Your best promoters will always be your biggest fans. After I have plugged into each person in my Dream 100 and started the process of digging my well before I’m thirsty, there are now two ways that I can get my message in front of my Dream 100’s audiences. First, I can “work my way in” by getting traffic that I earn. Second, I can “buy my way in” by getting traffic that I control.
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STEP #2—WORK YOUR WAY IN (TRAFFIC THAT YOU EARN)
Now, this concept isn’t just a launch strategy. It can and should be a consistent part of your business. To this day, I still do multiple interviews each month for people who have a platform that want to have me on as a guest. Usually at the end of the interview, the host will ask me what I’m working on or where I would like people to go for more information, and I direct them toward whatever funnel we are focusing on at the time.
This can and should be a consistent part of your traffic strategy. This organic, earned traffic oftentimes converts at a much higher rate than almost any form of paid traffic. It’s harder to scale, but your hottest, best buyers will typically come from an endorsement from your Dream 100.
We call this “earned” traffic because you typically aren’t paying for it with money, but you are paying for it with your time. When people are getting started and don’t have an advertising budget, I always recommend starting with earned traffic. The first eight years of my business were entirely fueled by earned traffic. I worked my way into my Dream 100, got in front of their audiences, and, with their endorsements, drove traffic into my funnels. I’ve found that paid traffic will get you started more quickly, but the second you turn off the ads, the traffic stops.
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STEP #3: BUY YOUR WAY IN (TRAFFIC THAT YOU CONTROL)
In a perfect world, every one of your Dream 100 would say “Yes!” and promote you to their audiences on all their platforms daily Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Typically, if I contact all of the 100 people on my list, I’ll usually get about 30 that will say yes, they will help, and then usually only about 10 people will actually do any real promotion. Just because you can’t get them to promote you for free doesn’t mean you can’t still get in front of their audience by running paid traffic.
Now while I’m digging my well and building relationships with people, at the same time I’m buying my way in to their audiences.
First: It’s faster. Paid ads can give you immediate feedback. I can turn an ad on and within minutes have people flooding into my funnels.
Second: It gives me the ability to test out different hooks and see what things people in each of my Dream 100’s audience are clicking on.
Third: 90 percent of my Dream 100 will likely never actively promote me on their own, but I still want to get in front of their audiences, and this is the only way.
Fourth: Paid ads are how you scale a company fast. My number-one goal with every funnel I create is to have a “breakeven” funnel, where for each $1 we put into paid ads, we get at least $1 back.
You see, there are really only two ways to scale a company fast. The first is to take on outside funding and then to use that money to either acquire other companies or pay to acquire customers. However, this way is lazy and inefficient, and I don’t recommend it. I liken this strategy to taking steroids to win a bodybuilding contest. Yes, you won, but you cheated. The better, smarter, and more efficient way to scale a business is to create a funnel that is profitable and then to put as much money into paid ads as possible. When you have a funnel that at least breaks even, then you don’t have an advertising budget and you can spend as much money as you want without it ever costing you anything to acquire customers.
You might still be asking yourself, “Which is better: controlled traffic or earned traffic? The answer is, “Both are essential to the long-term success of your company.” If you only focus on paid ads, you are left at the mercy of the networks that allowed you to buy the ads. If and/or when Google or Facebook slaps or snaps, you can lose the lifeblood of your company overnight. If you only rely on earned traffic, you are completely relying on other people to get your message out to the market.
While the blend of these two types of traffic is the key to building a solid foundation for your company, there is still one other type of traffic that trumps both earned and controlled traffic. Given the chance to have only one, I’d always choose this third and last type of traffic: traffic that you own.
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When someone has spent the time to build a list of followers of 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000-plus people, they can send out an email to that list selling a product. To make $100K, they only need a small percentage of those people to buy the product, yet to someone working for the hourly wage it would take them all year to earn that amount.
Recently I sent an email to my list of 32,000 subscribers and offered them a chance to buy one of my $37 e-books. Of those 32,000 people, only 232 of them decided to purchase (just 0.7%), but that put a quick $8,584 into my pocket. That would have taken the skeptics more than 171 hours (at $50 per hour) to earn the same as I did from less than 15 minutes writing the email and sending it out to my list. Mark Joyner taught me were the same: the list is the key. That’s the big secret. It is the only real asset in any company.
THE ONLY REAL SECRET TO BUSINESS: LIST BUILDING
When you look at the big online acquisitions, it’s interesting to see what the companies are actually buying. In September 2005, eBay purchased Skype for $2.6 billion.10 At the time, eBay was one of the largest online sites and their development team was arguably the best in the world. It would not have been difficult for eBay to clone Skype and make a better product. What Skype had that eBay wanted, though, was 54 million members in 225 countries and territories. eBay was purchasing the list.
We also see it in smaller, entrepreneurial-type companies. Your list is your key to your current and future success online. This is the best type of traffic: traffic that you own. In fact, my only goal with traffic that I control and traffic that I earn is to convert it into traffic that I own. That’s what I learned from Mark Joyner. When I’m buying ads, sure, I want to sell a product, but, more importantly, I want to get those people on a list first. Because when I buy an ad, I’m getting them to click once. When they join my lists, I can email them as often as I like for free, instead of just getting them to click once. It’s the same with traffic that I earn. I want to direct these people into funnels where I get their information and get them on to my lists.
That’s why the concept of the break-even funnel in Secret #4 is so vitally important. All of the traffic I control and earn is always pushed into a front-end funnel that will ask for the visitor to give me their email address, subscribe to a Messenger list, or both. That way, I can convert them from traffic that I control or earn into traffic that I own, where I can market to them for free, over and over again.
UNDERSTANDING THE VALUE OF YOUR LIST
It’s been said that on the low end, you should average about $1 per month for each name on your list, and when I got started, that was true. When I had 500 people on my list, I was making about $500 per month. As I grew, these numbers held true for a while:
- 1,000 people on my list: $1,000 per month
- 10,000 people on my list: $10,000 per month
- 100,000 people on my list: $100,000 per month
But as I’ve gotten better at building a relationship with my lists, these numbers have gone up dramatically. As a worst- case scenario, though, they should follow these metrics. For example, if you know you want to make $100,000 per year, make sure you are focused on getting at least 10,000 people on your list (10,000 people x $1 per month x 12 months = $120,000)
Again, I want to note that these numbers change in every market. Most local businesses may only have 500–1,000 people on their lists, but because of their ability to build a better relationship with that list, they could be making $50– $100 per name per month, whereas with some types of lists (such as retargeting or social lists), you might only make $0.50 per name. I suggest setting a benchmark of $1 per name per month and then trying to beat it.
As a side note, if you think about traditional investments like real estate, I see people all the time spend $250,000 on a rental house and hope that it brings in a positive cash flow of $500 per month. Then they’ll take up to 30 years to pay off the mortgage (i.e., “break even”) while still having to deal with broken toilets, tenants, and more. List building is a completely different investment model.
You might be wondering, “Now that I’ve added someone to my list, how does that grow my company?” Well, the answer is simple. Now that you have created the most valuable thing inside your company, you can then direct your subscribers into “follow-up funnels.”
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David Frey wrote: “A study done by the Association of Sales Executives revealed that 81 percent of all sales happens on or after the fifth contact. If you’re a small business owner and you’re only doing one or two follow-ups, imagine all the business you’re losing. Not following up with your prospects and customers is the same as filling up your bathtub without first putting the stopper in the drain!”
VC-backed companies will go in the hole for 6–12 months or more to generate a customer. That’s right, they sometimes don’t break even for over a year, but they can do that because they’re burning someone else’s money.
THE SECRET TO QUICKLY GROW YOUR LIST WITH PAID ADS
Ideally, we break even in our initial funnel, but sometimes it might take us a few days or weeks to break even using our follow-up funnels. Many times, people will lose some money inside of their front-end funnels and not break even immediately, and because of that they get scared and walk away from it. If they looked closer at their numbers, though, they’d see that they might have been just a few days away from breaking even and that they could still have kept running ads to those funnels profitably, even at a loss.
When someone joins my list, I’ll build a relationship with them. I might send them a few emails making sure they’re able to download the lead magnet I gave them for free, and I might even send a video or an article helping them to get more value from the thing I just offered them. At that point, I would still be $3.00 in the hole for each lead, but I would be building a relationship with them, which means they would be more likely to open my emails and buy things from me in the future. Here’s where the fun begins. The next set of emails in my follow-up funnel would be focused on introducing them to the next funnel in my value ladder.
The next step in the follow-up funnel would be to move them into one of my higher ticket funnels. We call this “funnel stacking.” In this example, the next thing I would invite them to is one of my web classes. I might send a few more emails inviting them to register for the webinar. After they went through that webinar sequence and I made an offer for one of my higher ticket products, the average dollar per lead would increase past the $3.00 I spent for the lead. At that point, I would break even and start making a profit. That means within about a week of paying for that lead, I would be in the black! Anything that those customers bought from me in the future would be pure profit.
Are you seeing how this works? Sometimes the break-even happens inside of the initial front-end funnel, but other times it happens within the follow-up funnel. As soon as I know that I break even on day X of my follow-up funnel, then I go back and spend money to acquire customers, knowing that I’ll have a return on that investment at an already established point.
“Amateurs focus on the first sale.”
Dan Kennedy once said, “Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”14 With good funnels and a strong follow-up funnel, you can increase how much money you can spend to acquire a customer.
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MULTIDIMENSIONAL FOLLOW-UP FUNNELS
So far I have only talked about emails inside your follow-up funnels. In a perfect world, everyone who got an email would read it and click on the links inside. Unfortunately, with people’s attention spans today (down from 20 minutes in the ’90s to just seven seconds today!), a lot of the people you send emails to will never actually open them. Some stats show that as much as 87 percent of emails go unopened! You’re battling for attention every time you send anything.
As the war for attention has grown, a lot of amazing tools have been created that we can plug into our follow-up funnels to make sure people actually see our message. I’ll share with you the ones that I see as the most powerful today.
Retargeting: The first, and one of my favorite tools to plug into my follow-up funnels, is retargeting ads. Have you ever been to a website, and then over the next few weeks, it seems like they’re stalking you online? Everywhere you go, you see their banner ads following you around? That is retargeting, and it’s one of the most powerful ways to push someone through your follow-up funnels and ascend them up your value ladder.
Messenger: In 2011, Facebook created their Messenger program which, for many people, has replaced email as their favorite communication tool. You can add Messenger subscriber boxes into your funnels and get people joining your email list to also join your Messenger lists. This gives you the ability to follow up with people through a different channel than email. It’s a very powerful tool that has a much higher open rate than email. unlike email, where I can send email daily and not have many people upset, with Messenger, I can only send one or two messages a week without losing many subscribers. We strategically place Messenger messages within our follow-up funnels to create a conversation about once or twice per week with a goal to direct people back into a funnel or ascend them into the next one.
Text Messages: We don’t normally try to get someone’s phone number on a traditional landing page, because each new field traditionally lowers conversions, but I do try to grab a phone number when people buy something from us or when they register for a webinar. We can use text broadcasts to make sure people don’t miss the webinar they’ve signed up for, let them know the statuses of their orders, and help move them into the next step in our value ladder.
THE 3 CLOSES: EMOTION, LOGIC, FEAR
As you have seen, we have a lot of tools that we can use to try to get someone to buy from us. But what should go inside of each message? We’ve found that the ones that give you the most leverage include messages based on:
- Emotion
- Logic
- Fear (urgency and scarcity)
The most powerful way to get someone to take action is by using emotion. It’s often been said that people buy things emotionally and then try to justify their purchase logically. The lead of any sales letter, the stories in my webinars, the first emails in our follow-up funnels, and the first ads in my retargeting sequences always speak to people’s emotions.
The top of the page has a headline that appeals to one’s emotions, a video telling stories to get one emotionally interested in the product, and then an order form for one to take action. Fifty percent of my sales will come immediately from people who only see this top block and never scroll. They’re my emotional buyers.
The next 30 percent of buyers are a little bit harder to convince. They’re the analytical buyers. They may have felt something emotionally, but they need to be able to logically convince themselves that the purchase is right for them. Often they’re afraid of what others will think if they buy it, because they have a fear that their status will decrease if the product doesn’t work for them. So under this top section of the page, I transition my message to speak toward their logic.
I also let them know about the money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work so they won’t risk a decrease in status.
The last 20 percent of buyers aren’t as motivated by emotion or logic, but they are motivated by a fear of missing out (FOMO). The only thing that will get them to take the leap is for them to be afraid that you’re going to take it away. Urgency comes from you giving them all the reasons why they need to buy it now, and scarcity comes from all the reasons why this will be gone soon. For this last group, I close almost every sales presentation, letter, and sequence focusing on urgency and scarcity.
I just showed you how the process of Emotion → Logic → Fear works on a landing page, but it also works inside of every follow-up funnel and retargeting sequence. When someone joins a follow-up funnel, my first set of messages focuses on the emotion as I tell stories of other people who have used the product and share the hidden benefits. After a few days, I switch all my messaging to logic, and then the last set of messages will switch to fear.
If I’m only sending out three emails in that step of the follow-up funnel, then I have one for each of the three closes. If I have five emails, I might spend the first three days on emotion, one day on logic, and one day on urgency and scarcity. The number of messages matters less than making sure you hit each of the closes, because each one will bring in a different group of buyers. As I make my transition to the next funnel in my follow-up funnel, I start over with emotional story selling again and get people engaged about the next funnel in the value ladder. This process is true in every type of messaging you put out.
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FOLLOW-UP FUNNELS (SOAP OPERA SEQUENCES) VS. BROADCASTS (DAILY SEINFELD EMAILS)
When someone first joins your list, we plug them into a follow-up funnel. Immediately, they’re put on a Soap Opera Sequence where we tell them stories (providing an emotional close) and lead them through our follow-up funnel. The first set of emails are all about building rapport. Readers usually connect with your story (as you’re the Attractive Character in your business)
Then we transition to the first funnel we’re going to promote in our sequence. We start “Season Two” of our Soap Opera Sequence (SOS) with the stories behind the new product/funnel that we’re introducing them to. We transition the SOS from us (the Attractive Character) to the first product we want to introduce. The SOS moves through emotion, logic, and fear, and it guides people into and through that first funnel. When it’s over, we move to “season three” of our SOS and start our new story about the new product/funnel that we’re introducing them to.
