Ultimate Guide To Funnel Hacking With Russell Brunson

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“We’re looking at other people’s sales funnels. We’re buying their product, we’re going
through the process to see what it is and then we are coming back, not the word
‘copying them’ but we are understanding what they did to be successful in this market,
I think I need to make something that is structurally as similar.”

Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
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Igor: Welcome back to another edition of List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor
Kheifets. Today, I’m hosting Russell Brunson. Now this guy needs no introduction
but in case you don’t know who Russell is, he’s a serial entrepreneur who started
his first online business when he was wrestling in Boise, Idaho at the university
and within a year of graduating; he actually sold over $1 million of products and
services from his basement. Now for over 10 years, Russell been starting scaling
companies online, he owns a software company, a supplement company, a coaching
company, and he’s one of the top super affiliates in the world. Now Russell has also
authored a book called, “DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing
Your Company Online” I mean what have you not done? I mean you have pretty
much done it all online haven’t you?

Russell: I have been trying, a lot of failures, a lot of good ones. It’s been a lot of fun
along the way though for sure.

Igor: Oh yeah. I mean you’re everywhere. Just recently you’ve done The Funnel
Hacking Event. I mean that was just a huge thing in our industry. Everybody
went there besides me probably because I’m just too scared to get my ass on a
plane so how did the event go?

Russell: You missed it. It was amazing. We had almost 1200 people there this year
which was crazy. We did one last year that had about half that many people and
this year it was bigger and better. It was amazing. It’s fun to get a bunch of like-
minded people together in a room and talk about sales funnels and all that kind of
fun stuff. So we had a great time.

Igor: Nice. Nice. I think that’s the only real event where you break down funnels.
You coined the term ‘funnel hacking’. What does that mean? Let’s break it
down for our listeners.

Russell: Yeah, so funnel hacking, it’s funny when we first launched our software
company, ClickFunnels, I thought that overnight it would be this huge success
and we would get a million members in one night. It didn’t happen. In fact, our
initial roll out was a huge bomb. I was like, “Why do people aren’t they signing
up?” I got to figure this out because this tool we created in my mind is the
greatest gift we could ever give our community but nobody understood what it
was. I started to think about how do I look at business like when I’m going to a
market how do I create something that I know is going to be successful upfront
the first time and I looked and I said what I do is we go and we find other people
in the market that we are in or we want to be in and we see what they are selling
and how they are selling and we buy their product, we look at that the offer is and
what’s the upsells and what’s the downsell and what’s the email sequence. We
look really deep at what they are doing so we can find out what is actually
working and then after we kind of reverse engineered their sales process, we kind
of rebuild it again. I was trying to explain this to some of my list and the people
who were following us at that time. I said, “Can you think of a cool name for
this? I got to coin a name for this so it’s just ‘not go reverse engineer someone.’”
One day, it just popped out the concept that we are funnel hacking. I said,
“Guys, that’s what we are doing.” We are funnel hacking. We are looking other
people’s sales funnels, we’re buying their product, we’re going through the
process to see what it is and then we are coming back and not the word copying
them but we are understanding like this is what they did to be successful in this
market, I probably have to make something that is at least structurally similar.
They have a free plus shipping on the front end and a $200 upsell, I’m going to
make something free plus shipping and a $200 upsell because they have proven
that works. They went ahead and kind of paved the way first, they were
pioneering and they proved that something works. So I’m going to create
obviously my own products and services but I’m going to model the sales
process because they perfected that. So that’s what funnel hacking is looking at
what other people are doing that’s currently working and modeling it. As we
start teaching that people got it and they started understanding and they started
seeing… In fact one of my friends and students, he told me one day, his name is
Justin Brook. I think you know Justin. He said, “Russell I realized something
really interesting today.” I was like, “What’s that?” He’s like, “You’re really
not that smart.” I’m like, “Alright, thanks Justin.” He’s like, “No, like you just
look at what’s working and then you model it. That’s the big ‘aha’, you’re not
genius, you’re not some marketing superstar, you just are smart enough to look at
what’s working, and you model it.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s kind of it.” As we
started to show people that they realized that I can do this as well and we showed
them how they can use ClickFunnels as a tool to actually build out the sales
processes that they have seen and for us that changed everything and its blown
up. Now that whole event is called “The Funnel Hacking Event” and people
come to it and we all just share funnels and show off what is working. It’s a ton
of fun.

