Russell started his first online company while he was wrestling at Boise State University. Within a year of graduating he had sold over a million dollars worth of his own products and services from his basement! For over 12 years now Russell has been starting and scaling companies online. He owns a software company, a supplement company, a coaching company, and is one of the top super affiliates in the world. DotComSecrets was created to help entrepreneurs around the world to start, promote and grow their companies online.
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What we chatted about today
An example of 8 pages in Russell’s sales funnel that is making close to $18k per day.
Russell shares the process of how to create a sales funnel, and without Click Funnels it can be hard and expensive.
How to build a sales funnel in around 10 minutes.
How to model your competitors and clone their funnel in less then 10 minutes (while still making it your own).
How to get the same customers to start coming back to your website.
Transcript
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Interviewee: Oh, I’m prepared.
Interviewer: Russell started his first online company while he was wrestling at Boise State University. Within a year of graduating he had sold over a million dollars’ worth of his own products and services from his basement. For over 12 years now Russell’s been starting and scaling companies online. He owns a software company, a supplement company, a coaching company and is one of the top super affiliates in the world. DotComSecrets was created to help entrepreneurs around the world start, promote and grow their companies online and he is doing just that.
So Russell, take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro and give us a little glimpse into your personal life.
Interviewee: Man, the other side of that story is just my family. I’ve got a wife and we just had our fifth baby which is that insane.
Interviewer: Wow.
Interviewee: That’s been cool and our newest project I think we’re going to talk about today a little bit is ClickFunnels and last weekend actually I flew out and we were in a hotel room and recorded Tony Robbins. We’re building out a whole sales funnel for him and that was like one of the new highlights I need to add to my bio. So it was amazing.
Interviewer: Yeah, we need to add it to the bio like stat. So I’m glad you brought that up. That’s amazing on every level. And Fire Nation you might kind of say hey I kind of recognize that voice because Russell is the fortieth repeat guest on Entrepreneur On Fire so now and over the 1,050th episodes, we’ve only had 40 repeats but none have we had this quickly because he was guest 897. So if you go to EOFire.com, just type “Russell” in the search bar, boom, you’re going to get to see his great story and the failures and aha moments.
That was 161 episodes ago, Russell. Doesn’t that just seem like yesterday?
Interviewee: It does.
Interviewer: It really does. It’s like didn’t we just talk about this last week? So you’re going to check that out Fire Nation for his story because today, like Russell said, we are talking about ClickFunnels.
But even before we dive into that specifically Russell we’re all about creating viable businesses. You’ve done that better than almost anybody else in the industry, maybe besides Tony Robbins. Break down the ways that you currently generate revenue today.
Interviewee: We’ve got a bunch of things that we do. Some people know about it and some people know about it. Until just recently we actually just barely sold but we had a big supplement company up until about a month and a half ago selling supplements to help people with diabetic nerve pain. That company blew up and did awesome things and then we had the opportunity to actually sell it which is the first time that I actually sold a real business. So I had to go through that whole cycle which was so exciting, so fun to see the whole thing. That was a big thing.
I’ve got a lot of smaller projects we dabble in. I’m actually an equity owner in a network marketing company nobody even knows about and I’m behind the scenes doing the marketing and sales funnels for that company and also that nobody knows I’m involved and so I get a lot of income from that which is really nice.
Then on top of that we’ve got our software company ClickFunnels which we launched about a year ago and is by far the fastest growing company we’ve ever had and then we’ve got our coaching company which is the DotComSecrets, the book and the high end coaching things we do that we’ve been doing for about eight or nine years now.
That makes about 95 percent of my income. I’ve got a bunch of other weird little things here and there as well.
Interviewer: Well, Russell, you do have a lot of things going on which is great because you’re insulating yourself from just the ups, the downs, the cycles of the market, this fad, that fad. But the latest thing that I know has your focus that has your attention is ClickFunnels and that is why we’re talking today because it’s September 14th, if you’re listening the day this went live and I got a very exciting announcement that I actually shared in the pre-intro as well.
We are doing a live webinar with Russell this coming Thursday, September 17th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 11:00 a.m. Pacific, Fire Nation. Go to EOFire.com/click and you can get to the webinar registration page. Highly recommend you take action on that because we’re going to be having a ton of fun on this live webinar. I want to get into that because my business hit the multiple seven figures when I figured out sales funnels and there’s nobody that can talk about sales funnels better than Russell. So we’re going to be diving into that today and to be honest with you he had one of his top guys walk me through a Skype screen share of everything that ClickFunnels can offer and is about to be offering.