The Daily Seinfeld Emails come after someone has moved through all the Soap Opera Sequences inside of the value ladder and they are done with our follow-up funnels.
After that, people drop off the core list that has ascended your people through your value ladder, and then they’re moved to our daily broadcast list. This is the list that we use to send our daily story-based (Seinfeld) emails to lead people to our new front-end offers and get them to re- register for our webinars and promote our blog posts, podcast episodes, and affiliate offers. This is the bucket we put people into after they have dropped out of the back end of our follow- up funnel.
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Defeated, Arsenio explained that everyone used to answer his calls when he had his own show. But when he didn’t have his own talk show, his so-called friends avoided him. And that was the big takeaway! When you have your own show, everyone answers your calls. Earlier we talked a lot about the Dream 100, and how you can work your way in or buy your way in. In either of those situations, you have more leverage when you have your own show, or your own platform.
Your platform is the true value that you have to provide your Dream 100. It’s more valuable than money, gifts, or anything. The Dream 100 want exposure, and your platform can provide that for them. As cool of a person as I think I am, I’m sure that if I didn’t have my platform of over 2 million entrepreneurs among my email lists, social lists, and podcast listeners, it would have been very difficult to get Tony Robbins, or any of my Dream 100, to return my calls, respond to my emails, or be interested in working with me. None of these people needed another friend. They did need, however, access to my platform, This is the key to working your way in.
the more powerful thing to understand is that today you don’t have to convince a network that you should have your own show. Instead, you can click a few buttons and that fast you can have a show on all the major apps. Right now, the ABC, NBC, and CBS’s on people’s phones are:
- Facebook (talk show)
- Podcasts (radio)
- YouTube (sitcom)
- Instagram (reality TV)
- Blogs (newspaper)
More apps/channels will pop up, but as of right now, the majority of eyeballs are focused on these apps, which each gives you the ability to create your own show for free. But is having your own show the same as having your own list? I would say that the answer is, “Kind of.” With your own list, you own the traffic, but with your own show, you’re renting space and trying to earn eyeballs on someone else’s network.
If Facebook decides they don’t like your show for some reason (and they’ve been known to do it), they can cancel your show or your account without a warning. Until you own the traffic, you’re always left to the whims of the network. So even when starting your own show, remember that the goal is still to turn that traffic that you’re earning into traffic that you own.
YOUR PRIMARY DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL: EMAIL
The key to success with your show is how many people you can get to actually consume what you’re creating. You might be able to rely on each platform promoting you for free, but I never like to include that as part of my marketing plans. Sometimes we’ll create an episode that goes viral and we’ll get millions of views for free, but that’s not something we bank on. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, “After my new episode is live, how can I get people to go and consume it ASAP?” The best way to do that is to leverage the list that you’ve already been building.
We spend all our efforts to convert all traffic we control and traffic that we earn into traffic that we own (our own list) because when we have our own list, we control our own destiny. For that reason, I always look at free, viral traffic as the gravy on top of what might come if I promote the video to the best of my abilities, and I make my number-one goal first and foremost to promote each episode I publish.
In addition to email, you’ll want to continue to build up other lists and distribution channels, such as direct messenger lists on Facebook and followers on Instagram, so you can do “swipe-ups.” Each platform has its own version of a list, but email is the only one you own; you’re renting all the rest and you could lose them at any time.
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YOUR PRIMARY SHOW CHANNEL: TEXT, VIDEO, OR AUDIO
To begin with, you shouldn’t try to create a show on every channel. Doing that will hurt your ability to grow at all. For now, the key is to focus on one channel. for now, you need to focus on just two channels: your primary distribution channel (email) and your primary show channel.
The channel you should be growing your primary show on depends on you, your personality, and your talents. If you’re still not sure which platform you’d like to create your show on, I’d recommend looking at which platform you consume the most content on. Typically, if you love YouTube and spend a lot of time watching videos, you’re going to have the best success creating videos for that platform, because you understand it. If you listen to podcasts a lot, that’s probably the best place to start. Similarly, if you read a lot of blogs, that’s probably the best place to start.
Remember that for now, you should only be building one show on one channel. Do not try to build more than one at this point. In Secret #15, I will show you how to leverage this one primary channel into all the secondary channels, but that does not come now. Focus all your efforts on making your first show successful.
STARTING YOUR SHOW (FINDING YOUR VOICE)
I knew that if I was going to do my own show, I had to be consistent or it wouldn’t work. Out of all the types of shows that I could publish (audio, video, or text), I knew that it had to be simple or I’d never stick to it. The good news for me (and also for you) is during your first episodes, the ones where you are the worst, no one is listening to you yet! That’s why it’s so essential to start publishing your show now, even when you’re not good at it. In the process of doing your show, you will find your voice. Don’t look at your stats, downloads, or numbers at first, because you’re just trying to build the foundation for something great, and it will take time. Let me walk you through the steps that will make your own show a success.
Step #1) Publish daily for at least a year: The first commitment that you have to make is that you will be consistent. If you can publish every day for a year, you’ll never have to worry about money problems again. During the process, you will find your voice, and your audience will have time to find you.
How many great TV shows have you discovered in season three or later? I started watching Game of Thrones after they had released five seasons. This is such a common experience. There is so much content being produced that we can’t possibly discover it all. If step one in building an audience is to create great content, step two is to endure long enough to get noticed. You must be publishing or you will never become relevant, and you must continue publishing if you want to remain relevant.
Step #2) Document the journey: The biggest question and the largest fear that most people have when I tell them to start their own show is they have no idea what they will talk about. “Document, Don’t Create.” hunger to make the perfect piece of content is what’s actually crippling them.
It’s true that if you want to be seen or heard on social media, you have to put out valuable content on a regular basis. You should be doing a YouTube vlog or podcast or some sort of long-form audio/video series at least once a week. You should be posting on Instagram and/or Snapchat stories at least six to seven times a day. I’ll give you the biggest tip when it comes to content creation: Document. Don’t create.
And don’t get confused—just because you’re “documenting” doesn’t mean you’re not creating content. It’s just a version of creating that is predicated more on practicality instead of having to think of stories or fantasy—something that’s very hard for most people (including myself). Think about it: you can ponder about the strategy behind every post and fabricate yourself into this “influential person” ... or you can just be yourself.
You think that some 30- or 40- or 50-year-old is going to listen to your rant video with cynicism and think, What does this kid know? But, one of the biggest mistakes people make when creating content for their personal brand is trying to oversell themselves because they think that’s what’s going to get people’s attention. Whether you’re a business coach or motivational speaker or artist, I think it’s much more fruitful to talk about your process than about the actual advice you “think” you should be giving them.
Documenting your journey versus creating an image of yourself is the difference between saying “You should ...” versus “My intuition says ...” Get it? It changes everything. I believe that the people who are willing to discuss their journeys instead of trying to front themselves as the “next big thing” are going to win.
People listen to my podcasts, read my books, and watch my videos because they’re trying to figure out more ways to market their business. I’m not publishing because I know everything about this topic, I’m publishing because I’m obsessed with this topic. “We get paid a lot to think for other people.”
So my first question for you as you start your show is this: “What is the big result that you’re obsessed with? What are you trying to learn for yourself anyway that you can document as you’re discovering it in real time?”
So, the big question is this: “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on Venture Capital, who are spending money from our own pockets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and the things that we believe in, out to the world, yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.
Inside of this frame, I can talk about, share, and interview people on anything related to helping people sell more of the things that they believe in. In any case, how cool is it now, six years later, that I have documented the entire journey from business failure to growing ClickFunnels to being an over $100-million-per-year company?
Step #3) Testing your material: Publishing your show daily, as you’re documenting your journey, will give you a chance to start testing your material. You’ll discover what messages connect with people, which episodes get shared, and which ones don’t. You’ll see which messages get people to show up and comment and which messages don’t connect. It’s this very process of you showing up consistently and publishing that will help you to refine your message, find your voice, and attract your dream customers to you. It doesn’t matter if your end goal is a book, a webinar, a keynote presentation, a viral video, or something else, the more you publish and test your material, the clearer your message will become and the more people you will attract.
Step #4) Introduction to Your Dream 100: When you start your show, typically you’ll use the first few episodes to tell your origin story, why you created the show, and what people should expect. These initial episodes are important because there will be people who find your show a week from now, some a year from now, and others won’t find it for years, but when they do, and when they get hooked, most people will go back to episode one and binge-listen (or read or watch) to catch up on what they missed. Even though these early episodes are old, they’ll still likely be a starting point for many people that fall in love with your content. After the initial episodes, it’s time to start using your show to infiltrate your Dream 100.
Who are the people on your Dream 100 that have an interesting story they could tell that will relate to your show and have a following of people that you can promote their episode to? You have a platform that you can now leverage to get people on your show, and they have a network that you can advertise their episode to. It’s a huge win-win. In a perfect world, they would promote their episode to their entire following when it goes live (and that does happen at times), but even if they don’t promote, you can still buy ads targeting their audiences on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or wherever their following is.
The reality is that many people you ask will say no, and that’s okay, because you don’t need everyone. You just need one: one guest that you can then leverage to get the others. Typically, most markets have a “good ol’ boys” club atmosphere, and usually a lot of your Dream 100 will be in one or more clubs. To infiltrate and get access to that club, you don’t need to get access to all of them; you just need to have one of the cool kids think you’re cool, and then you’re in.
So your job now is to look at your Dream 100 and start asking them to be on your show. Many will say no, but don’t let that stop you. You only need one yes. As you have a chance to interview your Dream 100 on your podcast, you’ll be giving them a platform for which they’ll be grateful. You’ll be able to spend time building a relationship as you interview them on your show (digging your well before you’re thirsty), and you can tap into their audience to promote their episode, build your show, and get access to their followers.
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we’ll be shifting more into the tactics of how to fill your funnels with your dream customers on the following four advertising platforms:
- Youtube
I could have gone deep into dozens of other platforms, including LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, and Twitch, but I’m only exploring these four platforms in order to show you a framework and pattern that you can learn and use on any platform that you’d like to get traffic from in the future. Depending on when you’re reading this book, admittedly, some of these platforms may no longer be relevant, and there will likely be many to come that no one has even heard of yet.
Showing you the strategy and tactics on one platform is the equivalent of “giving a man a fish,” and teaching you the framework to get traffic from every platform is the equivalent of “teaching a man how to fish.”
THE “FILL YOUR FUNNEL” FRAMEWORK
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Step #1—Understand the history and the goal of the new platform: If you want to know where the platform is going, you have to know where it came from. How did Google start? Where did Facebook come from? How did the algorithms change and, more importantly, why did they change? What was the purpose behind them? If you can understand why they made the changes, then you can start thinking like them. This is so important because by the time you are reading some of these chapters, the algorithms may have already shifted, so it’s essential that you understand the history so you can see where we are today. As you start getting a layout of each platform’s history, you’ll quickly start to see what their end goals are.
Google wants to make sure that they give their users the best search results possible. Facebook wants to make sure you love the things that show up in your feed. Once you understand that creating the best user experience possible is their goal, then you can start asking yourself how you can align with their goals. The goal of spammers is always to hack the algorithm to get what they want, which always provides short-term gains, because as soon as the spammers are identified, the loopholes that they have been exploiting are taken away. Instead, if you align with the wills of the network and give them what they want, then they’ll give you what you want: tons of traffic.
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Step #2—Find and model your Dream 100: The next question is, who on this platform has already figured this out? Who has already identified your dream customers, who is publishing to them, and who is getting rewarded by the platform by getting tons of views or likes
- Question #1: Who is your dream customer?
- Question #2: Where are they congregating?
- Question #3: Who are your Dream 100 on this platform who have already congregated your dream customers?
so if you want to know what the platform wants today, in real time, then you have to be watching closely what they’re doing in real time. Here are the three things it will take to funnel hack social algorithms:
Follow each of your Dream 100 and spend 10 minutes each day watching what they are doing. Write down the answers to these questions: What are they posting?, How are they getting people to engage with what they post?, What paid ads are they running?
During these 10 minutes, try to comment, like, and engage with as many things they are doing each day as possible.
Notice the pattern of what is working right now and model it for your posts (funnel hacking). This will give you a pulse on what is working in the market on that platform right now. It gives you the ability to see in real time what the algorithms are rewarding today.
Funnel hacking is not copying. Funnel hacking is modeling, and there is a big difference between copying and modeling. You’re looking for the types of things the platforms’ algorithms are currently rewarding that you can then model.
When the pattern interrupt becomes the pattern, it stops being as effective. Notice that I didn’t say they stop working; they just become less effective. So if you are starting right now, and you see all of your Dream 100 doing something, you should still model what they’re doing. It may not be as effective as a new pattern interrupt, but it is the current pattern that is working, so that’s where you start. After you model the pattern that’s working, the next phase of funnel hacking the social algorithms is to look for and test ideas that will become the next pattern interrupt
Following your Dream 100 lets you have your fingers on the pulse of what’s working currently in each platform. You can model ideas that they’re trying, come up with your own unique ideas, and test them both to see which ones stick. Because the algorithms are always changing, it’s essential that you network with and stay close to your Dream 100.
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Step #3—Identify the publishing strategy and create your publishing plan:
Each platform has multiple ways that you can publish your content, so it’s essential to understand the strategy for each section and how you can weave it into your daily publishing schedule. For example, Instagram lets you do stories that are similar to a reality show, but you also have your profile, which is more like a picture gallery. Questions I would start asking myself are: “How often should you be doing Stories and what do you post on your profile, and how often?” There are a lot of possibilities, so you want to understand all the publishing opportunities on each platform, decide which you want to focus on, and figure out a plan to make it simple to consistently publish on your chosen platform.
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Step #4—Work your way in:
After I start publishing on each platform and I have content that my dream customers can see, I look for ways to work my way into the Dream 100. I start asking myself the question, how can I get organic, free exposure to the audiences of the people who have already congregated my dream customers, and then get these people to join my lists and become traffic that I own?
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Step #5—Buy your way in:
While I’m working my way in, I want to stimulate growth as fast as possible. The best way is to buy ads targeting the followers of my Dream 100 and then get these people to join my lists and become traffic that I own.