Igor: Wow! So Russell Brunson is not a genius. What a shocker! I mean that would
make a great subject line, I think.

Russell: I mean I’m not even that smart to be honest so… [laughter]

Igor: [laughter] Well you got to be at least somewhat smart. I mean you’re pretty
much the most ripped off marketer out there. I mean you go ripping people off
but now everyone wants to rip you off so that’s pretty cool. Wait so what are the
things that you’re looking for when you “funnel hack” like the offer, the
headline, what are you paying attention to?

Russell: A lot of things. The first thing I am look at is what are people actually selling? I
always tell people if you want to funnel hack someone and you want to be a good
entrepreneur, you have to be good at pulling your wallet out of your pocket and
buying someone’s product. They are like, “Why would I want to buy it, I can
kind of tell what they are doing?” I’m like you got to understand… I want to buy
the product because I want to see like after I purchase this thing and as one of
their members what am I getting? If I’m getting an e-book with 32-pages, I’m
getting 14 videos and a software, I want to know exactly I’m getting, what the
offer is because you guys have figured out, like I know this guys in the weight
loss industry, they have over $100,000 right now a day in sales. So I funnel
hacked them, they have proven that people are going to spend a lot of money for
something, what is it that they are selling? I look at it – most business like yo
learn in business school, I never did business school but I assume that the teach
this. You find someone that has a good mouse trap and you go there is a good
mouse trap how do I make a better one. I’m doing the same thing. What are they
actually selling, cool like they have an e-book with 50 pages and they got 16
videos, I’m going make an e-book that is better with 100 pages and like 300
video or whatever it is but what I’m trying to figure out is what is the mouse trap
they are selling now and how do I make it better. So that’s the first thing is
understanding their offer. The offer is the first thing I want to know what they
are selling and what the upsells are and what the downsells are, I want to know
exactly what the offer is. Second thing I’m looking at is like the page structure.
They have a video over here and an order button over here or is the order button
underneath the video, or does it appear later, how is it showing up? What is the
structure of the pages? And then from there I’m looking at how to actual sell like
what are the words on the page, what are the headlines, what’s the video say.
Every time I find a video that I know is working, I send it to Rev.com for a dollar
a minute they will transcribe the whole video so I’ll see a 15 minute sales video,
I’ll send it there, the next day I pay 15-20 bucks and I get the whole thing
transcribed and I can look and go “Wow” this is the sales video. I can see how
they are selling and understand exactly what they are saying to get people to pull
their credit card out of their wallet. For me, that’s how I’ve learned; that’s how I
studied; looking at what people are kind of doing and pulling those pieces out.
What’s the offer; what’s the structure and what’s the copy that makes this funnel
work.

Igor: Sweet! Now obviously, Russell, you have a ton of your own products. I mean
now that you have ClickFunnels which is huge pretty much everyone uses that. I
mean I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many people who buy traffic from me
come and they send me their ClickFunnels’ links etc so I mean it’s huge. I can
attest to that. Now but a lot of people listening to my podcast, my List Builders,
many of my clients, they don’t have their own products. They promote like
network marketing companies, business opportunities and stuff like that which is
okay but at some point I always tell my VIP Club members to eventually branch
out into your own information product services so on and so forth. Now you
created your own information products back when you were at university. So
can you talk a little bit more about where did you get the courage, who gave you
permission like why did you go into information marketing?