I can tell you it’s the most exciting thing that I’ve seen since I got into the online world. So I can’t wait to dive into this. I can’t wait for you guys to see what I’m seeing on this live webinar this Thursday. So again EOFire.com/click. Sign up for this live webinar. You want to be there.
If it’s after the 17th still go to that because we’ll be linking to the replay or to the sales page, whatever might be. Take action Fire Nation.
So Russell, take a step back brother. Share with us the idea of a sales funnel and why we need to be focused on that.
Interviewee: It was funny when I got I started a little over a decade ago and back then we didn’t need sales funnels. I still remember all my websites were like I had a sales letter and an order form and that was it. And it worked because back then Google loved us marketers, they were super nice. I’d pay a dollar for a click and I’d make $5.00 a click. We’d do it all day long. It was so great.
Then big bad Google and all the other advertising sources started becoming more difficult. More people found out that guys like me and you and everyone was out making money and they all started jumping in and competition got harder. Soon the same website I had where I used to put a dollar in advertising in and I’d get $5.00 or $6.00 back out now I put a dollar in and I would lose a dollar.
I wouldn’t make my money back and you can’t work a business too long where you’re not making money like that, right?
Interviewer: No, no.
Interviewer: For me I was just scrambling. I was a young kid. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just trying different things out and one of my friends, another entrepreneur, he messaged me and said, “Hey, Russell. I started adding these things to my website. So somebody would buy my first product then as soon as they would buy that I’d offer them, he called them an OTO, a one-time offer. He said after this OTO that would be like my next product.” He said, “Like 20 percent of the people that buy my first thing or buy this upsell, this OTO.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”
At the time I think I had five little niche websites. I had a potato gun website, I had a couple things like that. I had these little upsells like he did. I just copied them. The exact same thing except for my product obviously had [inaudible] [00:06:30] upsells. And just like he said I had something like 30 to 40 percent would take the upsell and that’s where this whole concept my sales funnel started was from that.
It was interesting. I started doing that and now you go back and buy my ads and I spend a dollar and I’d be back to making $2.00 or $3.00. I was like, the games back on. We can start playing again. Now I can actually be profitable and so that was kind of the beginnings.
From there we obviously we’ve done a ton of things with sales funnels and a lot of other people have. There’s a lot of ways you can do them. But that’s kind of the basics is really taking these static one-page websites that are tough to compete nowadays and you add in a couple of steps and build it out to an actual funnel where you can now be profitable and it’s amazing.
Interviewer: It’s amazing how you first describe that. How it used to be back in the day. The good old days where it’s just that flat website. You get to a website, boom, there’s some copy, there’s the order form, boom, you buy, you’re off to the races. That was it. Now you need more Fire Nation. The sales funnel to define it best is the rebirth, it’s the evolution of a website and if you’re not doing a sales funnel you’re a Neanderthal. You are going to die because that is just the evolution that we’ve gone through as internet marketers, as online entrepreneurs as businessmen, as business women, you have to get the sales funnel right because no sales funnel, it’s like going into the ocean in a boat with a hole in the bottom, like you’re just taking on water, money is going out. It’s everything, it’s gone.
So Russell takes us through what it looks like to implement a sales funnel. I mean, we know that we can make more money from the same traffic but what exactly does that mean?
Interviewee: It’s interesting how much as evolved and that’s kind of where ClickFunnels has come in but it’s funny, it was really, really hard. I remember we first had our sales page and the next page would have our upsell and we’d have a new order form where someone would have to re-put in their credit card and eventually after like a year or two somebody was smart to figure out like what if like somebody put in their credit card in the first page we stored that. Then the next page they click a button and then it would build their credit card again. We called these one-click upsells.
Someone came up with that idea and it was like wow, we added it to everything and it just boom, we made more money. So that’s kind of over the last seven or eight years of little tiny incremental advances. Okay, now we can do one-click upsells. Then there’s a whole bunch of different kinds we can go into. There’s down sells, we have order form bumps.
We have things like that but the way we kind of do it is my first step is I go and try to find like let’s say I’m going into a new market. Let’s say I wanted to go into the weight loss market. What I typically do is I go and I try to find who are the other people right now that are already having a ton of success and are making a bunch of money in this market today? We kind of coined a term amongst our community. We call it funnel hacking where we go to that website. It’s working and we do what every good entrepreneur has to be good at doing. We pull our credit card out of our wallet and we buy their product to see what their sales funnel is. What are people doing that works?