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Step #6—Fill your funnel:
As you’re publishing, working your way in, and buying your way in, the goal is always to convert all the traffic and attention into traffic that you own. You do that by pushing people into your funnels where you can get their contact information, sell them your front-end products, and then push them through a follow-up funnel to ascend them up your value ladder.
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“Well, when you go to a party, do you just talk about what you do? ‘Hey, I’m Perry, and I sell stuff. Would you like to buy some stuff from me?’ No, of course not. If you did, you’d be the biggest jerk at the party. Everyone would avoid you. “Okay, then what do we talk about on the social networking sites? As an introvert, I’ve never really networked in real life, so I’m not sure how or what I should be saying.”
“You talk about what’s going on in your life,” Social networking is just a great big party.
“The second part of the process is how I use my personal profile on each social platform,” Perry continued. “My personal profile is my house, it’s my home, it’s where I live. It has most of my thoughts, my information, and stuff that is interesting to me. They can see the things that I like to talk about.”
“Now, this is how it works. When I go into groups and start networking, or I see someone else’s posts in my feed, I go and participate in the conversations and make friends. As they see me consistently show up, they will want to drop by my house and see what I’m all about. Give them some free stuff like chips and dip (free content) to get them to come to your house. Then when they’re at my house, that’s where I invite them to take action with me: register for my webinar, attend my next event, read my new book, or join my newsletter list. That’s how I invite people from my house into my funnels. Those selling conversations don’t have a place on social media, but they do at your house. You can direct people into your funnels from the posts you make on your own personal profile. If you provide value on the social platforms, people will come running to your house because they want more of you, and from there, they will flow into your funnels.”
I changed my tactics, deleted all my posts that were trying to sell my products, and started serving, interacting, being entertaining, and having fun with my followers.
I wanted to give you this context before we discussed any of the specific networks, because this is how we “work our way in.” It’s the core concept that you have to master if you want to have success with social media, no matter which platform you are focusing on. Those who just spam their message to their followers will always think that social media doesn’t work. Even if they do get some short-term results, they won’t last. On the other hand, those who play the longer game and plant seeds with their followers will end up with a constant stream of traffic flooding into their funnels.
PRODUCER, NOT CONSUMER
I’ll start by saying that yes, you are currently spending way too much time on social media. I don’t care who you are; you are probably already spending way too much time consuming social media. If you’re spending more than 10 minutes a day consuming social media, then you are wasting your time. The keyword here is “consuming.” As of today, you are no longer a consumer of social media. You are a producer of social media. There is a big difference.
The first step in this process is to do a social media reset. That means unfriending and unfollowing almost everyone on every platform that you’ll be using to generate traffic. That way, you won’t be distracted by the nonsense that everyone around you is posting. From here on out, you’ll use social media as a business tool, not a social tool. After you unfriend everyone, I suggest only following your Dream 100 on each platform. That way, when you log in to any of the platforms, you’ll be able to quickly get a glimpse of what they’re posting and get ideas for things that are working well that you can model. Also, you will be able to start digging your well with these people by commenting on their posts and messaging them through direct messages.
Now that your social feed has been cleaned up, go and look for the social parties that have the most people engaged in them. You wouldn’t go to a party that only has a few dozen people; instead you would look for the largest parties in town where you can get the most exposure for your efforts. Depending on the platform, you’ll be looking for the largest groups, podcasts, blogs, videos, and Fan Pages that you can go to and become the life of the party. As you participate in these groups and serve their audiences, the people will naturally start coming back to your home.
I want to bring up the concept of producer versus consumer now so you will be able to look at everything that happens in the next few chapters through this lens. This way, you can focus on serving your audience, not wasting your precious time.
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Adding paid ads into the strategies you’ve been learning about is like adding lighter fluid to a pile of charcoal. You will get results faster on any funnel you want to promote and be able to more predictably control sales over the long-term. As always, we’ll be staying away from the exact tactics that often change and focus instead on the overarching strategies that will help you to build out your paid traffic plan.
One thing John told me as we were mapping out this chapter was: “While it’s true that each advertising network has little intricacies and nuances that can take a while to get used to, and there are definitely tips and tricks that can incrementally improve your performance, the good news is that the strategy of advertising on these networks is the same. The specifics of the platforms can be learned with online tutorials, or they can be hired out, but the strategy needs to be understood by you (the entrepreneur) in order to succeed.”
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WHAT IS MY ADVERTISING BUDGET?
If they have a funnel that is break even or profitable, then they don’t have an advertising budget. Their goal is to spend as much money profitably as possible because each dollar they spend turns into more dollars. We’ll keep running ads for as long as it stays profitable.
I never like putting very much of my money at risk at any given time, so with each new funnel, as soon as it’s live, we set up a few ads, give it a small test budget, and see what happens. The funnels that flop are sent back to the drawing board to get reworked, and the funnels that work are scaled to see how much money we can profitably spend.
PROSPECTING ADS VS. RETARGETING ADS
John explained, “Prospecting ads are the act of reaching out into the networks to find cold traffic or people who aren’t familiar with you or your offers and hook them long enough to get their attention. After we’ve gotten their attention and gotten them to engage with us (engage could mean they watched, liked, or commented on an ad), then we move them from the ‘prospecting’ pool into the ‘retargeting’ buckets. We then advertise to these people differently and work to warm them up and then get them into our value ladder.”
STEP #1: CREATE LOTS OF PROSPECTING ADS TO “HOOK” YOUR DREAM CUSTOMERS
When you’re thinking about prospecting ads, you’re looking at a huge ocean of people—all who need your product or service but all who have a different reason why. If you try to create just one hook, it may last for a while and grab the people who are looking for that hook, but it will dry up very fast. The more creative you can put into the prospecting ocean, the more fish (dream customers) you’re going to be able to pull out.
Targeting for Prospecting Ads
The next step after you have made your creative is to figure out who to show it to. John explains:
Dream 100: The best place to start is your Dream 100 list for that platform. When you’re running ads on Facebook and Instagram, you can target people who have an interest in a certain thought leader, brand, or celebrity. You’ll find many (but probably not all) of your Dream 100’s followers targetable this way in the Ads Manager. For YouTube, you can specify that you’d like your ads to show in front of your Dream 100’s videos both individually or their channel as a whole.
Ideal customer avatar: Second on your targeting list is your ideal customer avatar. Think about their interests, their age, their career, their home life, and anything else you can identify. Most of these ad platforms will allow you to get pretty specific on who you show your ads to.
Overlapping sections of multiple audiences: Some ad networks let you get more specific in targeting your audiences by layering on multiple criteria and then just targeting the overlapping sections. Think of three overlapping circles, each representing one of the audiences above and then imagine a center area where they all overlap. This center area represents the sweet spot where your dream customer is most likely to be. An example of this would be to not just target Tony Robbins’s followers in one campaign, business owners in another, and women between the ages of 35–55 in a third campaign. Being smart with your audiences and layering them can really help bring your costs down and improve your results.
Algorithms: The last thing, and honestly where the networks are working toward, is for you to rely on the algorithms to do a lot of the legwork for you. The platform algorithms can work with that data and actually start lending a hand in your targeting efforts. In Google and YouTube, they’re called Similar Audiences, and in Facebook and Instagram, they’re called Lookalike Audiences. In both cases, you decide which bucket to use as the source, the algorithm then looks deep into who those people are, and then matches up others in your specified geographical range who are most similar to them (and thus more likely to care about what you have to offer).
80/20 Rule for Prospecting
One thing to note when running prospecting ads is that these types of ads are the most expensive, but they are vital for two reasons. First, it’s through prospecting that you find out who is actually responding to your ads so your targeting becomes more on point (which brings your costs down). Second, it’s prospecting that fills your retargeting buckets. If you stop prospecting, you’ll soon find yourself with no one to retarget to. When you put up your first ads, they’re almost always going to a colder audience, a group of people who don’t know you and don’t know what you have to offer. It will always be more expensive and less efficient to advertise to this crowd, but when you’re getting started, you have no other choice. Results will come slower with these prospecting efforts and costs to get a lead or a sale will be much higher (sometimes even so high that you’re losing money to begin with). In fact, don’t be surprised if you spend 80 percent of your advertising budget in this category and it only generates 20 percent of your results.
But if you hold strong, there is a light at the end of this tunnel. You see, while one purpose of the prospecting campaigns is to generate some leads and sales upfront, the bigger purpose is to fill all your retargeting audiences (which include your social followings and lists). It’s from these new followers and retargeting audiences that you’ll often see 80 percent of your results while only using 20 percent of your budget.
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STEP #2: USE A RETARGETING FUNNEL TO CREATE CUSTOMERS
In Secret #6, we talked about the power of following up with your prospects through follow-up funnels using their email address. But what about all of the people who watch your videos or come to your funnel but don’t give you their email addresses? How do you follow up with all of them? The answer is through retargeting ads. There are three specific audiences that are essential to a high- performance retargeting plan. Each is based on how far viewers got along the customer journey.
Audience #1—Engaged: The first audience you’ll want to build is an audience based on viewers having engaged with you. Did they watch your YouTube videos this week? Did they watch one of your prospecting ads and make a comment recently? These people interacted with your post but never left the platform to pursue your offer. While they have made a minor commitment to you, it’s nothing serious. These people are worth some continued ad dollars but not too much or for too long. I tend to run an ad to this audience for up to five days. If they haven’t visited my landing page by that point, I let them fall out of the audience and return to the prospecting pools from whence they came.
Audience #2—Landed: The second audience you’ll want to build is made up of the people who clicked through and landed on your page. These people took a bigger commitment, left the platform, and visited your sales funnel. While they trusted you with their curiosity and visited your page, they didn’t take any further action by opting in or purchasing. I tend to run an ad to this audience for up to seven days trying to get them to come back and take me up on my lead magnet. Again, if they don’t opt in or buy within seven days, I just let them fall out of this audience.
Audience #3—Owned: The third type of audience you’ll want to have is made up of those who did take your lead magnet and those who purchased. These people have made a large commitment and have entrusted you with email addresses and credit card numbers in exchange for your goods. This is the traffic that you now own. Not only are they now on your follow-up funnel sequences, but they’re also prime candidates for seeing ads for your next offer or an offer one step up the value ladder.
Unlike prospecting ads where I’m making new creative as often as possible, with your retargeting campaigns, you’re focusing on creating them once and you will never touch them again. It’s similar to a Soap Opera Sequence inside of a follow-up funnel that you write once, and it lasts forever. As we move people through the retargeting buckets, we use the same three closes you learned about earlier: starting with emotion, then moving to logic, and ending with fear (urgency/scarcity). That is how we pull people into action throughout each retargeting campaign.
The lowest hanging fruit in the advertising world is running ads to your subscribers, followers, and ever-growing lists that you own. And while only a third of the emails you send may get opened, you can always run ads to your lists, often reaching those who didn’t originally open the emails and greatly increasing your overall conversions from these lists.
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STEP #1: UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY AND THE GOAL
If you are “working your way in,” then you win this game by:
- Attracting followers
- Creating content that engages them and keeps them coming back to the platform for more
As you do that, you can use that attention to get free, organic traffic into your funnels. If you are “buying your way in,” you win by showing your ads to your Dream 100’s followers and pushing them into your funnels. As with all platforms, I believe we should be playing both sides: working our way in and buying our way in.
STEP #2: FIND YOUR DREAM 100 ON THIS PLATFORM
The first step, as you’ll soon see with every platform, is to identify the Dream 100 that have already congregated your dream customers on the platform you are starting on. Follow each of them and set up a plan to spend a few minutes each day viewing all their Stories, posts, and ads. This will help you to identify the patterns that are making these people successful. Each day, I spend three to five minutes viewing my Dream 100’s posts looking for:
- What pictures “hook” me and make me want to read the caption
- Which captions make me want to take an action
At the same time, I:
- Like the posts from my Dream 100
- Comment on at least 10 of my Dream 100’s posts each day (digging my well)
I also spend five minutes watching Instagram Stories from my Dream 100:
- Looking for cool ideas on ways they’re engaging people
- Checking out where their swipe-ups push me to
- Messaging (DM’ing) on at least 10 of their videos (digging my well)
- Looking for the swipe-up ads that are shown to me and funnel hacking them (swiping up on them)
Remember, you’re now a producer of social media, not a consumer. Don’t get caught in the trap of following tons of interesting people who will distract you and waste your time.
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STEP #3: IDENTIFY THE PUBLISHING STRATEGY AND CREATE YOUR PUBLISHING PLAN
Here are the core areas of the platform we’ll be focusing on. The first I call “content hooks,” where you are producing images and videos in a way to grab your dream customers and turn them into your followers. We rarely, if ever, actually sell anything in this content; we only focus on getting people to like, comment, and follow.
- Instagram profile (your gallery)
- Instagram TV (your produced video content)
The second section of the app is your home. This is where you’re able to direct people into your funnels and actually sell.
- Instagram Stories (your reality show)
- Instagram Live (your live show)
Again, I want to mention that these platforms, their features, and the strategies for them are always evolving, so view this chapter as a baseline, and watch your Dream 100 closely so you can model and innovate on any and all algorithm changes as they come.
Again, copying is not the goal; on the contrary, copying is illegal and unethical. Modeling is watching what others in your market are doing so you can get ideas on what you can create. To have success on Instagram or on any platform, you have to be you. Your brand and your personality are the keys to getting people to follow and engage with you. The differences you bring into the ecosystem that you serve is the secret that will create your true fans.
The first step, then, when setting up Instagram is to quickly communicate in your bio who you are as the Attractive Character. When people find you on Instagram, the first thing they’ll do is check out your bio. You also get one link that you can use to direct people back into one of your funnels (converting them from traffic that you’ve earned into traffic that you own). I suggest looking at your Dream 100’s bios, seeing what’s working, choosing what you like, and modeling them to create your own unique bio.
Instagram Profile Strategy (Your Gallery)
Your Instagram profile is the core foundation of your Instagram strategy. The hook (your pictures): After someone looks at your bio, the next thing they’ll see is a grid of all the pictures and videos that you’ve posted. Each picture is a hook that can potentially grab someone who is scrolling on Instagram and pull them into your funnels.