Russell: That’s a great question. You know when I got started it was different atmosphere
than it is today. This is pre-Facebook, the beginning of Google, pre-My Space,
pre-FriendStrike, it was different out there. I was looking online and there
weren’t a million people selling e-commerce and Amazon and all these things
happening. It was pretty basic. There were people actually EBay and there were
a few people making money on EBay and I saw people making money selling
information products. I tried EBay first. I remember I would go to the thrift
store down here by my house and I would go buy every thing that I thought I
could sell on EBay. I was buying records. I was buying big boxes of books and
all these awkward shaped things and I would post them on EBay and I would try
to sell them and I remember I bought this Michael Jackson record. I’m like
Michael Jackson is awesome, records are like rare. This needs to sell for like 100
bucks. I think I paid like $12 for this record and I posted it on EBay, I think I
sold it for $14, I made $2 on it and then I had to go to the post office and get a
box to ship it and it was a weird shape so I had to get a huge box anyway I ended
up making like 3 cents from this thing and I had like 20 of these things so I spent
2 weeks selling stuff on EBay and made maybe $2 or $3 probably lost some
because some products didn’t sell at all. I was like this is hard work. Then one
time, I was at the post office with a wheel barrow of odd shaped boxes and trying
to ship some things out. I saw this guy walk to the door and he had this big huge
box full CDs like probably 500 CDs and they are all the same size, same shape
and everything and he walked up and handed them to the dude and walked out of
the post office and I’m watching this and I was like he didn’t have to do all the
boxing and shipping and everything. I was like, “What in the world. Hey dude,
quick question for you. I was like what are you selling and he was like I’m
selling information products on CDs. I was like are you serious. How much do
people pay for this? He was like – I think it was 30 bucks per CD and he just
dropped off 100 CDs.” I was doing the math like 3000 or whatever it was but in
my mind, that is more money than I have made in my entire life combined. He
just did it in one thing. He had one CD and he kept burning it on a CD burner
over and over again and shipping it out. I was like that sounds way better than
buying stuff at the thrift store. So then I went online and I was trying to find info
products. I wanted to sell like something too and I stumbled on these resell rights
thing and I was like are you kidding me people would sell me rights to one of
their books for like 10 bucks or 20 bucks so I started buying some resell rights to
some books and then I started burning them on CDs. I remember the first one I
bought was like kids coloring things. You could color like a thousand coloring
pages. There was like Ernie and Bert, Big Bird and all these coloring pictures.
So I bought resell rights from this guy for 30 bucks for this CD that had 1000
different coloring pages for kids and I started selling that. It sold like crazy. It
kept selling. I had this e-burn side kick. I would come home from school every
day and I would burn these CDs with these pages of coloring books and little e-
books and stuff and I would send them out to people. That kind of got me into
the whole information business and then I started selling information on how to
sell potato guns, information on weight loss, information on eventually affiliate
marketing and things like that which got me into that whole business. I think a
big part of it was just the fact that I loved it and I didn’t have to ship anything.
At first I was shipping CDs and then I found out that people just like
downloading things so it got even better, we cut out the whole going to the post
office thing. But I got addicted to information products and I still am, I still think
it’s the best way to go.

Igor: I agree with you completely. I found information marketing through network
marketing, I started out in network marketing but I realized the guys who were
making the most money were the one who were selling information, tools and
services too, network marketers like Jonathan Budd was big at the time and Mike
Dillard who I’m actually interviewing for the show as well and it kind of hit me
like wait a second, there are all these people that are heading for the gold and
looking for the golden mountains and I can be selling them the tools and the
picks and the shovels. It’s a great position to be in. Now here is a challenge with
information products, a lot of people I talk to when I tell them create your
information product, create your service, they don’t feel that they are eligible to
do that. They don’t feel qualified to that do. They sort of bring this mindset
from the offline world where if you want to be a doctor, get a doctor degree.

Russell: Exactly.

Igor: If you want to be a lawyer, get a lawyer degree. If you want to be a professional
gravedigger, get a gravedigger degree so what are your thoughts on that?