We’ll buy that person’s products and we’ll see their upsells and their down sells and kind of see what’s already been proven to work and we can take that concept as a blue print. A good example of this and I’ll talk about this on the webinar later on this work but when we launched our supplement that’s what we did. I went and I found this guy’s supplement that was making three million dollars a month and I wasn’t making any money with my supplement. I’m like well this guy knows something that I don’t know.
I bought his product. I mapped out in his Step 1, he did this. In Step 2 this is what he charged. In Step 3 this is what his upsell was and when we made ours we just kind of modeled it but with our products and when we did that, boom, it launched and almost instantly was making money, almost 20 grand a day because we modeled something that was already working. I think that’s really the power of kind of what we are going to showing on the webinar and the way this whole funnel thing works because as soon as you see what works, you see a funnel concept that works, you can kind of model it.
Similar like when we launched our book earlier this year I went and looked a probably 30 or 40 different people that had book launch funnels. I saw what they were all doing and then we took the best ideas, we modeled it and we created a funnel that kind of matched it.
Interviewer: I loved being part of that funnel and just being able to drive Fire Nation to that and see No. 1, how well it worked. No. 2, how much value they got and No. 3, it just made me realize the incredible value of having that funnel from start to finish and Fire Nation, let me just kind of throw the gauntlet down here.
Ask yourself this question. Am I an action taker? If the answer is yes, if you are an action taker then guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to press Pause, you’re going to go to EOFire.com/click. You’re going to register for this webinar which is this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. It’s a mobile responsive website so get over there on your Smartphone or your computer, whatever it is. Register for the webinar and then come on back because we’ve got some great things going on and I don’t want you delaying, forgetting because this is a live webinar. You’re going to want to be seeing what Russell’s talking about today. We break it down for you.
Russell I love aha moments. That’s what I built Entrepreneur On Fire off of so take us to your aha moment for ClickFunnels. How did that idea happen and then kind of walk us through the implementation of it.
Interviewee: Yeah, it’s interesting. After we had launched our supplement I found the funnel that was working, we modeled it. It took my tech guys, my designers and my copywriters, my programmers, people who do this day in and day out, it took us eight weeks to launch that funnel.
I remember I was so frustrated because we already bought the supplement. It’s sitting in the warehouse and it’s just gathering dust and I’m waiting for this funnel to be done. I’m like how can this take this long? We’ve done this. We are a good team of people that does it a million times. How do average people actually do this? I have the best in the world and it takes us two months. How can anyone else even have a shot at this?
We were trying to figure out how we can speed this process for us and for other people. So we started looking out there at different solutions that were out there and there was a lot of different things that were kind of there you could kind of piece together and glue things together. Everything could happen in one spot and by that time one of my partners he was in Atlanta, he’s one of our developers, he flies out about once a quarter flies to Boise and he’s flying out to Boise and we got there and we were looking at different options and he was laughing.
He was looking at a couple of the popular options that are out there and he said, “We could create this entire thing this weekend. It’s not that complicated.” I was like, “Really, Mike. Well, if we’re going to do that what else could we do? How could we make it better?” And we sat there with this huge whiteboard five days just mapping it. What if we did this or what if we did this and then we could have this?
Me as a marketer I’m putting out my wish list of everything would be amazing and luckily for me my partner is an amazing marketer and also the best developer I’ve ever met in my life. He was like, “I think I can do that. Nope, I can’t do that. Yes, I can do that.” And he just kind of mapped this whole thing out and after that week-long meeting was done he went back to Atlanta and he started working on it and four or five months later he had the framework was done and then we have another partner we brought on who does all the front end user interface stuff and he’s the one that made the editor so simple where literally someone like me who has no website design experience can drag and drop and move things and make things look amazing.
Brought him in on the project and these two and went in and over the next two months built out the first version of ClickFunnels and their test to see if it was a good product at every step and it’s still the test is like if Russell can use this it’s going to be good enough for everybody else. That’s what they always say.
When it was done they took me on a walk through and said okay go build something and I started working. They showed me some basics, a couple things. The same things I’ll show on the webinar, a couple basic things you’ve got to learn and then go and do.