Jenna Kutcher give a presentation on her “JK5 Method” framework. I started using it a few years ago, and I still use it to this day because it makes posting to my profile simple and fun. To implement the JK5 Method, you first need to create five main categories of things you’re passionate about. This will help to give you a recognizable brand, and as you post images, you’ll simply rotate through these categories so your followers get a good understanding of who you are beyond what you sell.
For Jenna, her five categories are marriage, body positivity, photography, fashion, and travel. If you scroll through her profile, you’ll notice that she cycles through these categories. The categories I came up with for my brand were family, funnels, faith, entrepreneurship, and personal development.
No two categories live next to each other in the grid, giving you extra visual element, but also giving people a way to find a way to connect with you, even if they currently aren’t on the market for what you’re selling.
It’s important we talk about the overall vibe of your “grid.” Essentially, your grid is what users see when they scroll through to see multiple images all lined up in rows of three. It’s easy to get obsessive about your overall grid aesthetic but what I love about the JK5 is that it gives people an overarching view of your brand when they click to see your full profile. If you truly follow the five- category rotation, viewers will see more than just what you sell but be able to also see if they can connect to your account enough to FOLLOW you.
When you’re posting on your profile, never post in real time; your posts should be thought out and strategic. (Real time posting is for Instagram Stories.) I suggest creating a new album for each of the five categories in your JK5. Then look back through your camera roll and move all the existing pictures you’ve taken in the past into these albums. Moving forward, when you take new pictures with your phone, always add them into these albums.
Instagram also allows you to post videos on your profile that are under 60 seconds, so as you capture short videos that fit into your JK5, save them in your albums as well. Before posting any picture or video, though, I highly recommend using Jenna’s “ABCDQ Test” to see if it is “on brand” and therefore worthy for your profile. Here is the test:
- Aesthetic: Does it visually show something that fits the personality of my brand?
- Brand: Is it aligned with my dream client or something they will engage with?
- Consistent: Is it consistent in terms of color or quality to fit within my overall feed?
- Diversity: Is this something different than my last post? Does it create recognition beyond what I sell?
- Quality: Is this up to the quality I want my clients/followers to expect? If this stood alone, would it fit my brand?
The story (captions): After you run it through the ABCDQ Test and you’re ready to post the image, you need to think about arguably the most important question of all: “What am I going to say about this picture?” The picture is the hook that brings people in and grabs their attention, but the caption tells your story and tries to engage the reader before you make your offer or CTA.
Goal of Post. Each post you make should have one goal. As I post any picture and write its caption, the first thing I do is decide if the hook is meant to inspire, educate, or entertain:
- Inspire: It compels others to feel inspired and capable of big things.
- Educate: It teaches or educates your followers on a subject.
- Entertain: It provides entertainment for your followers.
Type of Caption. After I decide the goal of the post, I try to figure out the type of caption to post. According to Jenna, the three most common types of captions and how to use them in business are:
- Tell a story: The posts that do the best on Instagram have one thing in common: they invite you into the story and make you feel a part of the moment, as if you’re experiencing it beyond the screen. I’m not talking “once upon a time”–type stories but relatable life experiences that others can connect with.
- Ask a question: Having an audience (whether it’s 10 people or 1,000 people) gives you access to people that can help you create the perfect offer! When you’re not sure what to post, ask a question. People love to feel heard and be able to share their opinions. At least once a week I love to ask a question. Often, it’s as simple as: “What is the best book you’ve read recently?” or as complex as: “Tell me what you’re struggling with when it comes to Instagram so I can help you!”
- Make a list: You can have a lot of fun with captions by sharing a short list! Some examples include: three things people might not know about you, five facts about your business, three ways to use your products, or the seven best books you’ve ever read. Lists are a fun way to deliver a caption that is easy to read or interesting; they can also further connect you to your followers in unexpected ways beyond the traditional brand stories you tell!
Hashtags. So what is a hashtag, and why do you need it? If you think of Instagram as a huge filing cabinet, then the hashtags are the filing folders. When someone searches a hashtag, Instagram finds all the images that use that same hashtag and gives you a gallery of only those images.
You can use up to 30 hashtags with each post to help your images, or hooks, show up in the searches and feeds of your dream customers. Hashtags are the equivalent of keywords in search engines. Sometimes, you can put your hashtags in your actual caption (we call these overt hashtags) where your audience will see them, but typically most of your hashtags will be posted in the first comment after you post your image (we call these covert keywords).
There are many online research tools that can help you to figure out the best hashtags for your posts, and I do recommend using them, but the easiest way to research what hashtags you may want to use is to go back to your Dream 100.
The offer (your call to action): The last step in creating your post is your CTA. Every single post needs a CTA, and it can vary from being a very small ask to being a big CTA. Examples of small asks include: “Double tap,” “Hit the ‘like’ button,” “Post an emoji,” or “Comment below.” Examples of bigger calls to action include: “Share this post,” “Tag 3 friends,” “Click the link in my bio,” or “Sign up for ____.”
When people comment, you should be responding to their comments. This will get them more likely to comment in the future, and it gives other people extra motivation to comment as well. Now, let’s quickly recap the basic process to follow when making posts on your Instagram profile:
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Follow the JK5 Method and create five main categories of things you’re passionate about.
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Each day, post two pictures on your profile (rotate through your JK5 categories).
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Decide the goal of each post: Inspire, Educate, or Entertain.
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Decide the type of caption to use: Story, Ask a Question, or Make a List.
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Choose the hashtags that will make your post show up for your dream customer.
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Add a CTA to get your audience to engage with you.
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Instagram TV Strategy (Your Produced Video Content) -- Instagram TV was originally created to be a competitor of YouTube.
Instagram Stories Strategy (Your Reality Show) -- At the top of the Instagram app, above your feed, you’ll find a section showing the “Stories” for each of the people that you follow (your Dream 100). Each video is just 15 seconds long, and you can post as many each day as you’d like. Because they disappear after 24 hours, you don’t have to be as methodical about each post, caption, and CTA as you are with your profile posts. These Stories are more freestyle. Personally, I look at my Instagram Stories as my personal reality show where my fans and followers can see behind the scenes of what I’m doing each day. I’m literally documenting my journey through the day in short, 15-second mini videos.
By letting them participate in the process, they’re more invested in what I’ve actually been doing. They’re more likely to buy what I am creating when it’s ready. Instagram Stories are the most powerful way I’ve ever seen to have your audience build a relationship with you as the Attractive Character. Each day, I usually try to make at least one pitch for something I’m excited for. Instagram stories are my home where I’m able to push people into my funnels and actually sell to them.
After your account grows to 10,000 followers, though, you can unlock a really cool feature called “swipe up.” If you’ve been following others on Instagram, you’ve undoubtedly seen people do this before. They’ll make a pitch for something and tell you to swipe up to get access to it. When they swipe up on the screen, they will be redirected to any link you want.
Every day, I try to make 10–30 posts on Instagram Stories throughout the day documenting my journey. I’ll typically make one that directs people to my profile to comment on whatever picture I posted that day. I’ll also make one with a swipe-up CTA such as getting them to visit a funnel, listen to a new podcast episode, watch a video on YouTube, or engage with me in a way outside of the Instagram platform.
Story Highlights: These show up under your bio and above your grid. The way you use Highlights ties back to the JK5 Method, where you pick the five categories that your brand will be known for and create a “Highlight” for each one.
“Highlights” mini webinar hack: We have a little trick that we use to leverage Highlights to sell a lot of products. About once per month, I pick one of my products that I want to promote. I block out a full day in my Stories devoted to promoting that product with a mini webinar. Basically, throughout the day, I’ll post 15–50 Stories going through a scripted presentation to sell one of my products. Of course, I’ll usually make a ton of sales on that day. But because I save it as a Highlight, it will continue to sell for me every day.
In the first three Stories, I ask three yes or no questions that I know will hook my viewers. For those who have read Expert Secrets, these questions will seem familiar as they sync with the perfect webinar script. Question one is about the vehicle that I’m trying to put them into, question two relates to their internal struggle, and question three deals with their external fears.
My next few Stories will relate back to the questions I just asked. I like to use the framework: Feel, Felt, Found. I might say something like: I understand how you feel ..., I felt the same way ..., This is what I found ... Then I make a few Stories introducing a special offer I created that will solve the problems people said yes to in the first three Stories.
Over the next 5–20 Stories, I’ll show the proof. I’ll say something like, “Don’t take my word for it. Check out what others are saying.” Then I’ll post as many proof images, slides, and videos that I have related to the offer. This is one of my favorite ways to get consistent sales from Instagram. As people land on your profile and start following you, one of the first things they look at are your Highlights, so having a few in there that push your front-end funnels
Instagram Live Strategy
The last way to publish on Instagram is Instagram Live. Because Instagram Live and Facebook Live are so similar in their functionality and use, I won’t be spending much time on Instagram Live. One difference between Facebook Live and Instagram Live is that all Lives on Instagram are stored on the platform for only 24 hours, and then they’re gone. On Facebook, however, your Lives are stored on the platform forever, so you can continue to boost and promote your Lives. I suggest you focus all your Live efforts on Facebook as your message can get more views over the long run.
Your Publishing Plan
When I first started looking at this platform, I thought that publishing on it would be another part-time job. So for me to get this to work, I had to build out a publishing plan that I could do in less than an hour each day and that was simple and effective enough for me to stick to it.
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STEP #4: WORK YOUR WAY IN
The next level of growth starts when you tap into your Dream 100 and their followers using the power of Instagram TV.
You can do similar things when you meet your Dream 100 in real life, at conferences and events. Take a picture with them, post it to your profile tagging them, and have them post it to their profile and tag you. The possibilities are endless. Creative ideas like this are the key to working your way into the followers of your Dream 100.
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STEP #5: BUY YOUR WAY IN
To quickly grow your Instagram following, you need to show up on your Dream 100’s channel. Our favorite way to buy our way in is by getting a “shout-out.” A shout-out is exactly what it sounds like it is. Basically, one of your Dream 100 posts on their profile or in their Stories about you. In their shout-out, they’ll usually mention your name, tell people to follow you, and tag you. The tag makes a clickable link on Instagram where people can click on your tag and be taken immediately to your profile, which is why it’s so important to optimize your profile page.
For example, we found someone on our Dream 100 list (@prbossbabe), sent her a copy of my 30 Days book when it first came out, and paid her to do a shout-out. She posted a picture of herself with the book, told the story of the book, and then “shouted me out” by tagging me. This tag directed people back to my profile to find out more. She made this post on her profile, and she also published a few Stories with swipe-ups that took people directly to the book funnel.
You can approach people in your Dream 100 to do paid shout-outs, but there are also a lot of agencies that specialize in getting shout outs for you. You can hire them, and they’ll do all the work to find the people, get you the shout out, and get people to your profile page.
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STEP #6: FILL YOUR FUNNEL
The last step in this framework is to then use all this exposure and engagement to convert all of this traffic into traffic that you own. We use your Instagram profile and TV to find people and turn them into subscribers.
As your following is growing, you can then start using your Instagram stories and get people to swipe up and push your followers into your funnels. You can also use our “Highlights mini webinar hack” to create mini webinars on your Highlights that will presell your people on the products or services you are selling in your funnels!
The last step is to start running prospecting ads (as shown in Secret #9) to find more of your dream customers and move them into your retargeting buckets so you can get them into your funnels.
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STEP #1: UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY AND THE GOAL
Yes, over one-quarter of the world’s population is plugging into the Facebook network daily. It’s the biggest social party of all time, and unless some type of government regulation breaks up their monopoly, it will continue to grow.
Facebook has had a lot of scandals around how they handle their users’ privacy and data, which can be super annoying as a user of Facebook, but it can be a huge blessing as an advertiser on their platform. Facebook tracks everything you do: What do you like? Which things do you comment on? Which types of posts do you engage with? All in all, they have up to 52,000 data points on every individual that they accumulated as you were scrolling, clicking, and commenting. Their goal is to figure out what you like and show you more of that in your feed.
Because Facebook is tracking so many aspects of your behavior, it gives us as advertisers the ability to target people based on what they’ll probably like (their interests).
Facebook is a growing platform, and although I’m taking a snapshot of how it works today, it will continue to evolve. The good news is that even though Facebook’s features, tactics, and user interface change often, your overarching strategy does not. Whenever I’m diving into a new platform, I always begin by asking myself these three questions:
- What is the goal of the platform?
- What is the strategy that I can use to help the platform with its goal?
- What are the tactics that the platform is rewarding people for right now?
For example, the goal of Facebook is to have its users create content that will keep people on their platform for as long as possible so they can show them ads. Our strategy is to figure out what content Facebook is rewarding people for right now and how Facebook wants that content to be promoted (both free and paid)
The tactics are what that content looks like. This changes daily, but we can get a glimpse of what is working right now by watching our Dream 100
STEP #2: FIND YOUR DREAM 100 ON THIS PLATFORM
Surprise, surprise. The first step when you start using Facebook is to identify your Dream 100 that have already mastered this platform and congregated your dream customers. Your Dream 100 are the people, experts, influencers, and brands in your market that have already congregated your dream customers.
There will likely be a few big names in your market that you’re already familiar with, which is where I would start. Find their Fan Pages and “like” and “follow” those pages. Then find their personal pages and try to friend request them and follow their personal profiles too. Typically, after you do that, Facebook will find other people who have similar followings that you could follow. Go down that rabbit hole and start following every influencer you can find in your market that has a following. The same is true with groups. You can search for groups in your market and join them, and as you do, more groups will be “suggested” to you by Facebook. Join the ones that your dream customers are already congregating in.
Finding your Dream 100 is not a one-time activity but instead an “every time” activity where every time you’re on Facebook, you should look for these new congregations or people and plug into them as they start showing up in your feed. As you do this, your Facebook feed will become the best market research tool in the world. You’ll see every important conversation that your dream customers are engaging in. You’ll see every ad being run to your customers.
This is what your Facebook feed is for: mastering your market. My goal when following all influencers in my market is to plug into an ecosystem of at least 1 million people. For example, if I’m able to find 20 people to follow, and each of them has a following of 30,000 people, then I’m plugged into about 600,000 people. That means I need to keep finding influencers or brands or groups until that whole universe of people is at least 1 million people.