Russell: No, it’s funny. I actually talked about this a lot at the event. I’m half way
through my next book which is called, “Expert Secrets”, it’s about this topic
specifically. Like how do you become an expert and who qualifies you? It’s
funny when I first met Tony Robbins who was telling me a story about when he
was starting his whole journey and trying to become Tony Robbins that he
wanted to learn NLP which was this new science that was coming out at the time
and he went to top people in the world and he went to this six month long
seminar or workshop, he goes to this thing and after three days he was like wow I
got some good stuff I can go and help people. He was like guys let’s go help
some people. They were like no you’re not certified. But he was like I have
some tools that will help people, I know what to do, I’m going to go and help
people. They are like no. He got all frustrated so he walked across the street
from the hotel and walked into like a Holiday Inn or gas station or something like
that and started grabbing people and started doing NLP and fixing people like
helping people quit smoking, helping people do all of these things and he was
using this tool that he had learned and the people who ran the certification
program were so mad that they actually kicked him out of it. As you know now,
Tony is the biggest proponent and teacher and educator of NLP in the entire
world. I don’t think he ever got certified because they kicked him out because he
was too busy doing it as opposed to learning it. For some reason, we think we
have to be certified to be able to do things and it’s ridiculous. Right now, I have
a coaching group. It’s $25,000 a year. I have 100 entrepreneurs in it. We are
blocked out. We don’t have anymore room for anybody else and it’s funny
because I asked the group, these entrepreneurs, to give me 25 grand a year to be
in this group and I was like what do you guys think my credentials are to be
teaching you marketing? One person was like I don’t know I assume you have a
degree in business. I was like no I don’t. In fact, I got C in my marketing class,
barely graduated college probably the least qualified person in this room yet y’all
are paying me all this money for me to teach you and educate you, why is that?
The only reason why is because I know what I’m doing. I have had success.
I’ve gotten results for people in the past and they want those same results. A lot
of times our fear is I’m going to go and try to sell this thing, people are going to
find out that I’m a fraud or I don’t know what I’m talking about whatever the
internal fears we have are, right? So for me I’m a big proponent of flipping it
around. First step is not to sell information products; the first step is you have to
be able to get results for somebody. A good example of this is when we
launched our coaching, our mastermind program almost three years ago now, I
didn’t want to go out there and just tell people, hey now I’m now an internet
marketing coach, I just certified myself. You pay me 25 grand for me to teach
you internet marketing. That just seems annoying to me so I was like I got to
serve someone first. I actually have to show someone that I have the ability to
change somebody’s life because if I don’t, I don’t deserve to do it. But I think I
got some stuff that is good. So I was looking around and I found this dude who I
really kind of hit it off with, he had a company called Good Life TV and he was
teaching you how to juice and how to lose weight through juicing and I actually
resonated with him as a person. I was able to call him up and get a hold of him
and flew out to meet him for a day and just really like him and what he was
doing. And when I was talking to him at first, I could tell there was a lot of stress
and pressure on him. I felt this thing like I could help him and I don’t know how
but I think they are kind of struggling; I would love to see if I could help him. So
I asked him, hey man, I’m going to fly back out here and spend a day with your
team and just see if I can help, just basically work for you for free and see if any
good comes from it. He was like what would you charge me for it. I’m not
going to charge you. I will just do it for free. He was like why would you do
that? I’m like I don’t know like you’re cool maybe you can teach me some
juicing stuff and I think it would just be fun to hang out and see if I can help. So
reluctantly, I think he thought there was some kind of a catch, he was like alright
if you want to come. I went out there and I spent a day with him and we worked
on their existing sales funnel and some of the things they were doing right and
we found some things that they were doing wrong and then they had this new
idea for a supplement they were going to launch called Organifi. I was like cool;
let me show you my supplement funnel. I showed them mine and we walked
through the strategy and I showed him the pricing structure, how the upsell and
the downsell just showed him everything we were doing in my supplement
company and they said thanks and then I left. Next three or four weeks, we
communicated back and forth and just kind of helped them get things structured
and set them up with a shipping warehouse, merchanting and all different pieces,
I kind of helped them coordinate and they are an amazing team so I’m not taking
all the credit by any stretch of the imagination, they are an amazing team but I
spent the time with them. They went and launched the supplement called
Organifi and it now does over a million dollars a month. It has been for over a
year. They are killing it with it right now. I had a chance to be a little piece in
that, right, to help serve them and to give and get a result for them. So
afterwards, Drew made me this video talking about the transformation they had
and how much money they made from this funnel and what it did for their
business and how they are able to serve more people now and all these awesome
things so I took that video and I posted it online. I said here is Drew who was in
this kind of situation, I helped him out and this is what his business looks like
now and if you’re interested in working with me, you can apply down below.
We put that out there two and half years ago and it wasn’t me talking about how
great I was, it was somebody else talking about the result I had gotten for them
and from that again we have 100 people in my inner circle program now coming
off of me sharing a result. So the first step is not to go and sell info products.
First step is what do you know, what talents do you have, what things do you
have that could change someone’s life and you go and find someone and go work
for free. Go and work your butt off and work for free, get that result because if
you get a result for someone else you can leverage that result for the rest of your
business, right? So it can be anything. So let’s say you’re in weight loss like if
you got something that helps them lose weight don’t go and try to sell something,
go find someone help them lose a bunch of weight and then get that result and the
result now becomes the tool you use to market everything else. That result is
what certifies you as an expert in whatever it is you want to do. So that’s really
the key is serving first and getting a result for somebody and then that becomes
the platform for everything else you’re trying to do. That’s how you certify
yourself.