I tried a couple little things and then sure enough the next project we had I built the whole thing out and it looked like a real designer had done it. I was just like I can’t believe I did that. The funnel for my book launch I did that by myself 100 percent.
I’ve done all the funnels since then because after you learn how to do it it’s so empowering because before if I wanted to change a headline I’d have to message my designer and then I wait five hours and he would change it and he’d screw it up and he’s write it back to me and I had to tell him again how to change it and it would be back and forth for two or three days to get a little thing like that right.
Where now it can be 3:00 in the morning. I have an idea for a split test. I can lot in, blub, blub, blub and then it’s just done and it’s amazing. So if you can’t tell, it’s been a year since we launched this and I’m still like so excited. I can’t even stop thinking about it. I love it.
Interviewer: I love it on every way, shape and form. When I got to sit down with your guy who walked me through this the thing I kept saying over and over again Russell was are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I was just like it really does. I can’t even believe it.
ClickFunnels Fire Nation is Russell Brunson’s wish list. He’s one of the most brilliant marketers of our time and he’s just pointing and saying, “This is what I want done and this would be perfect for me,” and it’s done and now it’s available to everybody. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about on this webinar coming up. You just need to know this Fire Nation. A sales funnel does not have to be hard. It does not have to be expensive. And if it’s ClickFunnels it’s neither. It’s easy and really incredibly affordable which again we’ll be diving into.
One thing that we’re going to be talking about that I’m really excited on the webinar and we’re going to get into it a little bit in a second Fire Nation is an example of eight different pages and sales funnels. Each of them are making $18,000.00 a day.
Okay. Imagine just having one that was making $800.00 a day. We’re talking eight that are making 18K a day Fire Nation so stick around. We’re going to take a quick break. We’re going to thank our sponsors and we’ll be right back with Russell Brunson.
So Russell we’re back and Fire Nation’s appetites are whetted. They know they can go to EOFire.com/click to register for September 17th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, a live webinar with you my friend.
Talk to us a little bit about this. I gave them the appetizer about the eight sales funnels that you have that are making 18K a day. What’s the deal with that?
Interviewee: It’s interesting because I’m kind of private. I know that I love on your site how you show your income reports and I’ve seen some other people do that and it’s so cool. I’ve never dared to do that.
This webinar when I started writing was the first time I was ever like let me show behind the scenes of just one of our sales funnels. In fact, that $18,000.00 a day is coming from one sales funnel and I’m actually going to show you guys that funnel. There’s only eight pages.
So there’s eight little pages that [inaudible] [00:16:53] you could build in an hour, hour-and-a-half. You could have ones almost identical. I’m going to show you guys those eight pages and obviously I know a lot of you guys aren’t selling supplements but I’ll show you my supplement funnel. Then I’m also going to show you my coaching funnel. I’m going to show you our software funnel. I’m going to show you my info product funnel. I’m going to show you the funnels that we use to run our business.
` I’m guessing that whatever business you’re in you’re probably or you need to be using one of those funnels and I’m going to show you guys what they are, show you behind the scenes of how they all work and then you guys can use them and you’ll see how easy it is.
I have a friend who’s a chiropractor and he was going to go hire a web guy and I said no, just try ClickFunnels. I showed it to him and now he’s building his own stuff and he’s a chiropractor. It’s the first time an entrepreneur in a business has ever been empowered do what really is the most important part of your business, selling stuff on line.
And that’s where we’re going to show you guys how to do it on the webinar and you’re going to love it.
Interviewer: That’s so cool and just to clarify Fire Nation what Russell was just saying he’s going to show us the eight pages in the sales funnel that he’s actually using that’s actually making $18,000.00 a day that you can apply to your industry, your niche within your audience. We’re also going to be going through how to build a sales funnel in ten minutes. Ten minutes.
The thing that my audience loves Russell that I do on every podcast training, I do these live workshops twice a month and I show them how to create a podcast from scratch and get it to ITunes in under three minutes. People love that because people think this is a crazy thing.
Well you’re going to see Fire Nation how you can get a funnel going in around ten minutes. He’s going to show you how you can model your competitors, how you can clone their funnel. All of this stuff is easy, it’s simple, it’s all about ClickFunnels and that’s what we do Fire Nation. We stand on the shoulders of giants. We see what’s working. We apply it in our own voice, our own message, our unique value distinguisher and we make it happen.
So Russell there’s something that a lot of people want to do. They see customers that are going to other people’s websites and they’re like I want them to come to my website. How do we do that?