STEP #3: IDENTIFY THE PUBLISHING STRATEGY AND CREATE YOUR PUBLISHING PLAN
there are four areas of the platform that you must master.
- Your personal profile (your home)—As you are “working your way in” (e.g., going out and commenting on people’s posts, joining groups and posting content and more), the friends, fans, and followers of your Dream 100 —as well as the members of those groups—will see your profile picture, click on your face and be taken from the social party to your personal profile. This is your home, and this is where you’ll be able to direct people into your funnels.
- Your Fan Page (your show)—I know, Facebook no longer calls this a “Fan Page,” they call it a “Page,” but I’m old school and still call it a Fan Page because it helps me to identify its goal in my marketing plan. This is where you are “buying your way in.” After you post content on your Fan Page, you will be paying (“buying your way in”) to boost it to the followers of your Dream 100.
- Groups (your hangout)—This is where you throw your own social networking party and build relationships with your tribe.
- Messenger (your distribution channel)—This is one of the most powerful distribution channels that you have to get your message quickly to your most hyperactive followers.
Your Personal Profile Strategy (Your Home)
If you structure your profile page correctly, it will grab your dream customers who are looking for more information about you and turn them into traffic that you own. Facebook allows people to “follow” your personal profile, but you have to turn it on in the settings. Make sure you give people that ability, because even though you can only have 5,000 “friends,” you can have an unlimited number of followers.
Getting your profile set up correctly:
be careful because Facebook doesn’t want your personal page to be for business, so none of these elements are meant to be a hard pitch for anything; instead it serves as a landing page where people can get to know you better and decide to be a friend or follower
Your cover photo: You can design and upload a cover photo that represents you and your brand. It’s an image that your visitors will be able to see and know that they’re in the right place. Do not put a CTA on your cover photo, as this screams that you are trying to sell something on your personal page.
Intro section (your business card): In the intro section of your profile, you’re able to tell a little bit about yourself.
Featured Image: You can feature an image from a post you’ve made here. I have a picture of my three books. When someone clicks on that image, they are taken to a post where I have links to the three books in the description. This is the first way that I start filling my funnels from my personal profile.
What’s on your mind? (conversations at your “home”): As you are “working your way in” and people are coming back to your “home” or profile page, they will see the recent conversations that you’ve started, and if a hook grabs them, it will pull them into your conversations and into your funnels.
If you’ve read the earlier chapter on Instagram, you will notice that the strategy here is very similar to how we post on our Instagram profile. If you remember Jenna’s JK5 Method, we each picked five categories that represent our brand. My categories are family, funnels, faith, entrepreneurship, and personal development. Just like I rotate through these five categories as I’m posting images to my Instagram profile, I rotate through these same categories as I’m posting “what’s on my mind.” If all the personal posts are about business, oftentimes Facebook will shut you down for operating a personal page like a business page, so by diversifying what I post over those five categories, I am at less risk, and it also builds a connection with my followers outside of just my “work.”
I try to make at least one update to my personal page each day. These updates are more than just an image and a caption; typically they are a longer form story, structured almost like a Daily Seinfeld email where I have a hook, tell a story, and make an offer. Each day, as I’m trying to figure out what to post, I ask myself, What’s the hook that will make people want to hear this story? The hook could be a quick headline or a picture, but it should be something that will stop people scrolling through their newsfeed. After I place the hook, I tell the story, give the rant, or share the big “aha” that’s been on my mind that day.
What’s the offer I want to make to them? Sometimes the offer is as simple as wanting them to like my post, leave a comment, or tell me their story. Other times, the offer is for them to listen to a podcast episode or read a blog post. Still other times, I ask for the big offer, and I direct them to one of my front-end funnels.
My secret for figuring out what to post each day comes back to the JK5. I open my phone and look at the picture albums I set up to categorize all of my images. I look through the album for the category that I’m posting about that day, find an image that will work as a hook, tell the story behind the image, and then make my offer.
As people comment on your posts, be sure to spend some time replying to their comments. This one small act speaks volumes, and it helps to build relationships with your dream customers.
Your Fan Page Strategy (Buying Your Way In)
on November 6, 2007, Facebook launched “Pages” (which I’ll refer to through this book as “Fan Pages”), where a person or a brand could have followers or fans on that page. There was no limit to the number of fans that someone could have. Adding Pages gave Facebook the ability to see the things people were interested in more closely, and this paved the way for Facebook’s advertising platform that we came to love so much.
Think of your Facebook page as the Facebook version of your website. I treat this page very carefully. I only put the most curated and the best content on this page. It is the first impression for anyone who sees your paid ads.
I treat this page almost like my YouTube profile, where, when people come to it, they will see the brand, but then they will hopefully start engaging with all of the videos and images and things that have been posted there. My test for if something should be on my Page is this: Is this content good enough that I will spend at least $10–$20 to boost it? If you’re not willing to pay for ads to that content, then do not post it on your Fan Page.
There are four things that we post on our Facebook Fan Pages.
- Produced value videos: These are videos that have a good hook and story but no offer. The direct response marketer in me hates these videos, but the branding marketers loves them. For some reason, when you have a CTA, people will rarely share your videos. By not having a CTA, if people love the videos, they’ll like, comment, and share, and that’s how you get paid for this content. This increased engagement will boost everything else you do on your Fan Page.
- Live value videos: These videos are almost the same as our “produced value videos” except that they aren’t pre-produced. We go Live on the platform, and in real time we deliver the message.
- Live perfect webinars: These are the “right hooks” that will become your big paydays. If you’ve been providing value, now you have the opportunity to actually sell to your audience.
- Curated content from your other platforms (reruns): I’ll take content that I’m posting on my other social networks that are getting high engagement and post it on my Fan Page. I don’t link out to that other content; I’ll actually repost it here natively. For instance, with my YouTube videos, I’ll upload them to YouTube, but I’ll also upload them separately to Facebook. I look at this reposted content similarly to how we view reruns on TV.
After we post any of this content, we always do exactly what Julie suggested: I spend $10–$20 boosting that content. Sometimes the goal is to get engagement on the pitch-free content (with a goal to increase what happens when I post my Live perfect webinars).
Your Groups Strategy (Your Hangout)
Facebook wants people to build groups, and as of this writing, they are rewarding people for doing it. Your group is your own personal party. It’s a place on social media for your people to gather, hang out, and talk. I’m a big believer that most companies should have a group where the members of their community can network. It will become a huge source of traffic for you, help turn your warm audience into raving fans, I try to do a weekly “hangout” in my group where I can talk to our tribe and build a personal relationship with them.
Your Messenger Strategy (Your Distribution Channel)
Messenger has rules to protect it from being used as a platform where people are sending out spam, and because of that, if you’re too aggressive, they can and will shut you down. So it’s essential to use it in a way that enhances users’ experience instead of in a way that annoys them. We rarely, if ever, send out more than one message per week. Most of our messages try to create engagement before a link is sent. A great way to do this is to send out quizzes or interactive conversations, basically anything that will keep engagement high and complaints low. If you do that, you’ll be able to use Messenger without any issues.
Growing your Messenger list: There are three core ways that you can grow your Messenger list. First, when people come to your Fan Page, you can have Messenger pop up to start a conversation that will add them to your Messenger lists. Second, on your landing pages, you can have people select a box that will add them to your Messenger lists.
The third (and my favorite) way is to create a simple lead magnet and leverage your Fan Page to grow your Messenger list. Some of the Messenger growth tools make it easy to add people to your lists when they do a certain action. For instance, when people click a button on your post or comment with a certain keyword, you can add them directly to a specific Messenger list and it will send them a lead magnet right away.
Publishing to your Messenger lists: Because my Messenger list is such a valuable asset, and because I don’t own it (Facebook owns it and can shut it off at any time), I treat it very carefully. About once per week, we try to send out some type of conversation. Notice that I said “conversation” and not message. We don’t just broadcast out a message for someone to go and visit a funnel. Instead, we’ll ask them a question like, “Hey, are you still looking for ways to generate more leads online?” If they respond back with a yes, then I might say something like, “Cool. I have some new training that I think you’re gonna LOVE, but I wanted to see if you’d rather have it as an audio file, a video, or a transcript.” After three buttons pop up with these options, they can click one of the choices, which will take them to the next step in the bot’s conversation.
I personally like to use bots to guide people toward content on Facebook’s platform (like a Facebook Live on my Fan Page) and have the actual selling happen off Messenger. That gives me an arm’s distance from Messenger and selling anything directly through it.
Your Publishing Plan
We’ve covered a lot of things about publishing on Facebook. We talked about the core ways you publish inside Facebook with special focus on:
- Your personal page
- Your Fan Page
- Your groups
- Your Messenger lists
Each of these sections inside of the platform has a different strategy for how you publish. To make sure you hit each part of Facebook effectively to find and serve your dream customers
STEP #4: WORK YOUR WAY IN
We do this by finding the groups in our marketplace that have already congregated our dream customers. First, I want you to focus on finding and joining the right groups. Similar to the strategy used for influencers and brands, your goal with groups is to get access to at least 1 million people through them. I look at the suggested groups, join the ones that have bigger member counts, and continue searching for more.
For example, if I’m a photographer and I type “photography” into the group search in Facebook, it will pull up dozens of groups I can join. In this case, there are over 507,000 people at four parties talking about photography. These are the parties that I’ll be going to and networking at. Keep going to parties (i.e., joining groups) until your reach in these groups is over 1,000,000 people.
spamming out links to your front-end funnels, and hoping that people will click on them and join your lists. This is not what I’m talking about. In most groups, this will get you kicked out almost immediately and will ruin your reputation in that market. Instead, every day I go into each of those groups and try to see what questions people are asking that I know the answer to. As soon as I can think of something awesome that I can share, I write a value-filled post and post it in the group. No pitch ... no ask ... just value.
That is the secret to good networking. You are coming to serve, and if you do it consistently, people will see you, and they will follow you back to your home. But the secret is giving without withholding. This is the beginning of your value ladder, and the more value you give up front, the more people will want you.
I spend 30 minutes total each day participating in these groups, providing value, and answering questions, and then I’m done. Remember, your goal is to become the cool kid at the party, and if you provide value, everyone will want to come back to your house to hang out. This strategy takes a little time, but if you are consistent and people see you showing up consistently, they will want to find out more.
STEP #5: BUY YOUR WAY IN
All the paid ads happen on your Fan Page. This is where you can boost/pay to get your content shown to the followers of your Dream 100. Every video you post, every image you publish, and each post you write on your Fan Page can be promoted through Facebook’s Ads Manager. You can also make “unpublished posts” that don’t show up on your feed, but that you can start using to throw out hooks to grab the attention of your dream customers. Remember from Secret #9 that the more creative you can put out, the more success you will have. Use all these hooks to grab your dream customers from your prospecting pools, pull them into your retargeting buckets, and direct them to your funnels.
STEP #6: FILL YOUR FUNNEL
As you know, the last step of the framework is to take all this attention and use it to fill your funnels. At first, you do it by “working your way in.” As you go out into Facebook’s groups and start networking and providing value, you will be pushing people back to your personal profile (your home). On your personal profile, you will be rotating through the JK5 categories and making posts that can hook people when they show up on your page, as well as your friends and followers, and direct these people into your funnels.
To build an even stronger relationship with your friends and followers, you can invite them to come to your own social networking party (your group) where they can network with others and be part of your weekly “hangout” meetings. On your personal profile, they are only able to respond to posts you make, but here they can start their own conversations and get a sense of belonging inside your tribe.
After your social networking strategy is up and running, transition your focus to “buying your way in” with your Fan Page, where you will be producing and posting content that you feel good enough about spending $10–$20 to boost it.
Your number-one goal is to transition the traffic that you are earning and buying into traffic that you own by taking them through one of your front-end funnels.
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STEP #1: UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY AND THE GOAL
Google wants to show its visitors the best web page for every search. Marketers like us want our web page to be shown at the top. The battle between us and each platform is why the algorithms have to constantly change and evolve. That’s why almost every book that has ever been written on getting online traffic is obsolete within months. These slaps happen with Google, and they also occur with Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. That is why, in this book, I’m never going to tell you how to hack an exact algorithm.
Why does Google care so much about their users’ experience? Mostly because they still make the majority of their money from paid ads, and if people have a bad experience when they search, they won’t come back. So if your goal is to try to figure out a way to deliver the best experience possible to their surfers, Google will reward you for that.
STEP #2: FIND YOUR DREAM 100 ON THIS PLATFORM
This is where the search engines start to become really fun for me. This process is similar to a treasure hunt, looking for the keywords and blogs that you can tap into to bring you thousands of visitors a day, sometimes overnight.
In Secret #2, we talked about two types of congregations. The first was “interest-based” congregations, such as influencers, brands, and other things that people are interested in. The second type of congregation we discussed was “search-based” congregations. Instead of targeting “interests,” we would be targeting keywords and keyword phrases. For Google, we are going to be building out two Dream 100 lists. One list will be with the top bloggers in your market, and the second list will be a list of your Dream 100 keywords.
Your Dream 100 (bloggers): I will be utilizing these bloggers and their blogs in different ways, both buying my way into their traffic streams as well as working my way in. But for now, I just want to identify them and get them on my Dream 100 list. Finding them can be as easy as going to Google and typing in your dream keywords and the word “blog” after it. You’ll then see the top 10 listings in Google and which bloggers have made it to the top. Some of the bloggers will have their own blogs that run on their own domain, while others will use popular blogging networks like Medium.com. You can go to Medium.com (and other blog networks) and search for bloggers in your market.
Your Dream 100 (keywords): Being ranked on page number one for one of your dream keywords is the equivalent of owning Boardwalk or Park Place in Monopoly. Owning one or more of these listings in this virtual real estate landscape can fill your funnels with traffic for years to come. When I first did this exercise with ClickFunnels, the first 10 dream keyword phrases that I wrote down were:
- Sales funnels
- Digital marketing
- Internet marketing
- Online marketing
- Landing page
- Marketing automation
- Growth hacking
- Personal branding
- Website traffic
- Social media marketing
The next step was to find the long-tail keywords associated with each of my dream keywords. Often it can be really difficult to rank for a high-competition keyword, so I also wanted to see the long-tail keywords that would be easier to rank at first. To do this, take your number-one dream keyword phrase and type it into Google. Google will suggest other keyword phrases in the search bar that people often search for when someone types in your dream keyword phrase.