Igor: Nice, I like that. I like that. I mean you can’t argue with results at the end of the
day. Now obviously not everyone would want to work for free but hey
everything comes at a price and as my favorite author, Mark Manson says,
“Everything sucks, some of the time.” So if you got to go work for free to get
some result and by all means do it. So that’s pretty cool. I actually had this
really good question which I’ve totally forgot, Russell. That never happens to
me but let us move on. So you said you’re writing your next book right now, so
what’s that all about?

Russell: You mentioned earlier by my first book. My first book is called “DotCom
Secrets” and it was kind of helping people understand the whole psychology
behind sales funnels and how they work and how they interact with each other
and what sales scripts were used and how to communicate to the audience and all
sorts of things like that. The second book is more specific. It’s like where do I
start, what is the first funnel I should build, and what’s the second one, how does
that relate to the first one and then what’s the third one and what’s the actually
process so that’s what the second book is about. Kind of the step by step, from
I’m a beginner start up and don’t know where to go, here is the path and the
process you follow to get to the point where you are an expert and a thought
leader and things like that. So that’s kind of what the second book is about.

Igor: Nice, can we preorder that?

Russell: As soon as I finish writing it. [laughter]

Igor: [laughter] You know there’s a trend now, people tend to sell books way before
they have written them.

Russell: Yeah, I just know that it takes – I wrote my first book and it was hard. I even had
a helper helping me to write it and it was still like the hardest process ever and
this one is the same thing. It’s like I’m so picky, I don’t want to write a bad book
so I don’t see me being done in a month or six months or a year. I’m not going
to pre-sell until I get a little closer to the finish line.

Igor: Right, very cool and I respect that because I see so many people out there, you
know who are selling all this stuff but they deliver like years after they sold it,
right, before the book is even out there are a New York Times Bestseller and all
this stuff. So I can appreciate where you’re coming from here. I respect that. So
basically guys, that’s pretty much it. I mean I can’t hold Russell for much longer
because he’s too busy making money. So what I recommend you do, you go
ahead, go to Amazon.com pick up a copy of “DotCom Secrets” and also go
check out ClickFunnels if you still haven’t because that’s a sweet little funnel
software pretty much that does everything. I mean you got the autoresponder,
you got the split testing tracking, I mean it has all these features, right?

Russell: Yeah, we run our entire business off it now. People are always asking me what
about do I need Fuse soft or like I’m like we integrate them but you don’t really
need them, you can run them all through ClickFunnels. What about MailChimp
or Aweber, I’m like no you can run the autoresponder through us. What
about…it’s kind of cool like you can literally run your – I mean we have a
business that is WellRate Figure that is run 100% on ClickFunnels and I think we
have got over 13,000 other active customers who run their entire business on it as
well so it does the whole thing. It does everything you need.

Igor: Wow, sweet! You know what I like is when a marketer creates a product for
marketers not only just a company that gets into the marketplace and wants to
make some money but when someone who really, really went through all the
challenges we go through on a daily basis trying to integrate this and that and
shipping and the email and the text messages and this and that, I can really
appreciate what you’ve done here by creating a be all end all solution so we don’t
have to go and get umpteen different services and somehow try and connect them
all together through APIs and widgets and whatnot so that’s ClickFunnels.com,
right?

Russell: Yup.

Igor: So that’s ClickFunnels.com for the software and to go Amazon.com to pick up
the book, “DotCom Secrets”, I recommend you read it especially the chapter
about the character building and the trust, I mean I really enjoyed that and
besides that Russell, thank you so much for doing this; thank you so much for
sitting down with us, we appreciate your time and until next time we talk. Have
a good one.

Russell: Awesome, I appreciate you having me. We’ll talk soon.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to subscribe on iTunes
or Google. Play to never miss an episode because who knows just one conversion tactic
we share on the show might double your list and double your business. Download the
transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and
don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival
Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival . This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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