Interviewee: I’ll show you a lot of case studies on the webinar but I had a friend when I was getting started on line and he told me, he said, “Look Russell. You don’t have to go and learn how to generate traffic. Traffic is already there. You just have to figure out where it’s at and then get your offer out in front of it.” I was like that makes a lot of sense but how do you do that?
It wasn’t until a little while later I found a couple tools that will do this but one of my favorites is called SimilarWeb.com. So I will go off any of my competitors’ websites. We were doing some stuff in the weight loss market for a while. Truth About Abbs is a really popular product. So I’d type in “truth about abbs,” and I’d click on the button and it goes and shows you all the websites that Truth About Abbs is getting their traffic from in order from like this one sends the most traffic and then this one and this one.
` So when we launched our weight loss offer I’m like well dang, here’s all the websites that are getting all the traffic and went directly to those sites, bought banner ads on them and boom instantly we were getting traffic coming from them.
Same thing with our supplement. That same company that was making three million bucks a month, we modeled their funnel and then with a similar web type from their web site address, found all the sites they were buying ads on and then went and bought ads on the same sites.
It was so simple. I’m not a super techie guy so I don’t understand how to run Google ads or Facebook ads or anything but this is simple. I would just find the websites that my competitors are buying ads on and then I’d just e-mail the dude who owns the site and ask him if I could buy a banner ad and quick my ad is there in front of the exact same traffic that’s currently going to my competitors’ sites. And it’s the fastest, easiest way I know to get traffic.
Interviewer: Fire Nation we’re not going to belabor the point. You need to be on this live webinar. You can see why sales funnels work. You can see how ClickFunnels is going to just be an absolute no brain investment for you on every way, shape and form. I know Russell has a couple really cool things for the live attendees. So again you’re not going to want to check out the replay. You’re going to want to get there live. You’re going to want to be able to ask Russell questions. He’s going to answer them and you’re going to want to be there for again the special thing that Russell is going to be doing for live attendees. So make that happen. That’s EOFire.com/click to get there.
Russell, you’re a busy guy. I’m a busy guy but you know we took a break out of both of our days to have a chat here and I always walk away just excited, energized from having these talks so thank you for that. Why don’t you take us home right now?
Kind of share with Fire Nation maybe some parting words about sales funnels, about ClickFunnels and let’s just have a blast.
Interviewee: The last thing I want to share is that you kind of mentioned how ClickFunnels is on my wish list and there’s a new thing that’s just coming out on ClickFunnels. I think you had a chance to kind of see behind the scenes of it.
Interviewer: Backpack.
Interviewee: Well the Backpack. Did you also see Actionetics?
Interviewer: Oh, wait. Actionetics, yes. Yes, Adam showed me that.
Interviewee: The sales funnel things we’ve been talking about for a while. People are starting to get the concept behind it but being able to build sales funnels with your e-mail and your communication marketing as well. What’s cool is imagine this. This was my wish list I gave to Adam and he somehow magically made it happen.
I was like I want it when somebody comes and joins my list I want to know everything about that person. I want to know how many Facebook followers they have, how many Twitter followers. I want to know their Cloud score, how much money they make, what magazine they read, everything I can get I want in real time.
And then after I know that I want to be able to change my sales process on the fly. So imagine someone joins your list and then Actionetics goes out there and says this person makes $50,000.00 a year and they’ve got 10,000 Twitter followers. Then you can say okay send them this follow-up sequence here. Or if they make over $100,000.00 send them this follow-up sequence or show them this upsell if they’re making over $100,000.00 a year but this one if they’re making under $100,000.00. That’s the future where ClickFunnels is going.
Actionetics is the first kind of plug in that’s starting it and it will keep getting more and more advanced but it’s amazing. I’ve been using it in my own business and I know exactly how much money, how many followers everyone on my list has right now and it’s so exciting because I can now market to them all differently.
That’s where we’re going with this stuff you guys. It’s exciting, it’s amazing. You’re going to love the webinar and it really is the future of where this whole online business is going. I’m just grateful to be part of it. It’s so much fun to talk about.
Interviewer: EOFire.com/click. You can see how much fun Russell’s having, how excited I am and am getting just thinking about everything that he has going on and the fact that I now have Russell Brunson’s wish list because I am a ClickFunnel’s member. That’s just amazing.
Russell I want to thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today my friend. For that we salute you brother and we will catch you on the flip side.
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