These keywords will become your “long-tail” keyword phrases. Write down your nine long-tail keyword phrases that are associated with each of your dream keywords that you would like to target. For example: Dream Keyword: Sales Funnels, Long-Tail Keywords:
- Sales funnels definition
- Sales funnels software
- Sales funnels for real estate
- Sales funnels examples
- Sales funnels for artists
- Sales funnels templates
- Sales funnels explained
- Sales funnels 101
- Sales funnels for Shopify
You can also scroll down to the bottom of Google after you search for your dream keyword, and it will show you eight more keywords that are closely related to your search term. Keep looking until you find 10 solid keywords phrases to focus on. If you do that with all 10 of your dream keywords, you will end up with a list of 100 keywords. This is the simplest way to build out your dream keyword list, but there are some amazing software tools that can help take it to the next level.
STEP #3: IDENTIFY THE PUBLISHING STRATEGY AND CREATE YOUR PUBLISHING PLAN
Now that we have our dream keywords, we want to funnel hack the search engines to see what is already working for that keyword. To do that, all you have to do is type your keyword phrase into Google. Then scan the top 10 results and look for patterns of what type of posts are being ranked.
These types of linkable assets are what Google loves for a few reasons. The first is that if you structure them correctly, people will love the content so much that they can’t help but link back to it. Real, organic, quality links are what Google wants to reward you for, and writing a good article that people naturally want to link to is the secret to getting the right links.
As I’m scanning the organic results for my dream keywords, I’m looking to see if there are any Letterman Top 10 List–type articles being ranked. If there aren’t, then I will work on creating my own linkable asset that I can post on my blog. If I do find one that is already ranking in the top 10 for my Dream 100, I will use the “skyscraper” technique
The skyscraper technique works after you have found content that has already generated a ton of links and is already ranking for your dream keywords, and then you model it to create your own bigger, better piece of content, i.e., a bigger skyscraper. I like to try to create at least one new skyscraper article per month.
Here are four things that Brian recommended to do to your article to make your skyscraper taller:
- Longer: In some cases, publishing an article that’s simply longer or includes more items will do the trick. For example, if you find a link magnet with a title of “50 Healthy Snack Ideas,” publish a list of 150 (or even 500).
- More up to date: If you can take an out-of-date piece of content and spruce it up, you’ve got yourself a winner.
- Better designed: A visually stunning piece of content can typically generate a lot more links and social shares than something similar on an ugly page.
- More thorough: Most lists posts are made of a bland list of bullet points without any meaty content that people can actually use. But if you add a bit of depth for each item on your list, you have yourself a list post that’s much more valuable.
Important note: Brian recommends that you beat the existing content on all four levels.
Getting quality links to your skyscraper: Publishing the longer, better skyscraper won’t in and of itself get your site ranked onto page number one. After you’ve written the article, you need to promote it, and the way you promote an article is by getting a lot of the right links to it. Brian taught us to get the right links by looking at the links that are pointing to the linkable asset that we modeled. If people are already linking to that content, we know a few things.
- They have a website in the same niche that we’re publishing.
- They’re interested in the topic, because they have already linked to our competitor.
- They’ve already linked to an article on that topic, so it’s not difficult for them to include a link to our longer, better, more updated article too.
In your email, you can let them know that you saw they linked to your competitor and that you’d love it if they’d link to your article as well since yours is similar but much more up to date and comprehensive. Brian said that he personalized and tweaked this template for each person he reached out to, and out of the 160 emails he sent out, he got 17 people to link back! That’s an 11 percent success rate following the skyscraper method that helped him to get his article ranked.
The next way I work to get links back to my new article is by reverse engineering (funnel hacking) the backlinks that are going to the other nine organic listings on page number one for my dream keyword. I already found the people that are linking to my competitor’s article and emailed them. I am now going to do the same thing to the people who are linking to the other nine pages that are ranked on page one. I send out a similar email to each of them asking if they’d be willing to link back to my linkable asset. By doing this, I am getting the same backlinks that are currently ranking the top 10 results for my dream keyword phrase all linking back to me.
These manual link requests will get the process started, and then I will stimulate traffic to the skyscraper pages by promoting my new article on my other social sites (Facebook and Instagram) and email lists.
STEP #4: WORK YOUR WAY IN
Working your way into the search engines has two amazing benefits. The first is that you can tap into the traffic streams of the bloggers that you put on your Dream 100 list earlier. The second is you can get some of the best quality links directly from these same bloggers who have quality sites in your market (the type of links that Google loves).
The way I work my way into the search engines is through “guest posting.” That means I am looking for someone else who has a blog in my market and I am asking if I can make a “guest post” on their site. I’ll email the blog owners and tell them that I had a few cool ideas for a post on their blog and ask them if any of them are of interest. If they say yes, then I write up the post, include a link to one or two of my skyscrapers, and have them post it. I give them good content, their readers will click on the links and I’ll get traffic from that, the spiders will see the links to my skyscraper, and it will increase my rankings from there.
I try to post at least one guest post per week on blogs in my market, as well as work toward becoming a contributing author for the sites that bring me the most traffic and quality links.
STEP #5: BUY YOUR WAY IN
I quickly started to realize how much more valuable a click to your funnels is from one of these pages than even the same from the Google homepage. However, the people who do the following three-step process are actually more valuable to you:
- Type a phrase into Google
- Click on one of the results
- Click on the link to your funnel from this other page
Tons of the clicks that hit Google’s homepage will be wasted on people who aren’t serious, and if you’re paying for these clicks, it can be very expensive. However, the people who have to click two clicks to get to you are the ones who are most serious and will be worth the most money to you long-term.
When I look at my Dream 100 websites, I try to quickly weed out the ones that don’t have any advertising on them already. Instead, I’m looking for sites that have AdSense ads, banner ads, affiliate links to other products, and email newsletter subscription boxes. Then I start contacting the owners of these websites to find out my advertising options.
- If they have an email newsletter, I ask them if I can purchase a solo ad to their email list (more on this in Secret #17).
- If they have banner ads on their website, I ask them how much it costs to purchase a banner ad.
- If they have Google AdSense on their site, then I add their site to my list to target later with Google Display Network or GDN
- If they have an article on that page, then I try to see if I can get them to add a link back to one of my pages in their article.
STEP #6: FILL YOUR FUNNEL
Are you able to see now how you can get access to the traffic that is coming from the search engines? We focus on creating blog posts that are linkable assets that will act as link magnets that you can get ranked on page one for your dream keywords. While we’re waiting for these pages to rise in the search engines, we do guest posting on the blogs in our market to get both instant traffic from their readers and more links pointing back to our linkable assets.
We then go to the pages that are already ranked on page one for our dream keywords, and we work to buy ads on these pages so we can plug our funnels into the existing streams of traffic that are going to these pages. The last step is buying ads on Google’s paid search platforms.
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There is something special about YouTube that I don’t think many people understand. YouTube is the only platform where you can create something and post it online where it will actually grow exponentially over time. I have videos that I published five years ago that still get hundreds of views a day.
This gives us creators a reason to spend more time producing amazing videos that will serve us and our audiences for the rest of our lives and beyond.
STEP #1: UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY AND THE GOAL
Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine (behind Google),
YouTube is interesting because it functions similar to a social platform. You create content, try to get people to engage with that content and build up subscribers just like other social networks.
YouTube also functions as a search engine, which is why, unlike social networks, your videos continue to grow over time. If you learn how to optimize your videos the way that YouTube would like you to, they will reward you by ranking you for your dream keywords inside of YouTube, and often they’ll even post those videos inside the search results of Google.
STEP #2: FIND YOUR DREAM 100 ON THIS PLATFORM
You need to build out two Dream 100 lists: one list with the names of the people, brands, and influencers that you would like to target, and a second list with the keyword phrases that you would like to create videos for.
STEP #3: IDENTIFY THE PUBLISHING STRATEGY AND CREATE YOUR PUBLISHING PLAN
The way to win at YouTube is to figure out ways to create and post videos that are in alignment with how they want videos to be posted. That’s why it’s so important to closely watch your Dream 100 and see what things they’re doing that YouTube is rewarding them for. If they change how they like descriptions, tags, or linking, you’ll see the changes in the videos that are getting a lot of views, and then you can change your strategy to match theirs.
Set Up Your Channel
Before we start creating any videos, we need to make sure the channel is set up
- Name of your channel: For your channel name, you should focus more on branding than keywords. Your channel name will show up everywhere in searches, suggested searches, related channel suggestions, and on your videos when you leave comments. You’ll notice that my channel name is Russell Brunson— ClickFunnels. I do this because I want people to recognize my name as well as my main brand when they see my channel name come up.
- “About Us” page: This page is important for two reasons. First, it lets people know more about you when they’re checking you out before they subscribe. Second, the information you write here will show up in the search results for your channel and will be a big key to people finding and subscribing to your channel.
- Header image: When people come to your channel page, the first thing they’ll see is your header. Your header should be simple and speak clearly to your target audience so that they know the value they’ll get from your channel.
- Profile image: Many people mistakenly put their logos here. Instead, use a picture of yourself because it will dramatically increase engagement.
- Channel trailer and description: When people first come to your channel page, they’ll see an actual trailer for your channel as well as a brief description about your channel. It is only shown to new visitors who aren’t subscribers yet, so this video is speaking specifically to them. Here are Joe’s script guidelines for an engaging channel trailer: Introduce yourself and welcome your viewer to your channel. You want the viewer to feel like you are talking to them and that you understand them. Go briefly into your backstory and explain why you have the authority to be creating the content you make on YouTube. Pitch your value statement. Leave no doubt in your viewer’s mind what this channel is about. Talk about the channel, what it is about, and why it matters. Share your posting schedule so they know when to expect new content. End the video with a really strong CTA. This means you need to tell the viewer what you want them to do. Tell them to subscribe to your channel and turn on notifications so they don’t miss any of your new videos. Make sure this video is no more than 60–120 seconds long. Any longer than that and you will lose your potential viewer. If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to buy anything fancy. I still use my iPhone for the majority of my videos.
Identify Your Dream Keywords that You Want to Make Videos For
The first step is to find all the long-tail keywords around your dream keyword that you can make videos for. This is a tactic I learned from my good friend Jeremy Vest. He calls this tactic “finding your channel’s focus phrase.”
The dream keyword “ABC Hack”: Here’s a trick to find hundreds of keywords you can choose from. If my root keyword is fairly broad, like “how to make money,” you can type in the same words in the YouTube search bar followed by a space and the letter a. The suggested search results will show you: “How to make money ...”
- As a beginner
- As a kid
- At home
- At school
Then you can replace the a with b, and the suggested search results will show you: “How to make money ...”
- Blogging
- By investing
- By posting ads
Then move on to c and d and so on. You will want to get at least 50 of these “how to make money” keywords to use as keyword titles in your videos.
Create Your First Video
Now that you’ve done all the research, set up your channel, and made a list of keywords to target, now it’s time to start creating videos. As I’m creating videos, there are two types of video that I focus on. The first are called “discoverable videos.” These are videos based on keyword phrases that I publish as hooks to rank for these keywords with a goal of grabbing people’s attention, pulling them into my channel, and turning them into subscribers. How you structure these videos is very important because if one of them takes off and gets 100K views, you want to be able to make sure that you are able to create subscribers and leads from all of these viewers.
- Hook: Create a 15-second concise introduction. This is where you’re going to hook people using the same keywords that they’re searching for. You’ll tell them the value of your video and present a hook for them to look forward to so they continue watching.
- Trailer: Place your quick branded intro or “trailer,” which should be no more than four to five seconds maximum. Do not put a 30- or 60-second branded intro here. You’ll lose the majority of your viewers right there.
- Intro: Talk to your viewer about who you are and why they should listen to you for the next 15–30 seconds. Share a little bit about your story so that you make a connection with that new visitor. Don’t assume that they know who you are.
- Story/Content: Share content and story for the next 7 to 12 minutes. Here is where you deliver the value from the hook you mentioned earlier.
- Offer: Add your CTA. As a discoverable video, the offer will normally be to get people to like, comment, subscribe, or turn on the notifications.
Use this show formula as an outline to write out your video script. Once you have an outline and a tight script, take out your cell phone or camera, look right into the lens, and film yourself recording that video. Typically, I’m not selling on these videos, outside of selling the subscription to my channel. The second type of video I create is called “video webinars,” which are usually less keyword focused, as they are created to build a stronger relationship with my current subscribers.
These are the videos that I use to sell things. I’ll still try to find keywords to rank them for, but oftentimes I am trying to create or teach something that may not fit inside of a certain keyword phrase.
Upload Your Video and Set It Live
After I’ve created the video, there are six things that we currently do for each video we upload to make sure we’re aligned with YouTube’s algorithm.
Look at YouTube as a TV show: YouTube wants you to create a show, schedule it, and publish it on a consistent schedule. For example, you may publish your videos every Thursday at 7:00 P.M. EST, or every Tuesday and Thursday at 7:00 A.M. EST. Create a schedule for yourself that you know you can keep up with, and be consistent as you stick to that publishing schedule.
Find the keyword for your new video: Make sure you have identified the keyword phrases you want to use for your new video.
Write your video title: Your title should have two elements: it must contain your keyword phrase, and it also needs a strong hook that works in tandem with your thumbnail to “sell the click.” For example, if I were trying to create a video that would rank for “potato gun,” some possible titles might be: “Potato Gun—The 17 steps to build your gun in under an hour” or “How to build your Potato Gun with stuff you can find at Home Depot for under $30”
Create your thumbnail “hook”: This is the visual hook that will grab people when they’re watching someone else’s video to convince them to watch your video next. Make sure it looks good when it’s shrunken down tiny. The best practices that usually get the most clicks are using large faces/images, bright colors, and as few words as possible. It needs to pop off the page. Look at your Dream 100’s video thumbnails to get an idea of how they’re grabbing attention with their thumbnails.
Write your description: Ideally, these will be between 150– 300 words. The first two sentences should contain your keyword and CTA because this portion is “above the fold,” You will also want to add your subscribe link and a link to your front-end funnels, as well as links to other related videos and playlists you have on YouTube. To optimize your search results, I recommend adding up to three hashtags.
Add tags: While still helpful for search ranking, tags mean less than they used to. Keep your tags highly relevant to your main keyword: the more closely related to the topic, the better. If you branch out, you’ll only confuse the algorithm. Those are the core things that we’re looking at when posting each video. Again, these specific things may change, so that’s why it’s so essential to closely watch your Dream 100 to see what things are being rewarded in YouTube and then make changes as needed. After your video is posted, you want to get people watching it as soon as possible. I’ll usually encourage the traffic that I own, such as my email lists, fans, and followers, to watch the new video.
Here are the three things we’ve noticed that have the biggest impact on your video’s success: Click-Through Rate (CTR): How many people who see your thumbnail actually click on it? The benchmarks we want for CTR are:
- 4 percent—Acceptable
- 6 percent—Good
- 9 percent—We should throw a party!
Initial retention: The first minute of retention is very important. You need to hook people fast and keep them watching. Watch the videos from your Dream 100 to get ideas on how they hook people past the first minute. Try to keep minute one retention above 70 percent.
Overall retention: As for your overall video retention, how long is the actual video being watched? We look at how many people make it to the end of the video. The benchmarks for video retention are:
- 35 percent—Acceptable
- 40 percent—Good
- 50 percent—Party time! (You’ll get a lot more reach if your account averages this or better)
The “Binge-Watching”YouTube Hack
One of the best things you can do for your channel is to get people to binge-watch your videos. When YouTube sees people going from one video in your channel to another, and another, not only will it boost your views on those videos, it will lift the entire channel. One secret is instead of putting up a longer, 30- or 60-plus minute video, create a YouTube playlist and break up your long videos into smaller 5–10 minute videos that are part of a series inside of that playlist. Then when someone watches the first video on the playlist, it automatically directs them to video two in the series,
- It’s a huge value add to your own list and will build a better relationship with your viewers.
- It gets your hottest subscribers watching your newest videos, which should give you higher initial and overall retention than a cold viewer who finds you on YouTube.
- You’re likely to get more likes and comments from these viewers, especially if you ask them to engage in these ways in the emails and messages you send to them promoting this new series.
- Most of them will move through each video in the playlist because they’re excited to see your new series, which will make these videos rank higher, which will also boost your entire channel.
This becomes such a big win-win-win for you, your viewers, and YouTube that we try to build launching a new playlist that viewers can binge-watch into our publishing plan at least once per month.
Your Publishing Plan (create a publishing plan for yourself on a weekly basis of TODO)
STEP #4: WORK YOUR WAY IN
The core way we work our way in to YouTube is by following the publishing plan we just laid out. Every day, we’re picking new keywords we want to rank for, and then we go and create videos to target these keywords. If you are consistent in publishing these videos, you will continue to show up in the search results for more keyword phrases, more people will subscribe to your channel, and your videos will keep growing.
Similar to Instagram, you can also do collabs with other channels where you can make a video with another influencer and have them post it to their channel with links pointing back to you.
STEP #5: BUY YOUR WAY IN
You could pay people to create a video and post it on their channel for you. You could even pay them to let you put a playlist with a video series on their channel. The ideas and opportunities are endless!
STEP #6: FILL YOUR FUNNEL
It all starts with consistently publishing keyword-based discoverable videos to get you a spot on the organic listings, as well as the Google search results. We use paid ads to place our ads on top of the other videos that are ranked for our dream keywords and the videos of our Dream 100. we will put out prospecting ads to hook our dream clients, move them into the retargeting buckets where we will turn them into traffic that we own, and then we will ascend them up our value ladder.
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So what happens if you’re reading this book, and Facebook has recently been shut down by the government for controlling too big of a monopoly or a new social platform is getting traction and you want to figure out how to get in early before it’s too late? As you know, my goal with this book is not to give you a fish, but it is to teach you how to fish. In my 15 years online, I’ve watched as dozens of networks and hundreds of ads sources have come and gone.
I want to give you the exact blueprint we use as we look at every new traffic opportunity. For this example, I am going to apply the Fill Your Funnel framework to grow and monetize my podcast. To do that, I need to apply this framework to the Apple podcast directory. As I break down how to dominate the podcast network, notice how we use the same framework in order to have success.
STEP #1: UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY AND THE GOAL
Podcasting tends to attract a more affluent audience and people who have a higher net worth. In fact, a recent survey showed that podcast listeners are 45 percent more likely to have a net household income of over $250,000 per year.43 That tells me a few things. First, if you want to increase your own personal net income, you should be listening to podcasts instead of radio. Second, your dream customers, the cream of the crop, are those on your list who also listen to podcasts.
STEP #2: FIND YOUR DREAM 100 ON THIS PLATFORM
Podcasting is one of the easiest platforms to find your Dream 100 on, because almost every podcast is published in the Apple podcast directory, Apple’s ranking algorithm for podcasts is currently based on three things. First (and most important) is the number of new subscribers. The more new subscribers you get, the higher your podcast will rank. That is the number-one factor and trumps the other two, so much so that my main goal is to get people to go and subscribe. We do contests, give away prizes, and talk about it in every show episode. The other two ranking factors are number of downloads and the number of new comments. Both of those are important, but not nearly as important as the number of new subscribers. To find your Dream 100, Apple will show you 200 of their “top” podcasts for each category, and this gives you a huge list to use for your Dream 100.
STEP #3: IDENTIFY THE PUBLISHING STRATEGY AND CREATE YOUR PUBLISHING PLAN
The strategy with podcasting is pretty simple compared to other platforms: you just have to decide which type of podcast you want to host. My guess is that if you listen to a lot of podcasts, then you probably have your own favorite format. Some people love interview-style shows, others would rather use the time to just share their own thoughts, yet still others like to do a blend of both. I don’t think it really matters which format you want to do, as long as you pick something that you can be consistent with.
As with most things in life, consistency is the key to having success with a podcast. Podcasts have a compounding effect. Each episode that you publish will hook new fans, who will then go backward and binge-listen to your show from the beginning. Because of that, each episode’s audience will be bigger than the last,
Your Publishing Plan
With podcasting, you’ll want to make sure you choose a consistent publishing schedule. Your listeners will come to anticipate when your upcoming shows will be released, so help build that trust by publishing your show on the same day(s) each week.
STEP #4: WORK YOUR WAY IN
The average podcast listener subscribes to six shows, and that’s it. Usually, they start listening to a show based on a recommendation from a friend. This is why many people who have tried podcasting stop because it’s so hard to get the initial traction and long-term growth.
Our strategy to grow our podcast following: build our Dream 100 list of podcasts that our dream customers were already listening to, and then go and work our way in. We messaged every podcast that we could find in our industry and asked them if I could be interviewed on their podcast. When I was interviewed, I was asked the question that almost every podcast host asks: “For those who have enjoyed this episode, how can they learn more about you?” And my answer was always the same: “I have my new podcast called Marketing Secrets And just like we thought, the podcast listeners who heard the interview and connected with me came in droves.
STEP #5: BUY YOUR WAY IN
you could buy ads in other people’s podcasts to promote your podcast! We are now buying ads as well as full episodes on the podcasts that our dream customers are listening to.
STEP #6: FILL YOUR FUNNEL
The strategies to promote your funnels are the same as how we grow the show. Every time I have a new book launch, a new webinar, or a new funnel that I quickly want to get a lot of traffic for, one of the best ways to do so is to hit up the podcast circuit. You can message hosts and see if they can get you on their show. Once you’re on, when they ask you the magic question about how people can learn more about you, simply tell them to get a copy of your book, register for your webinar, or get your free lead magnet. Then give them the URL of your funnel.
You can also purchase podcast ads to promote your podcast or any of your other funnels. Some podcasts run their ad department in house, where you can contact the show directly. They’ll usually have a media kit that will show you information such as the demographics of the show and how many downloads they get per episode. Many podcasters work with agencies to sell their ads. Most agencies will sponsor many different shows and they can open the doors to many other podcasts that you may not have known even existed.
A NOTE ABOUT OTHER PLATFORMS
I desperately wanted to write chapters in this book about some of the other platforms that were market leaders at one time, like Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. There is still so much opportunity on all these platforms, and some of them may come back and beat out the ones that I did show in this book.
I also had a desire to talk about some of the newer platforms that I think are going to be huge, like Twitch or TikTok, or even a platform such as Pinterest. I picked Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube so you could see the strategy behind how we attack each network as they come out. With that knowledge, you now have a process you can follow for any new network you decide to jump into and a process for how to recover during the next Google slap or Zanos snap.
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Many people think that they have to be on all platforms to be successful. That is not true. In fact, the majority of the times, the opposite is true. Often, people will try to publish and buy ads on all the platforms and never get great at publishing on any of them, or their ad dollar is spread so thin across all of them that they never actually get any traction.
For each business, there should be one primary channel that you focus on. This will also probably be the same platform that you spend most of your own personal time on, because you’ve been a consumer of media on that platform, so it will be easier for you to see how to become a producer of media on it as well. Right now, all your focus, from your Dream 100 to paying for ads, should be on that one platform.
I want you to understand that while I do publish on all these platforms now, I didn’t at first. If I had, I never would have become “Russell Brunson,” whatever that means. Five years ago when we first launched ClickFunnels, we picked one platform and doubled down on it, and for us, that was Facebook.
It was a long hard process that helped us to build a company that did over $100 million in sales before we started publishing on platform number two.
So for those of you who are reading this section now, know that for you, if you were sitting in front of me right now, I’d have you pick one platform, build your show on it, get to work on your Dream 100, and then only focus on that for at least the next 12 months of your life.
The other thing I often hear is: “But, Russell, I’m just going to record a video, and then I’ll post the video to YouTube, rip the audio for my podcast, and transcribe the audio for my blog post. I’ll just create the content once, and then I’ll post it everywhere.” While the concept is very sexy, and there are many people selling this as the best way to be everywhere at all times, by doing it you are missing the understanding that each platform has its own unique language. Usually content that works really well on one platform will fail when copied to another one.
People on Facebook want to hear your personal stories, talk about current events, and watch you go live. People who listen to podcasts are used to listening to longer-form interviews. People who read blogs are looking for longer-form content that is usually structured in a list with lots of examples and details. People on Instagram want images and to see behind the scenes of your journey and your life.
If you just rip your keyword-heavy YouTube video and put the audio on your podcast, it will seem strange to someone who listens to podcasts, and really weird when someone reads it as a status update on your Facebook wall.
Eventually, you’ll want to be omnipresent on each platform. But if you make that jump too quickly, it will more than likely cripple you before you have a chance to really build your following.
THE PROCESS TO ACHIEVE CONVERSATION DOMINATION
I’ve seen people try to be omnipresent on every platform, and they usually try to do it in one of three ways. First, they publish a primary show and then publish that same information in different formats to every network. You can get some success with this, but your efforts will be watered down, at best. The second way is publishing completely unique content on each platform. While this is possible, it usually requires building a huge team of people to accomplish it, and it will take a ton of your own personal time.
What if we created a master show that we streamed on Facebook and Instagram Live that was scripted out to have all the individual assets we needed for each core platform? Then we could prepare all week for the show and stream it live, where our team would have all the assets they needed to make unique content that fit the native language for each platform.
Monologue: I start with my monologue, similar to how most talk shows start, where the host gets up, tells some stories, and tries to connect with the audience. When the monologue is over, this piece of content will become a future episode on the podcast.
Interview: I will typically interview someone on the show, either in the office or over the phone. This interview matches the native language that people are used to listening to on a podcast, so in post-production we’ll turn this interview into another podcast episode.
Q & A Collabs: Before we start the live show, I send a few of my Dream 100 a question by video on my phone, where I ask them to respond to the question and send a question back to me. I show their question live and give them my response, and then I ask them my question and show their video response. After the show is done, we post the edited video on IGTV and tag them, and then they will post it to their IGTV and tag me back.
Top 10 List: I pull a “David Letterman” and share a top list. The list I am sharing is going to become my skyscraper article for my blog. I may share the “21 Best Things You Can Post on Twitter to Get More Followers,” or “My 13 Favorite Squeeze Pages for 2020.” I show an image of each item and talk briefly about it, and when the segment is done, my team will take it and quickly use my explanations to write the skyscraper post in my voice and start the link-building process.
How-Tos: I look at the keywords that I want to rank for on YouTube and do a segment showing two to three different ways to do things. Every how-to will become a YouTube video targeting a specific keyword phrase that we will post and then rank.
Image Stories: I go through my JK5 categories and show at least one image per category and tell the story behind it. That gives my team a better understanding about the image’s meaning when they are writing the captions and trying to get people to engage with it.
Quotes: I like to start wrapping up the show by sharing my favorite quotes and explaining why they are my favorites. That way if my team turns them into quote cards, they will have good explanations that they can use from my own words to post in the captions.
Final Thoughts: I want to keep something special for our live viewers to keep them engaged until the end. When the show is over, we quickly record all the information that my team will need to bridge together the content for each platform.
PUBLISHING AND DREAM 100 ON EACH PLATFORM
As you decide to branch into each new platform, follow the steps in the Fill Your Funnel framework:
- Step #1: Understand the history and the goal of the new platform
- Step #2: Find and model your Dream 100
- Step #3: Identify the publishing strategy and create your publishing plan
- Step #4: Work your way in
- Step #5: Buy your way in
- Step #6: Fill your funnel
- Have fun with these hacks, as they’re incredibly powerful and will give you an advantage against anyone who wants to compete against you.
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I now believe that having both branding and direct response blended together is essential in today’s world, even more so than when I first started experimenting.
THE BIRTH OF THE FUNNEL HUB
The Shadow Funnel
Then they showed me the number 251,680. “What’s this?” I asked. “That’s how many people worldwide in the past 12 months have searched for ‘Russell Brunson,’” they said. “That’s the shadow funnel, and that’s just your name. That doesn’t include your company or product names, and as you continue to get more momentum, your shadow funnel will grow. Many people try to rank for their dream keywords, but they typically forget about their own branded names.
As I was busy trying to rank for non-branded keywords, I didn’t realize that over 250,000 people were searching for brand keywords like my name. Because I hadn’t set up funnels for these branded terms, I was losing out on tons of traffic. EXAMPLE: branded terms - Russell Brunson, Dotcom Secrets, ClickFunnels -- Nonbranded Terms -- Digital Marketing, Sales Funnel, Courses, Sales Funnel Coach
YOUR FUNNEL HUB
Its goal is to organize all the funnels and offers in your value ladder in one place. When people start searching for you, it’ll let you control what they find when they search; inevitably, it will help you ascend people up your value ladder. It’s a central hub that organizes all of your funnels and offers and gives you the look and feel of a more traditional website to help build your credibility and magnify your authority.”
You know what else? In Expert Secrets, you told us to create a lot of things as we were designing our tribe. Things like:
- Who is your Attractive Character?
- What is your future-based cause?
- What is your customer manifesto?
- What does your value ladder look like?
- What do you stand for, and what do you stand against?
“We always had those on a Google Doc, and we kind of knew what they were, but our followers never knew. The funnel hub is the place where we gather all these things together so people who are looking for us can quickly understand who we are and how we can serve them.”
Then they said, “You’re publishing on so many platforms— your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts. Your funnel hub can become your brand stream to organize all your media in one place.
HOW TO CREATE YOUR FUNNEL HUB
Here is the basic layout of a funnel hub. Leveraging the funnel hub to take advantage of all your shadow traffic, earned media, traditional press, and word-of- mouth advertising can be huge.
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each of your Dream 100 has a distribution channel; that’s why they’re on your Dream 100 list. Each person has the Midas touch, and it’s your job to figure out how you can plug your products into their distribution channels.
DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL #1: EMAIL SOLO ADS
There are hundreds of people in almost every market who have already built up their own email lists, and one of the easiest ways to quickly increase your traffic is to buy ads in their email lists.
When I’m looking for email lists to buy ads in, I’m traditionally looking for a solo publisher, someone who has already created their own brand and list, where I can pay them to send out an email talking about my products or services.
The solo publishers are likely already on your Dream 100, and it can be a simple process to ask them if they are willing to sell a solo ad in their newsletter. The ones who’ve had experience with this will typically say yes and have some sort of base pricing. Bigger brands will usually have an online media kit that lists their prices
You can also find a lot of advertising opportunities in email newsletters by searching on Google. I’ll often type in “[my niche] email advertising” or “[my niche] online media kit,” Fewer clicks from a newsletter where someone has a good relationship with the publisher will always be better than more clicks from someone who has a bad relationship with their audience.
I wish I could give you a set pricing that you’ll typically pay, but it almost always ends up in a negotiation, so keep in mind that their rates are usually negotiable. They say, “suckers pay rate card,” and I tend to believe this is true. Publishers will usually try to have you pay based on how many people are on their list because that larger number serves them, but I would prefer to pay based on how many clicks their emails typically get. To find out that number, I’ll usually ask to see a report of the last 5–10 emails they sent out and how many clicks each email got.
If they want to send you their email list and have you send the email out, then run away fast. This is a scam and not something you should ever do. They should be emailing their list from their servers with your creative that you gave them. I like to have the email come from the publisher endorsing the landing page that I want to send the reader to.
The best part about email ads is you get results really fast. When someone sends the email, you’ll get the majority of all your clicks within 12 hours, the rest of your clicks within 36– 48 hours, and then the clicks usually stop.
The worst part about email ads is you can waste a lot of money fast if you’re not ready. Lastly, solo publishers will often try to sell you “sponsorship ads,” which are smaller ads embedded inside their emails. I’m not a huge fan of these, and I’ve had a really hard time getting them to be profitable. For me, if I can’t buy a solo ad, meaning the entire email is my message, then I usually won’t do it.
DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS #2 AND #3: FACEBOOK MESSENGER AND DESKTOP PUSH
Usually, the messages that are sent through Messenger need to be a little more stealthy because Facebook doesn’t like you sending out straight promotions. Because Messenger doesn’t allow you to send blatant promotions to your subscribers, the open and click-through rates are second to none. I recommend finding people in your Dream 100 who are actively building up Messenger lists and asking them if you can buy ads to their lists.
OTHER DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS
There are tons of different distribution channels out there that you will start identifying as you keep your eyes open. Some of my friends have built up big text message lists, so we’re buying text blasts from them. Others run big Facebook groups, so we’re paying to post a sponsored post in their groups. Others have big groups on LinkedIn, so we’re paying the group owners to send messages to their followers for us.
There’s an unlimited number of ways to do this. The key is to keep your eyes open for streams of traffic and distribution channels that people own; then figure out how to buy ads in them. Each new distribution channel you plug into will give you a raise.
INTEGRATION MARKETING
For example, let’s say I find a partner who is getting 1,000 new leads into their funnels every day. Instead of just buying an ad one time to that list, what if my email was sent to every new lead on their email list on day three? That way, I set up the deal once, but I get the benefit of that integration every day. Now, every day 1,000 new people get my message. I’m now integrated into my partner’s sales process, and as they grow their company, mine grows as well!
As soon as I became aware of this concept, I started looking for these integration opportunities everywhere. I looked for products that people would need immediately before they started using ClickFunnels, things like domain hosting, graphic design, and business licenses. Then I figured out a way to set up a partnership with each company.
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I looked at his response again: I rely on my own network of affiliates. I saw his brilliance. Instead of relying on his own efforts to do SEO or PPC, he could have dozens of others ranking pages for him and running ads selling his products. Instead of relying on his own email list, what if he found 10 or 20 or 100 affiliates who each had lists of tens of thousands of people? Instead of his message getting sent to thousands of people, he could reach millions. The amount of leverage you get when you build an affiliate program and rely on the efforts of other people is huge.
Instead of becoming the best person in the world at driving traffic, I needed to create an opportunity for the top affiliates to make money by promoting my products and services. Then I could focus my efforts on recruiting, training, and paying them.
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- Recruit your army of affiliates
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- Make them affiliates
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- Give your affiliates a reason to promote
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- Train your affiliates to become super affiliates
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- Compensate your affiliates
STEP #1: RECRUIT YOUR ARMY OF AFFILIATES
If you’ve been following the Dream 100 process, then you’ve already created lists of your potential affiliates. Every Dream 100 person has their own distribution channel. Some have an email list, others have a following on Facebook or Instagram, others have a podcast with a lot of subscribers. We’ve talked about working your way into their audiences as well as buying your way in. Asking your Dream 100 to be an affiliate is blending both of these things together.
You’re no longer buying ads and hoping they convert. Instead, your Dream 100 is promoting you, and you only pay them after they’ve made the sale. So how do you turn your Dream 100 into an army of affiliates? The first thing you have to do is ask them to be an affiliate, even though asking is oftentimes the hardest part. If you’ve been digging your well with your Dream 100, and if you have a relationship with them, you should know the projects and ideas that they are working on.
Because of this, we spend a lot of money sending out cool stuff in the mail to recruit affiliates. The key is getting their attention and giving them a reason to promote. As you’re recruiting affiliates to sell your product, it is important to understand that there are different types of affiliates, each with a different motivation. Some are only concerned by how much money they make and want a high- converting funnel, while others are more concerned with whether or not the product is a good fit for their audience. For me, I don’t care what their motivation is. I just want to serve their customers, so I want to make sure they’re happy at all costs.
STEP #2: MAKE THEM YOUR AFFILIATES
Often, your best affiliates will be your customers. I always like to let my customers know that they can actually make money by referring their friends. You can put links to your affiliate sign-up page on your funnels, on your thank-you pages, and in your emails. That way, you are helping them to earn commissions on the products they already love and helping them to spread your message.
STEP #3: GIVE YOUR AFFILIATES A REASON TO PROMOTE
They could promote millions of products, so you need to explain why they should promote your products, and, more importantly, why they should promote you now. Usually, we’re able to get affiliates to promote based on one of three things:
- A new launch
- Their turn on a rolling launch
- Something special or new
A new launch: Launching a new product is one of the easiest ways to get affiliates to promote because you can tell them about the new project that you’ve been working on, send them copies of the product in the mail, and let them experience what you’re going to be selling 60–90 days before each launch. We send out Dream 100 packages, call them on the phone, send emails, and do whatever else we need to do to have them block out our launch dates on their calendars.
As we get closer to the launch date, we’ll typically put everyone who has agreed to promote into a special Facebook group where we can communicate with them about everything that’s happening in the launch. This helps to build a community of affiliates and create a fun competitive environment where we share leaderboards and give people multiple reasons to promote during the launch.
The rolling launch: A rolling launch is similar to a new launch, but instead of everyone promoting on one single launch date, you let people each have their own turn to do a launch to their lists.
Something special or new: Often I’m recruiting affiliates who don’t want to be part of a product launch. They may be SEO marketers, or they may be really good at PPC, or they may want a higher commission because they’re so good. There could be dozens of different reasons, but my goal is to be able to serve their customers, so I’ll work with them individually to see what is best for them. I may set up a special landing page, a different offer, a higher commission, or whatever else they need that will give them a good reason to promote for me.
STEP #4: TRAIN YOUR AFFILIATES TO BECOME SUPER AFFILIATES
As you’ll soon find, the better the affiliate is, the lazier they often are; and the worse the affiliate is, the more training they’ll need. Both of these became problems for us. New affiliates didn’t know what to do or how to promote us; the good affiliates knew how to do it but wouldn’t promote unless we made the process very simple for them. To solve this problem, we created affiliate training centers that had two goals:
- Show new affiliates how to promote our products. We trained them how to run ads, track their sales, and more.
- Offer copy-and-paste ads that our super affiliates could grab and quickly edit. We gave them sample email ads, banner ads, copy for Facebook posts, and more.
The affiliate center is one of the most powerful tools you can have in your traffic arsenal because it’s easy to create an affiliate center for each of your funnels.
STEP #5: COMPENSATE YOUR AFFILIATES
While most people are always asking how little they can pay their affiliates, I want to figure out ways that I can pay them the most possible. The more you’re able to pay your affiliates, the more likely they are to promote you. and affiliates who are good have unlimited opportunities to sell anything they want. They don’t need you; you need them.
I noticed that most of the other software companies were paying their affiliates 20– 30 percent commission on their sales. We launched immediately with a 40 percent commission for our affiliates, and because of that, we were able to recruit most of their top affiliates.
As you can see, there are two core ways you can pay affiliates. The first is to pay out a percentage of the sale, and the second is to pay them a flat CPA for every sale they make. My rule is that I try to pay out 50 percent of the profit I make in my funnel. Building a successful affiliate program has brought us more traffic, leads, and sales than any other marketing technique.
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Thus far, I’ve focused on two types of traffic: warm traffic (the fans and followers and lists of your Dream 100) and hot traffic (your own list). For most companies, this is all that you will ever need to focus on. I strongly believe that you can build most companies to multiple eight figures a year just by focusing on warm traffic and then turning it into hot traffic. If you want to scale beyond that, though, you’ll have to master one other type of traffic: cold traffic.
To me, it meant that traffic that was cold needed to be spoken to differently than traffic that was warm or hot because they weren’t even aware that a solution existed, let alone that there was a product to solve their problem.
Cold traffic, on the other hand, often isn’t even aware they have a problem. If you remember the three core markets, cold traffic is a group of people that are at the 3 Core Desires level. All they know is that their health, wealth, or relationship isn’t good; they don’t have any understanding yet of anything beyond that. They haven’t been congregated into groups yet, so no one is helping them.
Getting something to work in cold traffic will seem difficult, but it’s actually as simple as changing your language patterns. Interestingly enough, the solution to both these problems is that they need a funnel, but to the people who are more unaware, my language doesn’t make sense to them. The difference in talking to hot, warm, and cold traffic is the language that you use. “Funnels” don’t make sense to the masses, so I have to change my language to “money-making website” to match what they would understand.
STEP #1: CREATE YOUR “COLD TRAFFIC CUSTOMER AVATAR”
The first step in this process is to create a new “cold traffic customer avatar.” This avatar will be similar to your current dream customer avatar, but cold traffic is much earlier in their journey. They are six months to a year (or more) before they became your dream customer. They know they have pain in the three core desires that you serve (health, wealth, or relationships), but they haven’t started moving toward a solution yet.
To identify this cold traffic customer avatar for myself, I had to look deep into my own past. For most of you, if you’ve followed a traditional entrepreneurial journey, this avatar will mostly likely be you five to ten years ago. Think about it: most entrepreneurs have struggled with the desire of health, wealth, or relationships and went on a journey to get themselves out of pain.
So my question for you is this: What is your version of 12- year-old Rusty? What were the things that would have grabbed your attention at the beginning of your journey? What words and phrases would you have used back then to explain what it is you’re doing now? If I had seen words like “funnel” or “traffic” back then, I would have kept flipping through the magazine. Instead, they had used words that described the problem I had and the result I was trying to get in a way that I understood, and that’s why they were successful.
STEP #2: CREATE A BRIDGE
As you can see, the warmer the traffic, the smaller the pre- frame bridge needs to be. If your audience knows, trusts, and loves you (the hottest traffic), then your bridge could be as simple as telling them you have something cool that you think they should buy. The last and longest bridge is the cold traffic bridge. But how long does it need to be? It all depends on how cold the targeted customers are.
When we got back the data, we found a lot of interesting trends, but one that really stuck out was that a huge percentage of our customers at the time were conservative Republicans. The report even referenced a few of the websites that this group spent a lot of time on. to prepare them for the warm funnel. After I saw that, I was ready for round two! So we spent time trying to figure out:
- What language patterns (words and phrases) should I use to explain what I’m trying to warm people up for?
- What false beliefs do people have that would keep them from buying when they did see my funnel?
- What stories did I have that could bridge the gaps and break their false beliefs?
- What content pieces did we need to create to tell these stories?
We then wrote an article landing page which would become our cold traffic pre-frame bridge. When we bought our next solo ad to the list, we sent all the traffic to this article page. From the article page, we directed them to a lead funnel that captured their email address, and then we built a follow-up funnel that led them to different posts on our blog, videos on YouTube, and other places where we had strategically placed content to warm them up. Eventually, we introduced them to our front-end offer after we had warmed them up.
In order for most companies to scale past nine figures per year, you’ll need to master cold traffic. To begin with, though, I’d still focus all your efforts on warm traffic and the Dream 100.
Stop and grab the big pile of cash (your hot and warm traffic) first, and then after you have it all, you can start looking more at the cold traffic channels.